This week, we look back at Vicky Cheng‘s December 2016 post on engaging with students in the classroom. Vicky will be back next week with more on teaching and writing. “A good teacher will lead the horse to water; an excellent teacher will make the horse thirsty first.” — Mario Cortes Inside the academic classroom, we instructors face a number of pedagogical challenges, ranging from...
[7 minute read] “Can we have snack right now? When we get back to the classroom?” “We usually have snack at 10:00 or 10:30am. It’s only 9:30am now. Don’t you think you’ll want it later?” I ask one of my students doubtfully, walking beside him as we head towards the seventh-grade classroom at Temple Concord. We have just come from T’fila – the communal thirty-minute prayer-time that begins weekly...
[7-10 minute read] Above my fortunes, yet my state is well. I am a gentleman. – Viola, Twelfth Night Viola, the shipwrecked woman of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, finds herself separated from her twin brother in a foreign land. Vulnerable, she must find means for supporting herself and dons the disguise of a eunuch named Cesario to serve Duke Orsino. The neighboring grieving Duchess, caught...
[10 minute read] The media we consume shapes our implicit biases. It is one factor among many, but I saw it at work among my Fox News-watching relatives during the 2016 election. I saw it at work among rosary-praying priests putting my femininity on a pedestal. I saw it at work after 9/11, when I started getting spooked by Arab-looking passengers at airports — even though my family is Arab...
[7-10 minute read] Recently, my coursework on Hollywood Melodrama engaged me with reading portions of Helen Hanson’s book, Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film.[1] This text represents an amazing work of scholarship, connecting well-researched critical feminist histories, studies in the formation of literary and filmic genres, and close-readings of the narrative...
[7-10 minute read] Take an adventure with me through my affective and critical experiences with a few texts I encountered during my first year and a half of my Ph.D. program: ***** I am sitting in the theatre in the last showing of the night for Star Wars: Rogue One. I have just come from my house where I have been drinking a bit of wine with friends. I am happily relaxed after a rather arduous...
[7-10 minute read] The exploration of queer representation in Hannibal allows for a greater understanding of the conventions of gender and sexuality within the thriller genre. Highly-fictionalized thrillers such as Hannibal thrive on extreme relationships, but also rely heavily on non-traditional erotic relationships to further depict the extremes of personalities in its central characters. The...
To some degree, all of our posts this month have flirted with affect. Whether it’s waking up dazed in confused in graduate school or exploring the significance of melancholia, memory, and reverberating energies, all of these topics point to a larger picture of attempting to understand and read feeling in texts and our daily lives. This week, we’d like to revisit how we’ve engaged with discourses...
My room has always been a mess. Today, when I say “mess,” I mean I have a couple piles of books and some empty spaces on a shelf—or, I have a shelf completely filled and an overflow collected on my bedroom floor. There are stacks of papers on my bookshelf, on my nightstand, on my desk, on the printer on my desk… I know what they all say (or at least I did at one point). At the end of the...
It’s six in the morning, on the dot, and Pabu wakes like a cuckoo, leaping out of bed, suspenders already clipped on, to face the day. It’s windy outside. Leaves of orange, red, and yellow are dense in the air and Pabu makes his way from his modest front porch to the neighboring coop, almost as big as his own home though it houses only a few chickens. Their names are Lady, Sweetie, and Mama; they...