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Froglin posted:Teaching, advising, publishing, marketing, PR, university writing centers/student services. There you go. Really, today's textual society is quite good for the future job prospects of the lowly English major. I think as long as you accept that an English bachelor's degree is not a professional degree and that you're supposed to pursue your own avenues of interest during your undergraduate education, you'll be fine. You can be an A student doing, like, one hour of solid work per day on top of classes, so there's no excuse not to pursue various other opportunities while you complete your degree.
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Oct 24, 2011 12:57
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Froglin posted:Teaching, advising, publishing, marketing, PR, university writing centers/student services. There you go. Really, today's textual society is quite good for the future job prospects of the lowly English major. I wasn't necessarily challenging the validity of an M.A. program in composition or rhetoric. I was more commenting on my anecdotal experience of having never seen someone with that kind of degree despite the fact that I have seen those types of programs at many institutions.
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Oct 24, 2011 14:53
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Naet posted:I wasn't necessarily challenging the validity of an M.A. program in composition or rhetoric. I was more commenting on my anecdotal experience of having never seen someone with that kind of degree despite the fact that I have seen those types of programs at many institutions. I work at a university and there are several of us here in academic advising/admissions/student services/writing center/library-type positions with our novelty degrees! 
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Oct 24, 2011 15:52
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Froglin posted:I work at a university and there are several of us here in academic advising/admissions/student services/writing center/library-type positions with our novelty degrees! As a soon to be holder of a different novelty degree, I say huzzah!
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Oct 24, 2011 19:47
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Should I be offended that my freshman English 1 professor is using The Giver as the main book of the semester?
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Oct 25, 2011 00:46
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Bondage posted:Should I be offended that my freshman English 1 professor is using The Giver as the main book of the semester? You should be offended that you only have one main book for an entire semester.
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Oct 25, 2011 01:04
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Bondage posted:Should I be offended that my freshman English 1 professor is using The Giver as the main book of the semester? That sort of book is more appropriate for a 5th grade classroom (which is when I first read it). Also, I second Zas.
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Oct 25, 2011 04:16
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Naet posted:I wasn't necessarily challenging the validity of an M.A. program in composition or rhetoric. I was more commenting on my anecdotal experience of having never seen someone with that kind of degree despite the fact that I have seen those types of programs at many institutions. I imagine there are a lot of people with degrees in composition or rhetoric working at community colleges.
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Oct 25, 2011 04:21
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Brainworm posted:I try to make all my classes discussion based, or at least discussion oriented. And I try to keep the class quick moving and relaxed -- nothing kills conversation like stress. Also, I bring in a healthy dose of offbeat stuff. Mostly pamphlets, but I'm always ready to throw in e.g. Titus Andronicus. And if there's something awkward in the text, I try to mention it in an offhand way early on, so any nervous folks know it's OK to go there later on. This is from about a billion pages ago but I just want to say that this one post is far more useful for me (I'm a new grad student, and start teaching next semester) than my whole goddamned first semester pedagogy course is. Thanks a hell of a lot, dude. Reading what works for you takes a load of stress off my mind and makes a ton more sense than synergizing the paradigms of social-constructionist and expressivist composition pedagodies or whatever the gently caress I'm learning. Now to continue on with the rest of this awesome, awesome thread! edit: In point of fact--before I started grad school I was bright-eyed, hopeful, willing and wanting to teach. (The only pedagogy I had in mind was teaching like teachers I liked.) When I came down here I felt, for the first time in my life, completely stupid. I'd open my mouth and nothing would come out. It was a total stress-based brain-freeze. Reading all your posts makes me feel like I belong here, after all; you're saying everything I want to do and saying it elegantly. This is fantastic, man. Absolutely fantastic. Asbury fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Oct 26, 2011 |
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Oct 26, 2011 03:41
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3Romeo posted:This is from about a billion pages ago but I just want to say that this one post is far more useful for me (I'm a new grad student, and start teaching next semester) than my whole goddamned first semester pedagogy course is. Thanks a hell of a lot, dude. Reading what works for you takes a load of stress off my mind and makes a ton more sense than synergizing the paradigms of social-constructionist and expressivist composition pedagodies or whatever the gently caress I'm learning. I imagine most people feel that way. I was concurrently enrolled in "Intro to Pedagogy" and teaching my first semester as a graduate assistant, and it was the most stressful time of my life. I was making lesson plans, teaching them, going to my own classes, then returning home to make up my next lesson plan. It was never-ending. Two things: one, after your first semester, you've got a base to build on. Two, remember, no matter how much you may brain-freeze or worry about students, you always know more than they do. That last part was from my adviser all through grad school. As long as you're okay with admitting when you mess up, you still always know more than the students do. Out of Brainworm's advice, the "Can someone tell me?" bit is one I've had incredible success with. I taught Introduction to Theatre, and it usually took a couple weeks to get past "lol theatre's gay" freshmen and upperclassmen filling a humanities requirement. Once you can get them to take ownership of an opinion in front of a group, and support them after they make it (assuming it's not "I think Hamlet may have been a ghost, too"), it'll make them much more likely to move forward in discussion. The small groups part is immensely helpful as well. As he said, it warms people up for larger discussion, where they may otherwise be reluctant to speak. In a group of three, it's actually much more awkward to NOT speak, and you can see if they're not participating. After the small group work, they've conceivably produced an idea, and it's always easier to get that out of people.
