Friday 25 July 2008

Adventures in Teaching

Today was the last day of my class, and I'm not gonna lie - I'm going to really, really miss a bunch of my kids. To celebrate, we had a dessert potluck with a ridiculous amount of strawberries, raspberries, Ben's Cookies, and boxes of biscuits, screened two episodes of the Office, did a quick recap of the course and passed back the exams, and then went on a fieldtrip to Modern Art Oxford, which had a surprisingly good exhibit on Gary Hume's door paintings. I'm a sucker for large, rectangular, largely monochromatic canvases, so I understand why other people hated it. It was a good way to wrap it up, though, because I think it drove home the arbitrariness of calling Britney Spears low culture and a tipped-over chair high culture. (On the first day of the course, I suggested that maybe we shouldn't classify individual people as high or low, but that seemed to fall on deaf ears.) They're sharp, they got it.

I was also touched that someone wrote "Knowledge is Power" on my board, added "Girl Power," and then scribbled "+ Ryan" underneath. Basically, at the end of a month together, they win because they all kicked ass on the final and did well in the course, and I win because I became an honorary seventeen year old girl.

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