Fall 2009

Offerings

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Syllabus English 2 Fall 2008

 

 

Prof.  Karen Sánchez-Eppler                                                            

kjsanchezepp@amherst.edu                                                                  

Office hours: Tues. 1-3                                                                             

 

Prof. Benigno Sánchez-Eppler

brsanchezepp@amherst.edu

Office hours: Tues. 10-11

 

Course Asst.: Emily Bularzik

ebularzik09@amherst.edu

Phone: 781‑864‑1433

 

This is a somewhat unusual course.  It is a writing intensive course with a good deal of reading.  In addition, each student will work one afternoon each week either as a classroom assistant at HolyokeHigh School or as a tutor at an AdultBasicEducationCenter in Holyoke or in Ware.  We will consider from many perspectives what it means to read and write and learn and teach for each of us and for others, some of whom we will encounter through the readings in the course, others of whom you will be working with weekly.  Although we hope you will reflect a great deal about teaching, this is not a course in how to teach.  It is a course in thinking about education, the process of learning, yours and others’.

 

The writing in the course is designed to range across many genres.  You will be asked sometimes to draw upon some aspect of your own experience, at others to engage someone else’s experience, to read and to write poems, closely observed descriptions, critical analyses, and one or two somewhat extended essays.

 

In considering whether you wish to take the course it will be helpful to know the commitments involved.  We will meet twice a week to discuss the reading and the writing assigned for the course. In these discussions we expect that each of you will draw on your own experiences as students, as readers, as writers, and on what you are doing as a classroom assistant or tutor.  Furthermore, each student will be required to spend time each week at HolyokeHigh School or offering GED tutoring through the Juntos Holyoke Tutor/Mentor Program or the Literacy Project a commitment of approximately four hours each week including transportation.  In addition, there will be a number of extra activities to support your work in Holyoke: a tour of the city including visits to a number of community organizations, an orientation in the high school, a tutor training, etc…  In effect this will be a humanities course with the equivalent of a lab section B the time committed to teaching.

 

Once you have a teaching assignment this should be treated as an obligation so important that only serious illness can be an excuse.  Please remember that many of the students have had too many experiences of adults letting them down; don’t add to this history.  As soon as you have a classroom assignment get the phone number of the teacher or contact person so you can let him/her know if something unavoidable has come up that prevents you from meeting your responsibility.  Marie Mew is our liaison at Holyoke High, the general phone number at HHS is 534-2020. Emily Fox coordinates the Holyoke Tutor/Mentor Program, you can reach her by phone 534-3376 or e-mail holyoketutor@holycham.com. Margaret Anderson coordinates the Literacy Project in Ware, her phone is 774-3934 and her e-mail is margaret@literacyproject.org. Do contact us or Emily Bularzik about any problems you are having with your placement.

 


 

 

Book List

                                                                             

Roberto Santiago ed.                                      Boricuas

Miguel Algarin and Bob Holman eds.            Aloud

Jonathan Kozol                                               The Shame of the Nation

Patrick Chamoiseau                                        School Days

Sylvia Ashton-Warner                                    Teacher

Judith Frank                                                    Crybaby Butch

David Mamet                                                  Oleanna

 

The books required for the course are available at Amherst Books. Because we will be working so closely with these books it is important, whenever possible, that each student has her or his own copy.  This course is taught often, so you may well be able to find used copies at The Option. There is also a Course Reader to be obtained in the English Office.  Each student in the course will have a nominal charge to their term bill to cover the cost of this volume and other xeroxing costs for the course.  Five College students will be billed by the College.

 

Writing: generally there will be nearly weekly writing assignment.  These will vary in length but none will be longer than 5 pages.  Essays are generally due on Friday afternoons by 2pm but occasionally other due times are marked on the syllabus. Please put one copy in the box on Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s shelf in the English Department Office, 1 Johnson Chapel, and e-mail another copy (preferably in Word) to either kjsanchezepp@amherst.edu or brsanchezepp@amherst.edu.  Since there is writing nearly every week, we will not accept late papers.   

 

 

                                                                     Syllabus

 

 

Week One

Wednesday, September 3

Introduction to the course 

 

Thursday, September 4 from 6-9 pm

Literacy Workshop with Emily Fox and Margaret Anderson WITH PIZZA

 

Week Two

Tour of HolyokeHigh School during this week

 

Monday, September 8

Abraham Rodriguez, “The Boy Without a Flag” and

Esmeralda Santiago, “The American Invasion of Macún” in Boricuas 30-46 and 159-177.

