Moving mountains with a teaspoon

I haven't had the right brain energy to read much today, but I've been digging away at prepping the short story course anyway. I have a feeling I won't have a real schedule of assignments ready in time to copy prior to the first day of assignments--and realize it doesn't really matter whether I do, as chances are a number of students won't be there until the following week (if then). I do want to pick a story to start with, and a few stories beyond the first week--and that is turning out to be extraordinarily difficult. I'm not delighted with most of the thematic groupings I've got so far: they all seem too simplistic and tailor-made for stereotypic and unthought responses. But after I read a few more stories, both in the anthology and elsewhere (specifically some of Le Guin's stuff--naturally--and out of the Lorrie Moore collection I just bought), I think I may at least have a place to start. Maybe.

I did come up with the course description for the the beginning of the short-story syllabus, the little blurb that seems so important to set up the tone and focus of any particular section of a course. In doing so, I have to say I kinda cheated: I quoted rather extensively from a Lev Grossman article about Jonathan Franzen that was in the 8/23 edition of Time magazine, in which both Grossman and Franzen wax philosophical about the value of reading as a counter to busyness "in the Kierkegaardian sense." Students are likely to have zero clue who Kierkegaard is, so I'm happy to at least introduce them to the name and the notion that he's an interesting philosopher.

By the way, the same article also has a rather wonderful riff on freedom (which is the title of Franzen's latest novel). It ends with the following: "There is something beyond freedom that people need: work, love, belief in something, commitment to something. Freedom is not enough. It's necessary but not sufficient. It's what you do with freedom--what you give it up for--that matters." (If you want to read the whole article: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2010000,00.html.)

That quotation could (should!) inspire some real thinking and debate amongst any students who are even half awake: it yanks firmly on the reflexive "America/Freedom!" cant that students have swallowed wholesale and don't really think about. I do this periodically: I start to collect articles, thinking maybe someday I'll teach 101 using just articles with ideas like this--or even the extracted idea--instead of the reader I've been using. Jesus, I just want them to THINK. And it's monumentally difficult sometimes.

Speaking of which, I don't remember if I wrote about it in here, but after my smug self-satisfaction about the blurb I rewrote for the 101 classes, I talked with Lia about it, and she rightly pointed out that kids whose primary interest is their cell-phones, shopping, and who's hooking up with whom, probably don't care much about having minds that command respect. Unless--I thought, I hope--I point out to them that having such minds also A) makes them better job prospects and B) makes them sexier. (That second is something Ed pointed out as a benefit that students will be persuaded by--if one can in fact persuade them that such will be the benefit of whatever one wants them to do or become.) So I drafted the blurb again--and probably will at least one more time before I end up copying it for classes.

And when will said copying take place? I had kinda hoped it would be tomorrow, but I think I'd rather give myself another few days to try to pull something more concrete together for the short-story class and go in to do the copying on Monday. I do wish my brains didn't feel quite so much like pancake batter at the moment, but can't be helped.

And I all but promised that I'd have that book review done by the first day of classes, too, so at a certain point, I have to shelve futzing around with the class and turn my attention to that. It's only 1500 words, and I don't feel the need to be terribly erudite, but I do have to finish reading the book first....

But each spoonful of mountain leads to a cupful, and one cupful at a time.