For the past several years, I’ve explored various ways of incorporating social media into my UNIV 112, Focused Inquiry II classes, offering students the option of maintaining blogs and creating a Facebook page for the course, which students weren’t required to “like,” but were encouraged to post to as an alternative to blogging. I was still uncertain of how I would introduce social media next semester, when one of my former students, Tommy McPhail, sent me an email message, which I include below with his permission.
29 November 2012
Prof. Lucas,
I recently underwent a Cultural Discovery Project for my EDUS 476 class (the introductory course to being an RA at VCU). Afterwards, I wrote a blog post comprising my thoughts, and the response was incendiary. Within 24 hours, my post went viral received thousands of hits. To date, the post has received over 40,000 hits on Tumblr alone, and was one of the top posts on Reddit, in addition to being signal-boosted by various Facebook networks, Philadelphia Slutwalk, and my favorite author. I’ve received a plethora of encouragement, criticism, heartfelt praise, objection, and even a marriage proposal from a blogger in New Zealand. The very idea that my writing could reach so many people worldwide, let alone evoke such a response, has been both overwhelming and inspiring. It was only fitting that I forward this along to you. I would not have been able to accomplish something like this without you and your class. It really inspired me, particularly the social media components, to start using my blog for social advocacy purposes. Thank you so much for all that you do. I hope you enjoy the piece.
My essay and the accompanying appendix are attached for your convenience. Here is a link to my original post:
Tommy’s blog post on his Cultural Discovery Project and the overwhelming response it received attest to the value of social media as platforms on which students’ work in the classroom–in Tommy’s case, EDUS 476–can have a life outside of the classroom with an audience of thousands of readers. At last count, Tommy’s Tumblr post had prompted 46,935 notes.
Now I know how I’ll introduce social media next semester: I’ll begin with Tommy’s blog.
The two books that I need to read before the beginning of the semester didn’t go into the suitcase. I almost packed them, but then I stopped myself. It was our vacation, after all. So I chose, instead, a couple from the stack on the nightstand: The Best American Non-Required Reading 2011—more on that beach-appropriate reading in another blog entry to come—and Tina Fey’s Bossypants.
Bossypants (2011)
Even though I read Bossypants purely for pleasure, I found myself making notes on a passage that I’ll refer to when I teach oral communication in my Focused Inquiry classes this fall. In a section of the book titled “The Rules of Improvisation that will Change Your Life and Reduce Belly Fat,*” Tina Fey discusses the importance of speaking in statements “instead of apologetic questions”:
No one wants to go to a doctor who says, ‘I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?’ Make statements with your actions and your voice (85).
That’s valuable advice for all of us who strive to improve our public speaking, and Fey’s laugh-out-loud example teaches us more succinctly and effectively than volumes of oral communication theory.
“Molly Haskell grew up here in Richmond, and it’s here that she fell in love with movies. One of her most vivid childhood memories finds her standing before a magazine rack in the Broad Street station waiting for the train to Florida, and persuading her father to buy her a magazine devoted to the child star Margaret O’Brien.* The pleasure Molly Haskell took in reading that movie magazine is one she would later pass on to the readers of her own film reviews and books.” Those are some of the words that I spoke about Haskell Friday night when I introduced her as keynote speaker at the third annual VCU Southern Film Festival at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
In her keynote address, Haskell discussed her most recent book, Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited (2009), which expolores Gone With the Wind as the product of three strong personalities: author Margaret Mitchell, film producer David O. Selznick, and actress Vivien Leigh. Published on the seventieth anniversary of the film’s release, Haskell’s book looks back more than eighty years to Mitchell’s drafting of the novel in the 1920s, while also considering the book and film in multiple cultural contexts and reflecting on its enduring presence in our collective memory and imagination.
At the outset of the panel, I noted that the publication of Brown and Wiley‘s book marked an important contribution to Mitchell scholarship as well as studies of book publishing and copyright. Though I was prepared to offer more talking points about their work and Haskell‘s, I didn’t need to. Their own observations about Mitchell, her novel, and the film prompted a nearly hour-long conversation with the audience, cut short only by the announcement that the museum would close at 9 p.m.
