1. The final exam environment today in my World Lit class was cool to me. Ashleigh, with a Venti Starbuck's drink, and Kati sat on the floor, backs up against the wall, typing out their exams on their laptops. Teresa and Kelly needed a power source and sat at a table at the front of the room facing the rest of the class. Others had strong batteries. Many wrote with pens. Red Bull cans, coffee mugs, stacks of the course's novels and poetry, students freely leaving to stretch or go to the rest room, air thick with concentration.
2. Lina's research essay looks at the Chinese immigrant experience and the labor they performed on the transnational railroad in terms of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. It's an ingenious approach and is developing into a wonderful paper.
3. Fernando, a student from Costa Rica, came by my office this evening to talk about coal mining, inspired by our class having read Sky of Stone and viewed Harlan County, USA. He also watched Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days episode on mining coal in West Virginia. He's intrigued by the demands of the labor, the conditions it's practiced in, and its importance to the USA -- and how different it is from anything he has known in Costa Rica.
1 comment:
My mother was from Fisty, Kentucky which is in Knott county. Harlan is just a county or two away. My uncle worked in the mines and it was a "way of life" in that area.
I recently watched October Sky and was moved by how "desolate" working in the mines was for people who felt they had no other choice.
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