FoolsCap

Why a John Lennon song title for today’s post?  I was listening to the song before arriving on campus for my Writing Center shhift today, that’s all.

Also, punctuation.  Not a lot of pop song titles really make use of punctuation, so when they do, I find it of interest.  Take "Oh Yoko!" for example.  Is it a cry for help, a joyous exclamation, a frustrated shout. . .?  I dunno.  I think (looking at the context of the song in terms of other Lennon songs about his relationship with Yoko) that it might be all three.  Has there been a more fascinating celebrity relationship in the past fiddy years than John and Yoko’s?

Well, maybe Kate and Spence, but it’s really close.

Anyway: assignment ideas follow.

Box Logic:

1. Students assemble a box of meaningful items (15-20) to bring into class.
2. Pairing up with another student, each takes detailed notes about the other’s objects
3. The resulting paper (3-5 pp) tries to conjecture what about each item is meaningful to the other person, looks for repeated signifiers in the itens, et cetera.
4. Students then exchange papers to see what others have thought about them based on their artifact-ual representations of themselves.  Then, a response paper (3-4 pp) to the other student’s conjecture–why these asusmptions from these items, et cetera?

Or, a variation:

1. Assemble box
2. Groups of 3-4 students take detailed notes about other students items
3. Paper (5-7 pp) then is in finding personal connections to other people’s items–did they have things that resonated with you?  What things?  Why?

Or, another variation:

1. Really basic: Give us a guided tour through your box in essay form (5-7 pp).  To my mind, the least interesting of the three and the least in line with my idea of writing hypertextually.  Of course, the connections between the items might be foregrounded in the writing, as long as I’m explicit in stating that the connection must be more than "these items are important to me."

Could be a research component here too, along the lines of my annotated artifact assignment discussed in class.

Lived Culture:

1. In class, we’ll design a survey that students will ask their "network" (hypertextual?) to fill out.
2. My supposition is that the questions students generate will largely fall along cultural lines, things like fave movie, fave TV show, et cetera.  Interpellation, voila!
3. Once students have collected surveys, the essay (5-7) will be to look at the different cultural discourses (choragraphic) voices that run throughout their network.  Again: conjecture and supposition: how do these distilled chora influence the way you think/act/write/live?
4. Students would be asked to turn in original copies of surveys so that I have some assurance that the paper is not just B.S.
5. I like this assignment because it seems to foreground the inter/hypertextual relationships of which I am so found, and it has that whole lived culture thing (although I’m not normally an ethnographic kind of guy).  The downside, perhaps, is that Text Book, which I probably will end up using, doesn’t really have that approach.  On the other, the first essay in it is a prose treatment of some linguist’s field work, so maybe I can make the text do what I want?

Final Project:

1. An adaptation of Text Book’s final project.
2. The text asks students to compile a collection of comments/fragments/excerpts from earlier readings in the text and arrange them into a sort of comment on the student’s relationship to culture (for example).
3. My addition is twofold.  First, students must find outside sources responding to the works they cite, or that they feel comment on the matter in similar or (even better) drastically different ways.
4. Second, student writing would be an attempt to work out the differences between the two citations.  Not to necessarily say which is right/wrong but to consider how they differ and more how they make arguments than the specific quality of those arguments.
5. I figure I’d have to set some standard like "only one/two full pages of text can be citation" in order to avoid B.S. and filler
6. I like this because a)research and b)it goes even further into highlighting those hypertextual connections

Also, I love John Lennon because his love are always realistic about love being hard work, and grounding it banal details ("In the middle of a bath, I call your name.").  I like grand romanticism, sure, but the nitty-gritty details are often just as affecting.

Feedback, as always, appreciated.