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Oct 26, 2011 17:02
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Any advice for prospectus and diss preparation? I'm gathering committee now and trying to carve a 200-page chunk of idea out of lots of stuff I've had building up.
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Jan 9, 2012 01:14
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Brainworm, thank you so much for that post on class discussions. I'm a new high school English teacher this year, and I'm trying to be a good one even though I feel like I'm failing at it most of the time. I tried your "Agenda system" in today's class, and I was really impressed by the results.
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Jan 10, 2012 04:48
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Sorry for the crappy bump but I used to like reading your blog and just went to link it to an English student friend and it had disappeared, evidently some time ago. I don't know if there's a reason why it disappeared but it'd be really cool if it reappeared somewhere.
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Feb 2, 2012 20:56
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His blog is gone and he stopped posting. I wonder what the story is. Probably his online life caught up to his real life but, really, did he post anything inflammatory on here or on his blog? He listed this thread on his CV. Either that or he died or went to prison.
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Feb 5, 2012 23:37
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I'm a former student of Brainworm's (in grad school now) and I visited him over the winter break, so I can say pretty certainly that he's okay. Between being recently married and having some administrative carnivalization going on at the alma mater, it's probably just a case of life overtaking the internet. So, just in case any of you are particularly invested in his mysterious fate, you don't have to worry too much. He may be back someday. I am sad to see he didn't renew the blog, though.
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Feb 6, 2012 01:06
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Does anyone have a link to the original thread? I remember Brainworm posting something really heartwarming about a company performing Hamlet or Macbeth or similar to a Chinese audience who'd never heard of Shakespeare before, and I'd like to quote it to someone.
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Apr 23, 2012 18:46
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http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2854869 But the post you're talking about is probably in this thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3130479&pagenumber=4&perpage=40#post360474079 Shy fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Apr 23, 2012 |
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Apr 23, 2012 18:52
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Shy posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2854869 That's fantastic, thankyou
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Apr 23, 2012 19:28
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OK. This is a case of "life caught up to me and killed my forum/blog." Can't really keep it going as I'd like to. I feel bad about that, but not as bad as I would letting anything else slide. Yuck. gently caress off losers!! [EDIT] This italicized bit wasn't me, but I'm leaving it in for posterity. You can see my drama/bullshit explanation below, though. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Oct 30, 2012 |
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Jun 7, 2012 20:19
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Great to hear you'll still around, I've really been enjoying this thread. I am not sure if you'll have much time to answer questions, but I would be curious to get your thoughts on Tolstoy's reaction to Shakespeare (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27726 for reference), if you happen to have. I found the piece interesting, but am ultimately disappointed that he choose to primarily focus on "King Lear" as that already seems to have had a number of issues. I would have been curious to know specifically what Tolstoy thought of "Hamlet" or "Othello". I also suspect a large part of his issues with Shakespeare is simply that they seem to have been two authors with very different ideas of what good literature should do.
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Jun 8, 2012 18:47
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Newbie, get a life. Find something better to do with your time. I did. EDIT Also not me. I was going to write that it lacks an indefinable quality that I try to bring to all my writing, but that's a little too precious. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Oct 30, 2012 |
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Aug 2, 2012 20:26
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So, Midlife crisis or new job?
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Aug 2, 2012 22:09
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Taking in this most recent post and the thread that got him probated, it looks like someone with access to Brainworm's account doesn't like the idea of him spending time here... Maybe something to do with the recent marriage?
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Aug 2, 2012 23:59
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Looks like a case of a nutty professor to me!
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Aug 3, 2012 00:48
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Girls kill brains
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Aug 3, 2012 18:53
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This is just more proof that books lead to madness, I plead with you all to burn your books as soon as possible before this affliction spreads to the ones you love!
