Class Today

Unfortunately, I need to cancel class today. I plan on being there Wednesday though.

I will still collect your papers on Weds.

Please finish reading the chapter,"White Tigers," in The Woman Warrior if you haven't already. Also, jump into the discussion here below if you haven't already.

See you soon.

Erin

White Tiger

Greetings classmates!!! This is Mario.I Hope everyone is having a good weekend.
I still find this book quite confusing but I actually found something quite interesting that I wanted to discuss with the class. What significance do you think her comparison between the dragon and the planet had? Does anyone believe It meant something important in her growing up?

For anyone interested in Art Spiegelman...

March 24 & 25, 2007 Teachers College, Columbia University To Present Unique Popular Culture in the Classroom Conference Teachers College Columbia University 525 West 120th St. (at Broadway) New York City Saturday, March 24 8:15 am - 7 pm Sunday, March 25 8:15 am - 4 pm A limited number of spaces to attend the conference remain. To register, visit tc.edu/ceoi/teachthinkplay or call 1.800.209.1245 Ice-T, Art Spiegelman Head Impressive List of Speakers (New York, New York) -- Teachers College at Columbia University, the leading graduate school of education in the US, will present Teach, Think, Play: Popular Culture in the Classroom on March 24 and 25, 2007. The event is designed to explore the power and challenges of integrating popular culture into classroom curricula with celebrities, media professionals, classroom educators, and academics at this unique conference. Featured speakers include Ice-T, the legendary rapper, Law & Order actor, and star of the recent VH1 reality show Ice T’s Rap School that featured the rapper teaching students at a Manhattan prep school how to be hip-hop artists. Students from the show will also speak at the event. Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book artist of Maus and creator of The Garbage Pail Kids, along with his wife Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker Art Editor and co-creator of Little Lit comic series, will deliver a multi-media presentation about the history of comics and their dynamic children’s literature. Other featured keynote presentations will be made by Taylor Mali, four-time National Poetry Slam champion and star of the film Slam, as well as Will Pearson, President and co-founder of mental_floss magazine; jan jagodzinski, author of Youth Fantasies and Professor of Education at University of Alberta, and Renee Hobbs, Temple University Professor of Mass Media & Communication and Director of Temple’s Media Education Lab. Sessions at the conference will be organized as follows: TEACH – Workshops led by teachers and organizations that have developed innovative and pedagogically meaningful ways to integrate popular culture into 5-12 and college curricula. THINK – Attendees will explore the theory and research behind the use of popular culture for educational purposes. How much theory do we need to breathe contemporary life back into our accustomed practices? PLAY –Cultural figures will discuss the ways in which they produce creatively in their media. Attendees will explore which methods of media and cultural production can best be adapted to the classroom setting. Artists and cultural figures that will present workshops are: Popmaster Fabel: Senior Vice President of the Rock Steady Crew and hip-hop historian Danny Simmons: visual artist, poet, and co-founder of DefPoetry Jam Emir Lewis: film editor of I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown vs. the Board of Education and Whiteboyz Sheila Marikar: ABC.com reporter and author of “Inside Britney’s Shaved Head” Alissa Quart: author of Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child Neil Chastain: award-winning percussionist and teaching artist Jason Bitner: creator and editor of Found Magazine Session topics include: How to Write A Differentiated Lesson Plan Using Popular Culture; Exploring Media Literacy Through Online Gaming for Girls; An Interdisciplinary Approach to Visual Literacy in the Language Classroom; Using Super-size ME! and Inquiry-based Teaching to Promote Reading and Writing; Blah, Blah, Blog: Virtual Dialogues in the Classroom; Cyber Bullying, Fact vs. Fiction; and Using Hip Hop Culture to Develop a Positive School Climate. The conference will take place at Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street at Broadway, New York City on Saturday, March 24, 8:15 am-7 pm and Sunday, March 25, 8:15 am-4 pm. A limited number of spaces to attend the conference remain. To register, visit www.tc.edu/ceoi/teachthinkplay or call 1.800.209.1245. Teach, Think, Play: Popular Culture in the Classroom is presented by The Center for Educational Outreach and Innovation at Teachers College. The event is co-sponsored by Mindblue.com, Progressive Arts Alliance, TC Students for a Cultural Studies Initiative, and FERA (Film Education Research Academy). Contact: email: toolsofwar@gmail.com web: http://www.myspace.com/ToolsofWar

From Ray

Here is Ray's post (he asked me to publish it since he was having trouble getting on).

