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This was a more interesting thread than I expected. Will you weigh in with your opinion on using "they" as a 3rd person singular gender neutral pronoun?
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May 6, 2009 02:02
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I think I might have enjoyed my English classes more if you were teaching them. If only because everything I remember hating about them, you seem to hate too. This was my high school English experience:quote:It's like they all went to some class where they learned than any piece of literature has two levels: one of them is where all the words happen, and that's basically a distraction. The other, "real" level, where all the meaning happens, is populated by "symbols" and "themes," terms which can apparently mean absolutely loving anything. I think I was so conditioned to expect this crap in English classes that I never even gave my college English classes a chance.
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Jun 30, 2009 06:08
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Can you go to this thread and explain wtf literary theory is and why people think its worth doing/paying people to do? http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3317256 Have you read The Name of the Wind, and what do you think of it. I'm not really sure in what way I mean the question, so whatever you think of first is fine. This may have been covered, but... What is your job? I mean that in the sense of what are the things you do that will help you get tenure, get a promotion, get paid more. For example a physicist at research university might answer that question "to do research and bring in grants. also i have to teach a class now and then, but I don't necessarily have to do a good job."
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Jul 4, 2010 02:45
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Can you explain what literary criticism is? I asked this before in reference to some other thread that died before you got around to it. I'll try to elaborate on what I am actually trying to get at. --- What do you, and also what do the college administrators want to achieve by having an English department. My guess is that for non-majors they want a way to improve their writing and communication skills, and maybe to make them have a wider knowledge base. For majors its probably to improve their writing and communication skills, and also become familiar with a wide range of literature, styles, and introduce them to the sorts of things that the professors do. Please correct me if any of this is wrong. Now my impression is that professors in English departments at research universities publish in peer reviewed journals having to do with literary criticism. I'm still not really clear on what this is, but from this thread it seems to consist of trying to see what a work says or implies about certain things. Like you might ask does racism appear in the text, implicitly or explicitly. And you also seem to suggest that at least one motivation for this is to find ways of enjoying the text more, by thinking of it in new ways. So assuming what I've described isn't totally off the mark, my question is really why do we hire the people I've described in the second paragraph to do the things in the first paragraph? Is there a different sort of people we could or should hire to do the things in the first paragraph? And does literary criticism exist just as a way to differentiate people enough to decide who to hire for these jobs? I know I sound condescending and dismissive. I haven't decided yet if I think that tone is deserved. But, I don't know how to get and what I'm asking without sounding that way. So I'm sorry about that. modig fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Nov 23, 2010 |
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Nov 23, 2010 06:22
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FightingMongoose posted:There was an article in the news today that a new version of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' has been published for use in schools that gets rid of five instances of the word 'friend of the family'. I could see why people would want to remove that word, I mean I've heard stories of students reading the book aloud and stopping to stare at a black student while reading 'friend of the family' aloud. So if that is an issue that apparently can't be dealt with in the classroom, I can see not wanting to use Huck Finn in it's normal form. What I don't see is why this book is so important that they think it's worth reading even if it has to be altered, vs just reading another book. I'm guessing it has to do with standards delivered from on high vs. severe problems in a local school that isn't allowed to not use Huck Finn. While I find the idea of altering the book to be annoying and dumb, I can't see it actually impacting what the students (presumably early high school students?) get out of it. There are still plenty of other parts of the book that deal with race relations. Interested to see what Brainworm thinks.
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Jan 6, 2011 03:15
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As someone who hated reading Shakespeare because it made no sense, now I at least feel like I have a better idea of why it made no sense. What I don't get though, is why we make high schoolers read Shakespeare? I posit that the vast majority get almost nothing out of it, since it makes no sense (to them, and takes a lot of effort apparently to make any sense of, and I doubt most student ever learn to make the sense or put in the effort), so it kind of seems like a waste of time.
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Mar 14, 2011 19:06
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Thanks for the reply Brainworm. I agree that English curriculum seems totally non-purposeful. It was never clear what skills were desired and how those skills were supposed to be improved by whatever we were doing. I never understood, and still don't understand, wtf I was supposed to be writing about when I wrote about books in school. It apparently wasn't just describing what the book was about, and some themes it dealt with, because I'm pretty sure nobody is bad enough at communication that they couldn't have explained that. I was definitely under the impression that we were being taught that literature was a puzzle we had to figure out, but I never understood what that meant. Hopefully you can help your brother be less confused Banana Grabber.
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Mar 18, 2011 22:01
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