Here Comes the Story of the Hurricane...

Been just swamped with work and personal stuff (like condo-buying) and so I haven’t written much about class. Today we talked for about half the time about some of the “urban legends” to come out of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Mostly we focused on these photos. The other half we talked about illegal immigration. It was, to me, a thoughtful conversation but it probably didn’t take us where we needed to go as a class. Not that I know exactly what I mean by that. Clearly, issues like immigration are rife with language/power stuff, but without a text we could all examine, the conversation quickly got into other areas. And I pontificated—mostly because I like having political discussion—but now I’m uneasy with the extent to which I talked. And I worry that my plea for responses seemed ham-handed at best. Who wants to respond to a teacher who just made a point that clearly addressed his political positions? Just nod and get out.

I give the class credit for putting up with it. And perhaps there was a time when I would have thought that a class like today’s was good or beneficial. I don’t think it was bad by any means, but the more productive conversations by far have been those where my concerns take a back seat to the texts we can all share.

So Wednesday it’s back to Katrina, specifically to editorials and letters that address how people perceived the actions of New Orleans residents and the federal and local governments. Katrina places us at an interesting nexus of rhetoric and reality. What happens when our leaders’ words don’t match with what we can see on the TV? And how do our political biases shape our responses to these events?

These are the kinds of issues we need to get more into. And we need to get into theory. And we will, what with Foucault and Fairclough and Lakoff all coming up. One issue I see coming is prepping the students for the challenges these authors will present—and to assist them in linking the authors’ ideas to their own. The DAJs will have to play a significant role in this—and that role will have to be documented. We might see more specific DAJ assignments in the weeks to come, which may be something of a relief to the students. In general, it's time for the class to move on to more complicated, challenging things.