As the story progresses, the war escalates. And as the war escalates, Marji is getting older, maturing, and growing up. The author is obviously creating a link between her and the war. But there are some clear divides between her life and the actual bloodshed that claimed many loves. First, Marji and her family's experience of the war is largely 3rd person, via the radio, TV, and friends. It's almost as if they're in an isolated safe haven, free to have parties and drink wine, as long as these forbidden activities are done on the downlow. Secondly, the people dying in the war are constantly mentioned as poor, rural males, brainwashed, indoctrinated, and sent to get killed on the front lines. Marji is as far from this class of people as one can get in Iran. Her biggest hardships were being forced to wear a veil and not being able to purchase punk rock tapes. The people she knows that died, including her uncle and her neighbor she admittedly wasn't that close to, are introduced in the story right before being killed, arguably for the sole purpose of being killed in order to create a link between the author and war casualties. In my opinion, Persepolis is more about a young girl who wants to be involved in the tumultuous happenings around her, but is kept extremely safe by her caring, careful parents, limiting her war experience to the BBC.

Question: Given the fact that the US is at war in 2 Muslim countries and on the brink of war with Iran, how do you think a book like this affects Americans' views on the Middle East, in particular Iran? And how does this contrast with what you think Satrapi's intentions were?

Post 1 Persepolis

A critic in The New York Times calls Persepolis: “the latest and one of the most delectable examples of a booming postmodern genre: autobiography by comic book.” Why do you think this genre is so popular? Why did Satrapi chose this format in which to tell her story? What does the visual aspect add that a conventional memoir lacks?

Describe Satrapi’s drawings. How do the drawings add to the narrative of the story?How does Persepolis compare to other comic books you've seen (if you've seen any)?

Would you call this a comic book, or does it transcend this and other categories? Where would you place this book in a bookstore? With memoirs, comic books, current events?


(questions courtesy Western Washington University).

End of The Book

After finishing the book, i didn't think it was repetitive as everyone has been saying. This might be to the fact that i didnt read it all in large sittings, but a little at a time. If anything it helped me as a recap of whats been going on. I can easily see why she would want to repeat alot of things because as shes writing the story it seems like she is fighting with herself about how she feels. The end i think is actually very good. Some of the parts of the book that stood out to me were the beginning and the middle. Right off the bat she started with that powerful line about how she found out her brother had aids, and it jumps you right into the story. Then after the middle point in the book just when you think your really getting to know her brother and hes getting better, all of a sudden the second part of the book starts up and you find out hes dead. She ties up alot of loose ends and the story ends up where you feel like you understand pretty much whats going on. Overall it wasnt as bad of a book that i though it was going to be, it was an easy read and it gave me alot of insight to how hard things in other cultures can be.

Overall reaction to My Brother.

I have not changed my mind, the mind that had thought that the book repeats repeats itself. The book still says things over and over. For effect. For drama. For confusion. For clarification. I realized that beyond this complaint, maybe one thing did change. I felt pity for the brother after reading a passage from the book. "In his life, there had been no flowering, his life was the opposite of that, a flowering, his life was like the bud that sets but, instead of opening into a flower, turns brown and falls off at your feet" (162-163). Pity (not empathy), not because he was stricken with a disease that had left him dying and then dead, but because he had a secret lifestyle that he could not disclose because of his society and his culture. I did not care for him, his womanizing without protection, his thievery, but looking at him from the viewpoint that he is a child who is two years old with the world open to him, and a sister who reads books instead of attending to the hard crap in his pants, I envisioned someone who never knew who he really was or could not express himself fully, stifled, someone who never really loved anyone or was loved by anyone except maybe his mother. This is not really Devon's story, even in the end, because it is still his sister's and yet it is not even hers. At first I thought writing this story was her self-serving way of creating ablution, some kind of resolution to the confusion she feels about her family. Then I realized at the end of the book that she wrote for William Shawn, her perfect reader, and that maybe he was really her brother in the end (196-198). In that way, I thought it clever that the title was just My Brother.

The end

So the end of My Brother was better than I expected. I think that Jamaica learned that she did love her brother and that even thought it wasnt the same love that she had for her family members in America, it was still love. I think she has a lot of trouble expressing her emotions throughout the whole book, but in the end it seems like she sorted through all of it. Its like she had a revelation. I thought the ending was much better than the begining, I thought that the way she was talking about the color blue and how everything came back to that color and revolved aroung it was pretty great. Also when she reffered back to that little boys funeral and how she compared it to her brothers was actually sort of sad. I thought the way that Jamaica introduced her brother being a homosexual and thats how he got aids was pretty interesting. She questions his sexuality in the begining a lot and wonders if he has ever had sex with men, so we the readers arent sure if he is or isnt, and then she confirms it. I thought that she did a good job with that as a writer.