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Aug 3, 2012 19:15
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FMchubs posted:Taking in this most recent post and the thread that got him probated, it looks like someone with access to Brainworm's account doesn't like the idea of him spending time here... Maybe something to do with the recent marriage? That is eerily perceptive. The best thing to say about the whole situation is that this marriage hasn't gone as planned, which is both a strategic understatement and the absolute truth. I'm not one to discuss feelings, etc. at length, other than to say that everyone has bits of batshit insanity which to them seem entirely rational and utterly normal. And your partner's crazy bits, they can sometimes leave you feeling like you just poo poo your pants in the grocery store. Granted, apart from Shivcraft and a handful of others I don't really know anyone here. It's not like me cracking jokes about [use your imagination here] in front of Mrs. B's coworkers when she has to face them the next day. But there it is, all the same.
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Oct 30, 2012 23:16
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elentar posted:Any advice for prospectus and diss preparation? I'm gathering committee now and trying to carve a 200-page chunk of idea out of lots of stuff I've had building up. Yes, I'm picking this up. I like writing and I don't get to do nearly enough of it. The Process I'm assuming you've got a topic chosen by now. Given that, you should keep two things in front of you: Stick to a schedule. This whole endeavor will take as much time as you're willing to give it, and no less. So choose times that you're going to work, work during those times, and then put it down until your next working time. And start every working time with a clear agenda -- fixes you want or need to make, articles you want to read, and so forth. There's nothing worse than having a lot of work in front of you and no way to establish a sense of progress toward a clearly defined endpoint, be it a clock time or a subproject. Keep in Touch With People. While you don't want to be asking your readers about every little thing, talk to them about a schedule on which you'll get your writing to them. Make that schedule periodic (as in "every two weeks"), rather than occasional (as in "when it's done"). You need to demonstrate progress, for one, and you want to kill any big problems while they're still in their infancy. Second, you'll want to start a writing group if there's nothing of the sort baked into your program. A shared expertise among group members is not necessary and probably hurts, since shared expertise can sharpen field rivalries. Instead, you'll want to have a(nother) group to which you are accountable for your progress, and with which you can discuss problems common to the drafting and revision process. Read each other's work, offer reactions (not suggestions), and hold everyone to bringing some number of pages to each meeting (eight pages a week is a good if arbitrary number). Involve alcohol and smoking if at all possible (and food if you're into that kind of thing), and keep each meeting relaxing but firm on deadlines. If meeting's a chore, it's the first thing people will skip; if there's no rigor, it's just another night at the bar. Neither gets the job done. The Final Product The gist of what I'm going to write here is that you need to keep your dissertation (the document) and your project (the line of inquiry you pursue in your writing and research) separate. The first reason for this is that the scope of your project is going to be too big for your dissertation. It's inevitable. Likewise, your dissertation is not going to be the final or comprehensive guide to your project's subject. People who want to write the definitive piece on baseball in American film, they're the ones who never finish. So -- I'ma write this in shot and italicize for emphasis -- the most important part of dissertation writing is choosing what to dissertate and what to write later. Keep that thinking in your holster when your readers want you to add something. If it moves outside the boundaries you've already set up (say, by suggesting another primary text, time period, or geographic location), make sure they make a case for that extra matter being part of the dissertation, not just part of the project. I made a habit of asking my readers if their suggestions were for the dissertation or the book. It saved me no end of trouble. Second, the best of all possible dissertation writing processes involves drafting a chapter, sending it out as an article, stitching those articles together. So your target for each chapter should be article length, and no more. Apart from some obvious efficiencies, one thing this gets you is a lot of (hopefully good) feedback. Also, validation: if your chapters get published, or even get good reviewer feedback, you and your readers both know your work is good enough. That will save all of you some hassle. So by the end of the whole mess you should have more than a dissertation. You should have a dissertation, a few published and forthcoming articles, and some idea of what you'll be working on next as you slap your book together. When interview time comes, that last one is really really nice. You have no idea how many interviewees don't have a coherent research agenda, or how much this can make a smart, competent academic look like just another scatterbrained PhD.
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Oct 31, 2012 00:34
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Great to see you back, Brainworm! Glad that one of my favorite threads did not, indeed, go out with a whimper.
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Oct 31, 2012 08:14
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Brainworm, You have to choose one of the following four plays to teach to your students; which one do you pick? Antony & Cleopatra King Lear A Midsummer Night's Dream The Tempest ...and why?
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Nov 6, 2012 19:35
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My high school teacher in senior year of high school told me that TAs are horrible at grading. Has anyone ever stereotyped you, and pulled a "gently caress you, bro. You're my age?"
