More hours!

There aren’t enough hours in the day. Or I move too freaking slowly. And I’m tired from last week. All the same, I’m also prepped for tomorrow’s class. Oh, and I started a new block today. Doing a 20th century Brit Lit class with a focus on Postcolonialism. We’re reading from an anthology and Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and The Colonized, plus watching some films, including Rabbit Proof Fence, Junoon, District 9 (and yes, I know, it’s an alien movie, but it really recreates and mirrors the issues of colonization, even though it isn’t specifically about colonization). And then I’m thinking about Lagaan, but the trouble is that it’s very long. I could switch it out for two of the others, but I just am not sure. Luckily I don’t have to make my mind up today. I often use The Wind That Shakes The Barley and Passage to India, but I want something different and Junoon, while it isn’t set in the 20th century, deals with the Sepoy Rebellion and establishes the atmosphere and I haven’t used it before. On the other hand, Lagaan might be better. Sigh. This is hard.

I’m also trying to decide how much time I want to invest into Heart of Darkness, or if I want to go another route with the stories and cover more ground. I’m not sure how good their reading skills are and whether we can read HoD in the time that I want to allow. That’s a choice I really need to make very soon. I don’t like planning way ahead for this class because I want to find out how students will deal with the reading first and if I have to adjust the schedule. So I usually plan a week at a time. But this time I’m only doing a few days and waiting to see how well they do with the Memmi book, because I may have to take more time with it than I’ve planned. I don’t like ramming ahead and having them feel lost. Better to lay a really good foundation and get them grounded in the terminology and then get going from there. So I wait to see how they will do with tonight’s reading and writing assignments.

The dogs are really enjoying the fact that I’m reading stuff for class, because they get to be on my lap and they make excellent lap desks, not to mention leg warmers.

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