When one man sitting near the front of the auditorium expressed his ambivalence about calling himself a fan, I was reminded of the “Seven Stages of Gone With the Wind” that Haskell outlines in Frankly My Dear:
“For those of us who fell under its spell, the range of emotions attached to the film fluctuate over time with the predictable volatility of a love affair and its aftermath, in my own case what we might clinically designate as the Seven Stages of Gone With the Wind: Love, Identification, Dependency, Resentment, Embarrassment, Indifference, and then something like Half-Love again, a more grown-up affection informed by a film-lover’s appreciation of the small miracle by which a mere ‘woman’s film’ with a heroine who never quite outgrows adolescence was tansfigured into something much larger, something profoundly American, a canvas that contains, if not Walt Whitman’s multitudes, at least multiple perspectives” (xiii).
Along with those words of Haskell‘s about the Seven Stages of Gone With the Wind, I would’ve liked to address how fans of the novel and the film have formed online communities, particularly on Facebook. That’s something that Ellen Brown mentioned back stage when the four of us–Brown, Wiley, Haskell, and I–were clipping on our wireless microphones.
In their introduction to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Brown and Wiley write: “We do not claim to have rewritten Gone With the Wind, but we have refocused the lens” (3). Similarly, Haskell‘s Frankly My Dear refocuses the lens, and the insights of the three authors inspired Friday’s night’s audience to see the book and film anew.
On November 8, as an exercise in ethical reasoning, students in my Focused Inquiry classes formulated responses to questions submitted to Randy Cohen during his tenure as the writer of TheNew York Times column “The Ethicist.” Students worked collaboratively in four groups, with each of the four responding to a different question regarding campus ethics. One question addressed the market-style dining system, another dealt with course evaluations, and the other two, unsurprisingly, concerned cheating and plagiarism. The four questions–which appear at the end of this blog entry–prompted considerable discussion, enough to insure that I’ll repeat the exercise again next fall as an introduction to applying ethical frameworks.
Students in my Focused Inquiry classes considered those questions of ethics only a day before the announcement of the firing of legendary Nittany Lions coach Joe Paterno and Penn State President Graham Spanier following the arrest of Paterno’s former assistant coach, defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, on charges related to the sexual abuse of minors.
Sexual abuse—in Sandusky’s case, of eight young boys over a fifteen-year period—doesn’t present us with an ethical question. Its atrocity isn’t an arguable point. But what we would have done if we were Mike McCreary—if we had seen what he saw in the locker-room shower—is another matter altogether.
In his November 14 column in The New York Times, “Let’s All Feel Superior,” David Brooks addresses the vanity that followed the news of the atrocity: “The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.”
Though we may believe that we “would have behaved better,” historically we haven’t. Brooks cites complicity in the face of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide as examples of the normalcy bias that prevents people from “process[ing] the horror in front of them.” Brooks also notes people’s motivated blindness–“they don’t see what is not in their interest to see.”
On the November 18 broadcast of NPR’s Tell Me More, ethicist Jack Marshall, founder of ProEthics, observed how the events at Penn State exemplify the dark side of loyalty: “And the dark side, in this case, is that people were so focused on the football program, and so focused on the university, that their loyalty blotted out all other considerations, including a prime directive, which is loyalty to the human race, to our children, to the innocent.”
When we return to questions of ethics next semester, it’s likely that students will raise the subject of the Penn State scandal. If they do, it will present an opportunity to consider how acting ethically isn’t synonymous with following the law.
Along with demonstrating the difference between ethics and law, and the power of the normalcy bias and motivated blindness, the recent events at Penn State underscore how even our greatest ethical values, such as loyalty, can lead us to act unethically.
The ethical questions that follow are the ones that my students addressed in class on November 8. The first three are collected in Randy Cohen’s book The Good, the Bad & the Difference (2002). The fourth question appeared in Cohen’s column on January 20, 2008.