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Nov 7, 2012 02:05
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WE RIDE posted:Brainworm, There are times for each of these plays, but most of the time I'd teach Lear. Of these four plays, Lear is most a living text -- it's probably adapted and rewritten more than the other three combined. That's important because, whatever text you're teaching, it's relationships between texts that make them meaningfully interperable. You can make sense of a play against just about any other kind of text: a dramatic theory or reading practice, a poem, a psychological text, an experience or memory, or whatever. But you can't teach a play in isolation, or without a relative text to build some relationship with. If you try, what you're actually doing is making the relative text a blank space anyone can fill in. In a classroom, that usually means that every student chooses a different relative text and never really has a conversation with anyone else -- you know, Alice says "This doesn't obey unities of time and place," and Bob says "There's a lot of anaphora in the opening speech." So, in my mind, you've got to have a relative text. Which relative text you choose has everything to do with what you want to do with the play and in the classroom. And in my experience, adaptations and rewritings are some of the most useful relative texts you can get. Take Nahum Tate's Lear. Yes, Lear with a happy ending seems spineless, and it's hard to imagine Lear without the Fool. But Tate did it, and it was a blockbuster. So bringing Tate in as a relative text is a great way to make conversations about Lear really, really concrete. You can talk about what the Fool adds (or doesn't add) to the play, whether and why the ending works, and other particulars in ways that are rarely possible otherwise.* Or take Death of a Salesman. As a relative text, it enables** all kinds of questions: Why a king instead of a regular fellow? Why daughters instead of sons? Why no wife? Apart from that, a rewrite like Salesman makes a strong case for Lear's continuing relevance, and frames Lear as a sort of family drama rather than a social parable. And so on, and so on, and so on. Also, using adaptations and rewritings as relative texts lends itself to assignments that build on students' existing strengths. If a kid has a strong non-Shakespearean area -- say, he really knows revisionist Westerns -- he can use King of Texas or Broken Lance as a stepping stone to Lear. If he knows 20th century drama, he can use Salesman or a movie like Thousand Acres. You get the idea. * You can do this with plays like Hamlet and Richard III, which have early ("bad") quartos, and with some of the sonnets (which show up in miscellanies before the 1608 printing), but the differences there are not nearly as dramatic. ** You can, of course, ask these questions without Salesman, but Salesman gives you both reasons to ask them and counterpoints that make them tangible. That's another way of saying that Salesman makes these questions deeply teachable.
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Nov 7, 2012 04:40
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Squirtle Squadee posted:My high school teacher in senior year of high school told me that TAs are horrible at grading. Has anyone ever stereotyped you, and pulled a "gently caress you, bro. You're my age?" I don't know that this has ever been a problem for me, or (more specifically) that this problem has ever taken this form. What does happen is that reflections on my grading (say, during student evaluations) see some serious coloring. I don't know what to chalk that up to, but my guess is that it has everything to do with classroom demeanor. And I don't know what age has to do with classroom demeanor, other than that I'm equal parts immaturity and enthusiasm, and it's hard for me to imagine working that way twenty years from now. So for instance: I teach first-semester writing classes pretty often, and in each of those writing classes I ask for about 75pp per semester, which means short (5pp) papers every week and long papers (8-10pp) every month. That doesn't include things like rough drafts, rewrite assignments, or support materials like annotated bibliographies. People teach differently, but a schedule of four or five five-page essays (20-25pp) in a Freshman writing class is more typical. But when I compare evaluations with evaluations from other sections, students in my sections consistently underestimate how much writing they've actually done, while students in other sections either peg it close or slightly overestimate; lately, the numbers converge at about 30pp. That's never really bothered me, except that I have to deal with that estimation bias whenever I'm up for review or evaluation. That's the flip side of what I sometimes call a deliberate strategy but which is actually just the way things are: the more relaxed you keep your class, the more you can get from kids when they're outside the classroom. I sometimes team teach with a guy in Theater who's turned this into an art form: for him, class is basically just a time when kids check in with each other about their progress on various intensive writing and research projects. Sometimes he brings cookies. Last year, I had a group of kids keep time logs as part of an assessment project, and the ones in his classes were routinely putting twenty hours a week into their projects and estimating something closer to six or seven.
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Nov 7, 2012 05:17
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How would you recommend reading Pale Fire to your students? Are the relationships in the higher levels of academia actually that preposterous? Or is Nabokov just really fed up with critics?
