Paula Marantz Cohen
>Through the eyes of my students
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| Blaine Fontana @ Sycamore Review |
Paula Marantz Cohen rethinks the teaching of literature @ The American Scholar.
Although I have been teaching for almost three decades, I feel I have only recently begun to teach. For years, I was doing what was expected: preparing detailed syllabi, grading piles of papers, and pontificating in front of a class about the importance of the subject matter that I had assigned. I thought I was teaching, and some of my students thought so too. But they were the diligent, receptive ones, and lately I’ve come to feel that diligent, receptive students don’t need teachers. The ones who do are the ones I used to gripe about: those who went directly to the Spark Notes, who didn’t proofread their papers, and who gave rote responses in class. They were the students whom I traditionally wrote off as not belonging in college—or at least not in my classroom.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Why did my thinking change? I suppose the precipitating factor came when I had children of my own. There is nothing more humbling to one’s self-esteem, more profoundly disruptive of one’s established worldview, than children—those creatures who know nothing of convention or tact, who speak truth to power (that is, their parents) because they haven’t yet learned to pretend or been cowed into doubting themselves. My children, though like me in some respects, were unlike me in others, and I eventually came to see myself through the lens of their difference. Their stubborn individuality forced me to acknowledge otherness in a new way and to question some of my most cherished assumptions. Watching them develop their tastes and interests spurred me to recall how I developed the tastes and interests that define me.
>When are we truly in some particular place?
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@ The Smart Set Paula Marantz Cohen writes on the migration series paintings of Jacob Lawrence.
Soon after I began reading Sharon Wilkerson’s new book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which uses ethnography to explore the great migration of African-Americans from the South to Northern cities during the first half of the 20th century, I came face to face with another treatment of this subject during a visit to Washington, D.C. Wandering into the new addition to the Phillips Collection, I was confronted in the first gallery with a set of paintings by Jacob Lawrence entitled “The Migration of the Negro.” I had heard about these paintings, which chronicle the first wave of African-American migration to the North from 1916 to 1919. Stumbling upon them on the wall of this museum, I was dazzled by their expressiveness and power.
Tony Barrell reflects on his exile in Australia and the impossibilities of going back at The Griffith Review.
I hadn’t been in Sydney that long and wasn’t used to much of it. As an Englishman everything was more familiar than it would be to most migrants to Australia, coming from the Balkans, Indo-China, Latin America and East Africa, but that very familiarity made it all the more strange. So many signs, institutions and English place names – Paddington, Kensington, King’s Cross, Canterbury, Cheltenham – colossal Victorian institutions, and cramped little red brick villas, but no Englishness at all. And, of course, it was hot. I had arrived in a steamy January heatwave; very different from what I was used to.
Then one day, after about a year, I had an epiphany. It didn’t make me feel that much more at home (that took at least two decades) but it connected me with others who might have felt even worse pangs of alienation. I was walking down King Street, Newtown, beyond the railway station around the corner and down the hill towards Alexandria. It had been a beautiful old shopping thoroughfare but now was rent with heavy traffic, and many of the businesses were run down or boarded up, but the signboard of one delicatessen caught my eye. The letters in black and green on a translucent plastic light box hanging from the awning said one word ‘Kalloni’. My heart jumped. I knew this word. Surely there could only be one meaning for it? I went inside. It was quite dark, but clean and full of Greek produce. There was yoghurt, fetta, sacks of beans and the yeasty honest smell of dried goods. There were stalks and flowers of oregano, sealed in clear plastic bags. The middle aged woman behind the counter did not speak much English, and my Greek has always been inadequate, but I had to ask her, ‘Are you from Kalloni?’
Lex Runciman considers the relationship between photography and landscape on a trip to Stonehenge @ Terrain.org.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )At my home in Oregon, whenever I go down the stairs I am confronted by a framed, 16 x 20 inch photograph of Stonehenge that I took one January morning in 2006. My wife Debbie and I had arrived with our coach driver Roger Thomas and 15 college students after a pleasant drive east from the city of Bath. We’d been in the UK only a couple of days, and jet lag was still an influence. We’d risen early to the largesse of a British breakfast (including salted fish and stewed tomatoes for those so inclined); we’d eaten our fill. The weather was gray but not raining, the countryside rolling, the coach pleasantly warm—several students fell asleep on the way. Only the shock of motion stopping woke them. Before we left the coach, I reminded them they needed to do some writing in their journals here, on site, before we left. They could do this as they walked or once they returned to the coach, but I wanted them to get some initial observations and responses on paper. Where such notes might lead we’d discuss later.
altimoniere 