The mandatory meal plan at my college allows you to eat as much as you want but prohibits taking food out of the dining hall. However, I think it’s okay to slip a sandwich in my backpack because I am only a little freshman, and the college needs to budget for lacrosse players. My sister, Shayna, believes this is tantamount to bringing an extra-large purse to a Holiday Inn buffet? What do you think? –Erin and Shayna Silverman, Boiceville, New York
I attend an Ivy League university where students are graded on a curve. During the midterm exam, the student next to me was copying answers from my paper. Because a higher score would mean a lower grade for me, I intentionally wrote some incorrect answers, waited until she handed in her test booklet, and then changed my answers to the correct ones. Was this wrong? –Brenna Tinkel, Philadelphia
A college student called last week to say his ‘friend’ had visited my Web page, lifted something I wrote, and turned it in as her own work. Suspicious, her professor plans to search the Web; if he finds the paper was plagiarized, he’ll recommend expulsion. The student implored me to take the paper off my site, lest his ‘friend’s’ academic career, and possibly her life, be ruined. What do I do? –Anonymous
Our university requires us students to write anonymous evaluations of our professors. On one evaluation, a student made derogatory comments about a professor’s sexual orientation. The university hired a handwriting expert to confirm the identity of the culprit so punishment could be administered. The university claims the student broke the code of conduct, but if anonymity was promised, is this investigation ethical?” –S.C., Georgia
FTP’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, September 15 – October 8, 2011
The Firehouse Theatre’s September 19 staged reading of The Night of the Iguana and its current production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof–both part of Richmond’s Centennial Celebration of Tennessee Williams–sent me back to the pages of Williams’ plays, which I’ve been rereading in the Library of America edition: Plays 1937-1955.
Williams’ Plays 1937 -1955 (2000)
I keep thinking of these words of Big Mama’s: “Time goes by so fast. Nothin’ can outrun it. Death commences too early–almost before you’re half-acquainted with life–you meet the other. . . .” In a recent Fresh Air interview, actress Margo Martindale told Terry Gross how saying those lines as a student differed from saying them decades later:
“I played Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when I was 20 years old at the University of Michigan. And then I played Big Mama on Broadway in 2004. The speech at the end of that play — ‘Time goes by so quickly …’ — boy did that have different weight from when I was 20 years old to when I was 50-something-odd years old. It’s all about what you’ve experienced. You can’t teach that to a younger actor. You have to have lived that.” In the current Firehouse production,
Jacqueline Jones speaks Big Mama’s lines from experience as well, delivering one of the cast’s strongest performances.
In his introduction to Camino Real, Williams writes of the all-consuming nature of play writing: “It is amazing and frightening how completely one’s whole being becomes absorbed in the making of a play. It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.”
Today when I was completing an application for a grant, I thought of how it would enable my whole being to become absorbed–at least briefly–in the writing process in a way that it can’t when I’m teaching. Grants buy us time, which “goes by so fast. Nothin’ can outrun it.”
I planned to devote this blog entry—my first in two weeks—to the Virginia Blackboard User’s Group Conference, which I attended on Friday. But what lingers in my mind today isn’t the conference, it’s the personal narratives that my students presented in class after their draft workshop on Thursday.
To shift students’ focus away from “correcting” their classmates’ writing, I decided to devote the second half of class to Readers’ Theater. After students read and commented on their group members’ drafts, each group chose an essay to perform for the class, assigned parts, and assembled impromptu costumes and props.
To honor the students’ privacy, I won’t reveal any details about their personal narratives; I will simply say that their work left a lasting
impression on me. As readers they offered descriptive rather prescriptive comments, and as performers they gave their stories a life in the classroom that was separate and distinct from the words on the page.
FTP’s The Night of the Iguana
The idea of combining a draft workshop with Readers’ Theater stems from my renewed interest in drama and my recent experiences at Readers’ Theater performances staged at the Firehouse, including the September 19 reading of TheNight of the Iguana, part of Richmond’s Centennial Celebration of Tennessee Williams.
The power of live theater and its influence on my teaching also speaks to my experience at yesterday’s Blackboard conference. Though I use Blackboard on a daily basis—and it’s usually projected on the screen in the classroom at least once during each of my Tuesday-Thursday classes—for me it’s simply a tool: a content management system for content that’s always changing.
During yesterday’s conference sessions, many in the audience divided their attention between the large screens at the front of the room and the small screens in their hands and their laps. In the 1:15 session, I overheard a man say his iPad was attached to his thigh.
More and more I see the need for opportunities to turn away from the screen and to face each other. Though I don’t agree with many of David Mamet’s sentiments—in particular some of his pronouncements in his latest book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (2011)—I do concur with his notion that people go to the theater to see that real communication between human beings is still possible. I know for me it’s true. My own return to the theater is in part a response to our increasingly digital lives.
