Three Beautiful Things 06/10/08: Exam Time, Hero's Journey, Mining Coal

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.

Three Beautiful Things 05/20/08: Weeping Camel, Prying?, Sky of Stone

1. I'll find out when we meet again on Thursday what my students thought of it: I showed the documentary film "The Story of the Weeping Camel", a magnificent Mongolian story about a nomadic family on the Gobi Desert and their efforts to reunite a mother camel and her colt whom she has rejected. It's a luxuriously slow movie, giving us a full experience with the rhythms of nomadic life and with the strength patience requires.

2. Maybe I pry too much. I become deeply interested in my students, especially, I think, my composition students because their writing is so much more personal. Last night I learned more about one student's unsettling ultrasound results of her current pregnancy, about another student's pastor father, why another student moved to Oregon a few years after his father died, how another student's mother has been in ICU and in and out of hospital care since suffering gall bladder trouble, and there's more. I hope if my interest and care passes the boundaries of privacy, my students will let me know.

3. This evening, my WR 122 class began our discussion of Sky of Stone, and I was very pleased with how my students recognized the way Coalwood, West Virginia, supposedly a idyllic company town, was, in reality, a town curbing freedom, one where not only the mine, but the citizens, were owned by the mining company.