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Nov 7, 2012 18:50
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When I saw that posts had been tampered with I had a flash of fear that some of Brainworm's other posts could have been edited out. Phew! I credit this thread with helping me start to appreciate poetry and classical literature, though in a way it's helped with everything as those two underpin so much in our society. Brainworm, have you read Seven Basic Plots (or any number of books like it), and what do you think about the utility of categorizing narrative structure in this way? Do you teach anything like it when discussing plot in your classes?
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Nov 7, 2012 19:40
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Brainworm, glad to have you back! Have you read J. H. Prynne (is it genius or insanity)? What do you think of Paul Celan (if you've read him)? E: I realize Celan isn't native to your area but I'm still interested to hear what you make of him. Boatswain fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Nov 7, 2012 |
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Nov 7, 2012 21:05
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Brainworm posted:There are times for each of these plays, but most of the time I'd teach Lear. Of these four plays, Lear is most a living text -- it's probably adapted and rewritten more than the other three combined.
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Nov 8, 2012 00:33
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I feel sort of dumb that it had never occurred to me that Death of a Salesman was a take on King Lear.
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Nov 8, 2012 03:19
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Verr posted:How would you recommend reading Pale Fire to your students? Are the relationships in the higher levels of academia actually that preposterous? Or is Nabokov just really fed up with critics? Well, Pale Fire works partly because there's something in the intensity of Kinbote's relationship with Shade's work that's uncannily familiar. Of course there's stuff in Office Space that's uncannily familiar, too, and it's no more a template for corporate relationships than Pale Fire is for academic ones. But, whatever the setting, anything done seriously is also inescapably ridiculous. Why this is, I don't know. Probably it's just that there isn't anything a person can do that's as big a deal as the miracle of his own existence in the first place. Human accomplishment is, in that cosmic sense, something like a penny-ante poker game played out in the middle of Vegas. With that in mind, I'd pitch Pale Fire to students less as book "about" academic insularity, and more a specific illustration of humanity's peculiar condition: the situation that produced us, whatever it is, is an inestimably grander affair than anything we're up to. Of course every living thing I know of is in the same position. But what makes us human* is that we're aware of this situation and are capable of coming to terms with it. The second half of that is no small miracle. Anyway. This means that a person who does things seriously (at least for certain values of seriously) is both ridiculous and tragic because he so comprehensively misses one of the more central and obvious points of human existence. Sort of like, say, focusing on what happens in a poem rather than on what it means, or on how reading it might be an artistically transformative experience of indescribable beauty and power. Or, again, like going to Vegas and taking your penny-ante poker game so seriously that you turn down the free drinks. But missing that central and obvious point is also a uniquely human and preposterously common experience. We all know that the only thing sadder than counting the hours you wasted on some near obsession is not growing out of it in the first place. And that's part of what Pale Fire (and Office Space and Gulliver's Travels and every other satire) rely on; as much as we might want to feel real contempt for Kinbote, all he's really done is play out (on a slightly larger) scale something that most of us kick ourselves for on a regular basis. Of course academics are part of that ridiculous economy of misplaced seriousness and myopic obsessions, and are probably a particularly good case study in it. But no more than, say, serious sports fans, golfers, or hobbyists of practically any stripe. * I sighed internally when I wrote that.
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Nov 8, 2012 03:19
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Caddrel posted:When I saw that posts had been tampered with I had a flash of fear that some of Brainworm's other posts could have been edited out. Phew! Wow. Thanks, and it's a completely wonderful accident if this has been everything-level helpful. Usually, I call it a win if I can be pedantic-level helpful quote:Brainworm, have you read Seven Basic Plots (or any number of books like it), and what do you think about the utility of categorizing narrative structure in this way? I haven't read it, but based on the Amazon summary I'm more interested in the ways it groups plotlines than in the evolutionary or social imperatives that apparently give rise to them. In my mind, you don't need mechanisms for classifying plots outside of significant formal similarities and differences. But, as a rule, I think categories (genres) are incredibly, incredibly useful, since they give readers (and, I guess everyone else) ways of making sense of tradition and influence. At the same time, categories and genres have a way of becoming both increasingly rigid and increasingly Balkanized -- that is, the ways categorization organizes knowledge makes the boundaries between categories more like barriers. I don't have a way around that other than fluency in a whole bunch of genre and category systems, since that makes the idea that genres and categories are organizational strategies rather than immutable divisions both intellectually clear and practically applicable. quote:Do you teach anything like it when discussing plot in your classes? I don't. I sometimes use dictionaries of literary terms (since they define both genres and the literary conventions by which texts might be included in them), but those are more for reference than training. And as far as training goes, I've yet to find a book that works with genre, tradition, and influence in ways that fit well with my classes.
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Nov 8, 2012 03:46
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