Several Random Things I Want to Share with My Classmates

Adolescent Thoughts on Grammar
On Spring Break, I read a great just-for-fun book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. I couldn't wait to share this great quote from the book on the teaching of grammar. After a teacher explains to her teenage students that the point of teaching grammar "is to make us speak and write well," the adolescent narrator says:

"I have never heard anything so grossly inept . . . to tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop" (157-158).

Anonymous Geo-shagging and the Future of Global Positioning
In class on Tuesday night, we talked about the next step in social networking. I mentioned that global positioning will be the next layer in how we use media to connect. About a year ago, I read a great article on this subject that I think you will enjoy. Here is the link:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-02/lp_guineapig?currentPage=all

An Update on the Rhetorical Family Tree
I am part of the group researching the scholarly influences of Dr. Souder. While the class is very aware of the significantly influential Dr. Hugh Burns, my task is to research another amazing influence on Dr. Souder--Dr. AnaLouise Keating. Dr. Keating is in the Women's Studies Department of TWU, where Dr. Souder is working on her second (!) doctorate in Women's Studies. Dr. Keating also happens to be the literary executor for the revolutionary writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who died in 2004. These two women co-wrote This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation.

Keating's academic influences seem to come from outside of the academy. She explains that Anzaldúa was by far her greatest scholarly influence, yet she met her a year after receiving her doctorate. She did, however, tell me that her dissertation advisor, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was Dr. Chadwick Hansen. Hansen, although an English professor for 20 years at UIC, is also a jazz historian. He co-authored several books on the subject, including: Hot Man, the Life of Art Hodes.

Hansen is also the author of Witchcraft at Salem. Written in 1969, Hansen's book undermines much scholarship on this topic by noting that there was actually witchcraft being practiced in Salem. Wow! Let me restate this, Hansen writes that there were actually practicing witches in Salem, plus he also talks about Freud-like female hysteria in both accusers and the accused. (There are twelve fairly recent reviews of this book on Amazon, and the book is still in print.)

Hansen, who attended Yale under the V12 program for veterans, certainly seems like an interesting connection to Dr. Keating, who is so well-regarded for her feminist writings.