Chop Suey Books, 2913 West Cary Street, Richmond, VA
Local writers gathered for workshops on the second floor of Chop Suey Books this weekend, and in between sessions sipped Tall Bike Coffee on the sidewalk and ordered burgers and hot dogs from store owner/grill master Ward Tefft–all as part of a 26.2 All-Write, All-Night Writing Marathon and Cook-Out to benefit the Richmond Young Writers.
Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film adaptation of the 1947 play / britannica.com.
Early in the afternoon, I left Chop Suey to focus on another writer’s work across the street: To mark the beginning of Richmond’s Tennessee Williams’ Centennial Celebration, the Byrd Theatre hosted a free screening of A Streetcar Named Desire, introduced by Carol Piersol, Artistic Director of the Firehouse Theatre (and my acting teacher), and John Knapp, Artistic Director of Richmond Triangle Players.
After Streetcar, I returned to Chop Suey and to my own writing, catching the end of a Writing Sampler workshop followed by a free-writing session. I noticed something that I hadn’t seen earlier in the day. On the curtain that serves as the door to the closet in the back corner of the writing room, someone had pinned a sign that read “Enter the Fort of Solitude.” Throughout the free-writing session, one of the Richmond Young Writers wrote there, behind the curtain.
At the end of the free-writing session, I retreated to my own Fort of Solitude on Grace Street but returned to Carytown before daylight. On the sidewalk across from Chop Suey, author Eliezer Sobel led a small circle of writers through a sunrise meditation and writing session. When we closed our eyes to begin, it was still dark. When we opened our eyes, it was light, and we wrote about 9/11 and other numbers on our brains.
I wish I could have read Acting Lessons for Teachers(1994, 2007) in 1990 when I was teaching my first college classes. Robert T. Tauber and Cathy Sargent Mester‘s book would have shown me that my teaching act wasn’t a gimmick but a pedagogical necessity–not simply because I was a twenty-two-year-old who could have passed for seventeen but because all of us who teach are performers.
Despite its title, Acting Lessons for Teachersdoesn’t offer tutorials on craft but instead describes the acting strategies that enhance teaching: physical and vocal animation, teacher role-playing, strategic entrances and exits, humor, props, suspense and surprise, and creative use of space. It also presents anecdotes from teachers, both K-12 and college professors, who have successfully employed those strategies in the classroom. Raymond J. Clough, Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages at Canisius College, recalls an evening in the mid-1960s when he saw Vincent Price perform a dramatic reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” For Clough, then a young college teacher, Price’s mesmerizing performance served as an epiphany, illustrating the importance of “training the voice” and of “knowing materials cold” (192).
Scott Richardson, Professor of Classics at St. John’s University, recounts how he presents a Viewer Mail segment in his classes to address the relevance of studying a dead language and broader questions regarding the value of higher education (202). To introduce the Greek god Dionysus, he invokes The Rocky Horror Picture Show(203).
While some teachers readily draw on the tools of actors in the classroom, others would rather not identify themselves as performers, believing that focusing on performance emphasizes entertainment over instruction. But all of us who teach–whether we call ourselves performers or not–share the aim of instructing our students, which requires their attention. Acting Lessons for Teachersshows us how we can capture that attention as an actor would.
The show’s host, writer Meriah Crawford, an Assistant Professor in VCU’s University College as well as a private investigator, referred to the authors assembled on stage as the “Voldemort Panel.” Along with Voldemort, the panelists discussed Hannibal Lechter, another villain known to more movie-goers than readers. Neville observed that what drives The Silence of the Lambsisn’t the search for Buffalo Bill but the character of Hannibal Lechter. Thompson noted his affinity for villains like Wickham of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a character who isn’t evil incarnate but who is deeply flawed. Katsu bemoaned the tendency for some writers to provide motivation for every villian’s actions: It’s a zombie, come on, she said.
Though villains dominated the conversation, the panelists and the host also addressed the importance of the writing habit, of returning to the desk every day. That’s a challenge for all three panelists, who are currently promoting new books. In the words of Thompson, promoting a book is like a wedding ceremony: You want to share your love of the writing with everyone, but then you’re ready to go back to the part that you do in private.
Jane Lucas 