Michael Jacobsen-Hardy, Facing Education: Portraits of HolyokeSchool Children in the Reading Notebook.


 

Wednesday, September 10

Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, 1-134

Literacy Workshop with Emily Fox

 

Writing: Write a 2-3 pp. essay about a school experience (it may be anything, from in or outside of the classroom).  Then use one element of the same experience and create a 17 syllable haiku about it. Your object in both exercises is to make the experience as detailed and vivid as possible for someone else, within the constraints of three lines or three pages. Due 2pm Friday September 12th

 

 

Week ThreeBPlacements Begin

Monday, September 15

Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, 135-317

 

Wednesday, September 17

            Panel of Reading, Writing, and Teaching Alumni

Sara Lightfoot, “Highland ParkHigh School” from The Good Highschool and

Laurie Olsen, “Maps of Madison High” from Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools in the Reading Notebook.

 

Writing: 2-3 pp. After reviewing Lightfoot’s, Olsen’s and Kozol’s descriptions of schools write a description of your high school that focuses on detailed information, emphasizing its socio-economic profile and the relationship of its curricular offerings (class size, kinds of subjects, which students are in what grouping or track, etc.) to the demographic characteristics of the student body. You may include a map of your school if you like. 2) When you have finished the writing above, on a separate page discuss the difference for you in writing in this fashion about your school and the way you wrote and what you chose to write about in the essay and haiku versions of your first assignment. Due 2pm Friday September 19th.        

 

Saturday Sept 20        Holyoke Bound day-long orientation and tour

 

Week Four

Monday September 22           

Browse through the poems in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, then pick 10 to read carefully, prepare one of these to perform “aloud” in class, and be ready to talk about what you find interesting in this poem.

 

Wednesday September 24

Working with a partner pick 10-15 poems in Aloud that “talk to one another” (perhaps they share a theme, or certain formal characteristics, or a quality of voice) and read them carefully.  Together you should prepare to perform two of these poems “aloud” in class in a way that lets us see them in dialogue.  Be ready to discuss the rational for your grouping.

 

 


Week Five

Monday, September 29

Continue with Aloud presentations and discussions

 

Wednesday, October 1

Workshop discussion of your poems and lesson plans

 

Writing: Write a poem of your own about a memory, a place, childhood, parents, a teacher, a school friend--using a poem in the book as your model. Then pick a piece from Aloud or Boricuas that you think would be useful or interesting to your Holyoke students and prepare a lesson plan laying out your goals for teaching this piece and how you would implement them. What are the problems with which your students might wrestle? You may want to look at the EducationalResourceInformationCenterwww.eric.ed.gov or at the somewhat more user-friendly The Educator’s Reference Desk www.eduref.org for model lesson plans. You don’t have to follow their forms, but you can get an idea from them of things you should be attending to. Due IN CLASS, Wednesday October 1st.

 

 

Week Six

Monday, October 6

Lisa Delpit, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other Peoples' Children” from Harvard Educational Review (1998) and

Sonia Nieto, “Who Does the Accommodating? Institutional Transformations to Promote Learning” from The Light in their Eyes in the Reading Notebook.

 

Wednesday, October 8

Beverly Tatum, “Identity Development in Adolescence,” and “The Development of White Identity” from Why Are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? in the Reading Notebook

 

Writing: Kozol, Delpit, Nieto and Tatum all write about the ways in which racism pervades and structures American education.  In a 3 page essay explore the commonalities and the tensions between their positions.  What does Tatum’s psychological analysis understand that Kozol and Delpit miss, and what does Kozol’s economic and political account reveal that the others ignore? How do Nieto and Delpit’s attention to pedagogy complicate these psychological and economic understandings?  Due 2pm Friday October 10th.                  

