Tag: nonfiction

Reality Pedagogy for the Modern Teacher

 

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education by Christopher Emdin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is so helpful, and I’d recommend it to anyone about to start teaching. I was a TA who got thrown into the deep end of teaching last fall, and had I read this book sooner, reality pedagogy would’ve made my class so much better. Some helpful concepts I would’ve loved to incorporate into my classes: cogens, coteaching (especially coteaching!), cosmo duos, a cosmopolitan attitude in the classroom. I loved the chapter towards the end on the importance of dressing yourself well and having an aesthetically pleasing classroom, because that reinforces what I already believed but had never applied to pedagogy. Also, yes, of course, your clothing matters.

Although this book is primarily aimed at white teachers who teach urban youth/neoindigenous kids, the pedagogy it presents could be useful for any teacher teaching to a classroom of students whose background differs from their own. Coteaching, especially, can be adapted for any situation because it allows the students to lead by example and show the teacher how they learn best.

I would love to read further on the subject of teaching kids to codeswitch because although there are great examples to show your students in the “Codeswitching” chapter, I still have questions about how a teacher would present this to their students.

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Critical Essays from Pop Culture…

Buffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TelevisionBuffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Television by Lynne Y. Edwards
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This collection of essays was well-worth the read! Obviously, I’m a literary nerd, so my favorite points of entry revolved around literary points of entry — oh my god, the Yeats essay was phenomenal. But this opened my eyes to so many different readings of BtVS, and I love that the editors weren’t afraid to include contradictory essays within this collection, sometimes even right next to each other. Overall, I think this collection is at its best when delving into character analyses, but all parts of it were interesting.

As someone who is interested in analyzing television and movies in this way, I feel like I’ve learned so much just by engaging with this text.

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Common Humanity

Mike Sager’s resume reads less like a timeline and more like a greatest hits reel, with all his stories as steeped in history as they are. Having worked early in his career at the Washington Post under Bob Woodward, he went on to work at magazines such as Rolling Stone, GQ, and Esquire, where he is currently a Writer-at-Large. His stories range from subjects as varied as celebrities to murderers, Paris Hilton to Warren Durso, whose greatest claim to fame is his apparent ugliness. Yet whether he is writing about famous porn star John Holmes or disgraced former journalist Janet Cooke, it is his empathy that stands out for the reader. Through Sager’s work, dignity is returned to his subjects, their lives and stories reclaimed from a public eye that perhaps sees public figures as entertainment first and human beings second. During a whirlwind two days in Santa Fe, Sager granted interviews, readings, and visited SFUAD classes as the Creative Writing and Literature department’s Fall 2016 visiting writer.

Read the full article at Jackalope Magazine.