Class started out with a brief discussion about spring break, and surprisingly no one had thought about genre during the vacation.

Then our thoughts turned to Wai Chee Dimock, a Yale English professor taking the generic world by storm through thoughtfully-written essays (one of which we read in the beginning of the semester) and a growing Facebook group called "Rethinking World Literature."  ShaynaS asked Dimock about her decison to delve into/question genre, to which Dimock replied that she is a "close reader" and genre analysis allows her to stay close to the text while "reaching outward" and bringing many interesting, popular texts into the foreground.

The article "Algebra in Wonderland" makes sense of lot of the strange sequences in Alice in Wonderland.  If they really were intended as metaphors for mathematical concepts, then the book seems a lot less "dreamlike."  Alice's confusion in the new world she encounters could be similar to Lewis Carroll's skepticism about the "new math."  Plenty of mathematical concepts like imaginary numbers do seem absurd at first. 

I wanted to say this in class, and yet the idea of contradicting Professor Dimmock wasn't appealing to me. I really enjoyed her visit.

Last semester, I took a class, creatively entitled "the novel," in which, among many other topics, we discussed what it is that actually makes a novel a novel. After reading several thigns that had no plot, no narrative, no coherent characters, and perhaps no artistic merit, we were forced to conclude that a novel is really defined based on it's length. A novel is just a prose (or even a poetry) piece of a reasonable number of chapters. Feel free to disagree with me on that score, but that seems to be how publishers and bookstores are choosing to define it.

i just realised that this post never showed up -- i guess it got lost?

tim burkes visit to class was an interesting one, not because of anything he said, but because of the way he went about doing so. it seemed like he was a breathing version of his blog - a monologue. he seemed so caught up in what he was saying and how relevant it was that a lot of the actual substance behind his words seemed to get lost. there were moments in which he threw in a joke or a random comment, and those honestly were the only times my mind snapped awake and i remember what he was saying.. maybe its just the way i function, but having someone speak to you and not just in front of you seems to make all the difference to the amount you absorb from what they are saying.

this class surprised me, having been in a class with anne last semester, i was expecting something similar to the gender studies class i was in. needless to say, this class was not it. and having seen that, i was reminded, once again of how much of the class is in our hands - anne lets us structure each class, theres no flow on thoughts, ideas or even ways in which to express them. and so, each class is invariably different, and i love it.

TOPIC: Coherently Implementing Model-based Inquiry
Learning Across High School Chemistry and Physics Classes

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