"Saladin was one of the greatest Saltines in the history of the Islamic world."
Another student answered the question about Leif Ericson by pointing out how he discovered 'New Finland.' For heaven's sakes, if high school aren't teaching kids how to spell Newfoundland, what are they teaching these days?!!
Ah, well. Perhaps they'll do better taking the class the second time around. But this week hasn't been only about painfully bad writing and historical inaccuracies. This morning I went down to Kaneohe with Kaddi, and when I returned to my office in the afternoon I found an envelope on my desk. Inside was a card from some students and this picture:
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This the crew from my history 485 Class: Authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia. It covers approaches to the end of colonialism, patron-client relationships, the 'failure' of democracy, and the rise of military dictatorships. We discussed all the great dictators: Ferdinand Marcos, Pol Pot, Ne Win, Suharto, Sukarno, and Sarit.
The class got off to a rough start as the laxadaisical BYUH approach clashed with my Wisconsin graduate school mentality. I've since learned that the students were really afraid of me for the first month (at least), but gradually they came to learn that I was not out to destroy them and began to appreciate the lessons of dictatorship, genocide, and revolution in SEA.
I now have that picture framed an sitting in my office. It has clever captions for each of the students reflecting their behavior and attitudes in class. I felt the drawing was amazingly real, especially the way it captured me as being both scholarly AND buff.
I'm still waiting for my card from the 201 students. I guess they must have mailed it.
4 comments:
Shane,
Interesting blog. Sounds like an interesting class on Authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia. Sounds like a Poli Sci class - you really are a Poli Sci wannabe at heart, just admit it.
I am teaching a class this Spring on the Comparative Politics of Islamic Societies, of which topic I am a renown expert :) I designed it to have about 1/3 SEAsia content. That's the best I could get.
I am showing them a documentary first week in class and it has Saladin in it. Perhaps you should consider updating your teaching style to multi-media. These are kids of the 21st century afterall. They blog, watch stuff on youtube, etc. I think you might get better papers and stuff if you look inwards first.
from
You know who writes this comment
Yes, I know you as J-Sel...my arch-nemesis.
The class really was a closet poli-sci event. We read Thank Chaloemtiarana and Herbert Feith, among others.
I only chose that topic because it was one of my prelim subjects. For whatever reason the students got into it.
Only Phidias himself could sculpt a better image on podium. Thankfully, we were spared the wet drapery...
Spenny
Didn't you get a similar picture when you left Thailand (for the first time)? I was looking for the name tag on your, as you say, buff chest.
I'm jealous, English profs are even more poli-sci wannabes than history profs, yet our subject matter is even farther from it. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as literature, hazaa!
PS. How did you make it so the letters of my word verification were "kadphom"? A neat trick to be sure.
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