                                                                             

 

Week Seven

Monday, October 13

 

FALL BREAK

 

 


Wednesday, October 15

Patrick Chamoiseau, “Longing,” School Days

 

 

Week Eight

Monday, October 20

Patrick Chamoiseau, “Survival,” School Days

 

Wednesday, October 22

Patrick Chamoiseau, “Survival,” School Days

 

Writing: Pick a passage you find powerful, of no more than a page, from School Days. Copy your passages so that you have to pay attention to every word and comma and write down all the observations you can about its (English) style.  Then, rewrite your first essay (Longing? Survival?) in Chamoiseau’s style. If you need to embellish or fictionalize or head in a slightly different direction, go ahead and do so. Then write 1-2 pages about how imitating his style affected the meaning of your experience.  The more general question here: what impact does style have upon meaning, and what might this have to do with the little boy’s, or any child’s, experience of school. Turn in your copied passage and list of observations as well. Due IN CLASS Wednesday October 22nd.

 

 

Week Nine

Monday, October 27

Sylvia Ashton Warner’s Teacher

 

Wednesday, October 39

Continue discussing Teacher

 

Writing: Take a list of your own “keywords”—20 or so words that come to your mind quickly as being especially powerful or important to you, including those generated in class—and make something out of them in any way you like. Due IN CLASS Wednesday Oct 31

 

 

Week Ten

Monday, November 3                                    

Patricia Williams, "Crimes without Passion" from the Reading Notebook.

 

Wednesday, November 5

James Baldwin, “Congo Square” from The Devil Finds Work in the Reading Notebook

 


Writing: AI deliberately sacrifice myself in my writing@ Patricia Williams insists Awhat is ‘impersonal’ writing but denial of self@; James Baldwin finds himself over and over in the books he reads and the movies he watches even when they seem very far from his immediate experience: AI knew something about that.@ Pick one passage in either of these essays and write a three page paper that discusses with as much attention to linguistic detail as you can how the self is revealed and how it is hidden in these sentences. How do these tactics affect you as a reader? What do such sacrifices, denials, and identifications have to do with learning? Due 2pm Friday November 7th.

 

 

Week Eleven

Monday, November 10

Judith Frank, Cry Baby Butch, 1-141

Literacy Workshop with Emily Fox

 

Wednesday, November 12

Judith Frank, Cry Baby Butch, 142-277

 

 

Week Twelve

Monday November 17

Judith Frank, Cry Baby Butch, 278-416

 

Wednesday, November 19

Shoshana Felman, APsychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and  Interminable@ and

 Herbert Kohl, AI Won’t Learn from You@ in the Reading Notebook

 

Writing: With these past few weeks of reading in mind write a 3-page paper about an instance of resistance to learning: either your own resistance or that of one of your students at Holyoke.  This essay can be as narrative or as analytical as you'd like, but either way, it should be richly detailed. Due IN CLASS Wednesday November 19th.

 

THANKSGIVING BREAK B remember to tell your class that you won’t be there

 

 

Week Thirteen

Monday December 1

David Mamet, Oleanna

 

Wednesday, December 3

David Mamet, Oleanna

Jan Dizard, “Achieving Place: Teaching Social Stratification to Tomorrow's Elite,” from                                        Teaching: What We Do in the Reading Notebook

Carleen Basler, 2008 Senior Assembly address https://www.amherst.edu/news/specialevents/commencement/speeches_multimedia/2008/senior_assembly

 

 

 


Week Fourteen

View On-line: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

 

Monday, December 8

Henry James, “The Pupil” in the Reading Notebook            

 

Writing: The verbs Aseduce@ and Aeducate@ both have their roots in the latin verb, duco/cucare, meaning Ato lead@ and, in the classroom, the distinctions between the actions they define can become blurred.  The novel, play, film and short story we have read in recent weeks alluse that blurring to help us re-evaluate what both activities share. Think about the different strategies that the writers and film-maker use to make their cases and draw upon these to write 3 pages about a situation you have experienced as a teacher or a student in which the distinction between seduction and education became blurred. Keep in mind that the best situations to write about are unlikely to be those in which a student or a teacher definitely Acrosses the line@ but, rather, those in which the ambiguities remain unresolved. Due IN CLASS Monday December 8th.

 

Wednesday, December 10

Endings

 

 

 

FINAL PAPER,

Due Monday December 15th

Write a new 5 page essay in which you reflect on your experience in and through the course this term.  You should focus on one or more of the texts that we have read as a way of organizing the essay; you are encouraged to bring insights from your own educational autobiography and from your experiences in Holyoke to your discussion of these texts.  Feel free to use whatever materials and whatever written form will make this essay as searching and meaningful for you as possible.