Opressive words in Literature

Over the past few weeks my ENG21o class as been discussing the book There Eyes Are Watching God.  During class a student was reading a passage with the "N" word in it.  As she read she changed the "N" word to black.  This ended up spuring a huge controversy in our class.  Our teacher believed that as we are in a college setting we should feel comfortable reading the word and by not reading the word just gives it more power.

In my opinion I agree with this logic, however I don't think that people should feel forced to read the word if it makes them uncomfortable.

Faciliatated Communication

Last week we watched a short film about a woman who has grown up with Autism.  During this movie an important moment in her life was when she learned to use facilitated communication.  The interesting thing is is the fact that facilitated communication has been proved to not work.  Here is a link to video about facilitated communication...I would really recommend watching this because it just shows how fast things change in the world of Special Education.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS305US305&sourceid=chrome&q=facilitated%20communication&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wv#

Al Capone!

While reading this book I felt it was such a creative story and a novel that many students would find interesting.  However I really wish that the story would focus on more on Natalie and less on Moose.  I feel then people with special needs could relate more to the novel, rather than having to read a novel about how people in their family are struggling dealing with their disablity.  This is my overall feel about the novel, that its more about how a family has to struggle with someone with special needs and if I were a person with special needs and read this book, it would make me feel badly, like I was a burrden to my family.

Lambda Literary Foundation

This award is given out to authors of books for the the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trangender community.  Here is a link to the website for more information!

http://www.lambdaliterary.org/

Blogging

So far, I feel like blogging is okay.  However its really frustrating for me because I have so many blogs in my other classes as well, it gets old after awhile.  It also is annoying because all my blogs are due on different dates at different times, it can get difficult to keep track of everything.  Personally, blogging about readings and such does not help me, I would benefit much more from a class disucssion.  However, I enjoy blogging if it is less formal like this blog is.  I like being able to contribute my thoughts and feelings.  This way it does not feel forced.

Over Critisizing Literature

We just got done talking in our questioning the text discussion groups and I had to make a post about what we talked about.  Deb brought up a really great point that is there possbility that we are being too critical of the literature we read and use in our classrooms.  Can literature just be used for enjoyment and not have to be realistic and 100 percent politically correct?  I personally feel that it does not.  My heart was broken in TE348 when my teacher talked about the book Little House on The Prarie being bad and offensive due to negative remarks about Native Americans.  It is of my opinion that that as a teacher we can still enjoy this book within our classroom and use the negative aspects as lessons to our students.

Habibi

This book brought up so many interesting points that I had really had not thought about before.  All I can remember as a kid is getting new students in my class and sometimes they were from a different country.  I try to put myself in Habibi's place and think about how I might have felt if my parents had decided to move our family to the middle east as I was going in to highschool.  To me, I would be very angry and confused.  However, I did not see this from Habibi, I saw the confussion, but she never seemed incredibly angry with her parents.  Perhaps this is a cultural thing as well since her father was from the middle east, Habibi did not want to upset him or hurt his feelings since he was so excited to move.  These are my thoughts so far!