Autumn Blog Revival

I feel pretty confident in my latest brainwave for an engaging and informative lesson, and as the leaves change and autumn rolls into Iowa, I have decided to revive this blog and describe this lesson plan.

The class I am teaching is called Rhetoric, and it is important that you all understand that it is not within the Department of English. The class is required for all first year students, and its purpose seems to be to teach freshmen how to analyze an argument, map a controversy, and advocate a point of view. We are strictly forbidden to assign a novel; the only books we are allowed to order are from a list of approved textbooks and "trade books," the latter being nonfiction books (my trade book is JSF's Eating Animals). I have two sections, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, both with twenty children in them.

Today's lesson was rooted in the chapter of the textbook entitled "What Counts as Evidence?" This weekend I was trying to devise an activity for the class when I had a brilliant thought. In the 7th grade I took a class called Media in which we spent an extended amount of time studying the Kennedy Assassination. It made a huge impression on me; for the next two years whenever I met someone I would ask them "Who do you think killed Kennedy?" before anything else. A softball coach told my mother based on this fact that I was a very unique child.

I watched the majority of the movie JFK last night and chose scenes that I thought would be good for my kids to watch. The majority of the clips are from DA Jim Garrison's actual trial against Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones with the most amazingly ridiculous white mini-afro). During the next class period we weill have a discussion where we critique the film/conspiracy against the textbook; in other words, regarding the Kennedy Assassination, what counts as evidence towards which conclusions? I suspect they will agree and disagree about some things. Although technically the purpose will be to get them to think deeply about what is and what isn't admissible as evidence in an argumnt, I will also be very glad to get them to think about this. As cynical as my kids are about things like advertising, I am not under the impression that any of them have bothered to ponder whether or not there was a massive government plot to murder its chief executive in 1963. Though cynical, they often seem apathetic. Which just breaks my little overenthusiastic English grad student heart!

I wanted to have them look at some of those Fiske and Princeton Review "guides to colleges" in groups later this week and have them read the chapter "Arguments of Fact" in the textbook together. I thought it'd be interesting for them to critique just how factual and persuasive those types of books are, to test them for certain arguments and see what happened. However, it turns out that in both the public and our school library, there is only one copy of a college guide and it is in the reference section and thus unavailable for check-out. Figures. So I'm going to allow the JFK activities to go on for a couple of days. They also have their first major paper due this week, so I might as well be kind and refrain from assigning homework on at least one of the days, right? I've already extended my office hours from 10:30-12:30 today to 9:30-12:30 and 2:30-4:00. And I'm offering office hours tomorrow despite my not actually having any. R says this is why I'm a good teacher, but I suspect it's mostly just more evidence of my being a nice person.