Tag: ISU

Classy: When food drives the English curriculum

This semester, I’ve taken on teaching a new elective course called FOOD.

We met for the first time today.

Over the course of the semester, we’ll be meeting twice per week to look a the literary, social and scientific intersections of the foods we eat and our relationships to them.

Class today started with my description of one of my top comfort foods – mashed potatoes, with excessive butter, mixed with corn.

Then, I asked students to share their comfort foods.

It’s the opening to the first class assignment. A mentor professor of mine at Illinois State, Dr. Justice, is teaching a similar class for undergrad, grad and doctoral students this spring as well.

She designed the assignment.

From the comfort food discussion, we read Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River Part I.”

“River” is one of Hemingway’s semi-autobiographical Nick Adams stories wherein Nick returns to Michigan’s upper peninsula on a camping trip after a tour in Italy during World War I.

After making camp, Nick fixes a supper of pork and beans with spaghetti and tomato ketchup.

All along, we’re told his pack has been too heavy, that he’s carry too much around.

Dr. Justice (a leading Hemingway scholar) explained to me Nick is making a camp version of minestra di pasta e fagiole in an effort to hold on to his time in Italy.

Food as memory.

For next class, the students (and I) will be writing personal essays about our comfort foods and how they burrowed into our food identities. Part of the assignment asks them to explain how they would alter the assignment in the same way Nick does to fit the restrictions of hiking and camping.

For many more than I expected, the adaptation won’t be difficult. Several of them proffered comfort foods bought in boxes or bags. I’ll be curious to tally the final real-to-processed ratio of responses. Even more, I’m looking forward to the discussion of what cultural significance that ratio might imply.

I’m thinking of asking the students to research the inspirations for the processed comfort foods and compare the healthiness of the two versions.

Either way, I’m pretty jazzed about where this course is heading.

Ideas?

Things I Know 11 of 365: College should do college better

Professor: One who speaks in someone else’s sleep.

– Unknown

Art and Society: Theater of the Civil War

Text and Context: Islamic Art and Culture

Traditional and Non-Traditional Grammar

Three courses of my undergraduate studies.

The first two were ordered from the menu of Illinois State University’s General Education program. The third was selected as one of the rhetorical requirements made of an English major.

I selected them because they sounded interesting.

Though I remember scant lessons from each such as my “A” on the paper, “Nouns: More than People, Places, Things an Ideas,” I can’t say that they proved incredibly interesting. They were work, yes, but they didn’t incite my curiosity. It’s a shame, too. I’ve got a pretty wicked curiosity.

College should do college better.

As I write letters of recommendation for our exiting seniors, I want to include a note at the end – just a heads up to whomever inherits our students – “Don’t screw them up.”

After four years of inquiry-driven, project-based learning, our students are ready for the interesting. They are prepared to ask questions and look for answers. They are prepared to do real stuff. They have written grant proposals, interviewed voters, written the histories of their neighborhoods and documented their families’ dearest memories.

Don’t worry about building your new sports complex, your shinier student union, your rec center, your re-sodded quad. Instead, look in your syllabi and ask if, at 18, you’d want to sit and listen to what you have to say.

Don’t mistake me, I’m not going all Mary Poppins here. It doesn’t have to be fun.

It should be, and by God, please make at least a little effort here, interesting.

Some of the best times and biggest mistakes I made in college happened in the offices of the campus paper, The Daily Vidette. What’s more, I didn’t pay tuition to write there. They paid me. It turns out writing for a real audience to inform them and to keep those in power honest drove me to understand the importance of sourcing your information and getting the quotes just right.

It was interesting, and it was important.

If “Don’t screw them up” is too vague, let me be more specific.

Colleges, universities, you don’t own the information anymore.

We’re teaching out students to access it, to analyze it, to ask what they can do with it and then to create with it.
I understand that used to be your job. Well, the first two anyway. You’ve been outsourced.

They’re coming to you hungry, curious and capable. If you assume otherwise, you will lose them. They will see through your undervaluing of their potential and they will lose interest.

We’ll still be down here pushing them up to you, but you’ve got to keep them there.

In order to do that, I think it’s going to take more than promoting your 24-hour Taco Bell.