And now, a short post about course planning

One of my major activities for the week was nailing down the details for my big lecture undergrad course in the winter. It’s a complete reworking of the department’s largest course (200 students), which has moved from a “telegraph to the internet” sort of history of communication course to “introduction to communication studies.” I always struggle with how to balance introducing students to some canonic names and approaches vs. contemporary material, as well as what the minors might need to know (we only have a minor, no major) vs. the people for whom this will be their only course in the field, ever. I’ve made my peace with that, so it’s on to how to actually set up the class.

Every time I set up a class, I find it to be a huge hassle to move around assignments and dates on my word processor as I experiment with different sequences and so on. So this time, I did something different. I laid out post-its on the table with dates for each class meeting. I then wrote in the permanent stuff like “midterm” and “no class, professor out of town.” I then made post-its for all my topics/reading sets. I was able to move stuff about at will and play with different arrangements of assignments. It was all immediately clear to me how things fit together. And then I brought Carrie over, and talked with her about the course. When she suggested a major reorientation of the material, it took just a few seconds to move the unit at the end up to the beginning and vice-versa.

I’m going to plan all my courses that way in the future.

Now if I can just settle on an assignment structure, I’ll be golden.

What’s Old is Even Older

Attention cultural studies geeks. I am always fascinated by the degree to which things repeat themselves in academic culture. The 70s mass culture debates restaged those of the 40s and 50s, and on and on.

This morning I went looking for an electronic copy of Georg Simmel’s essay on fashion, and I stumbled upon this table of contents. You may access to JSTOR, which I think you can only get if you’re logged into a university account (sorry, other readers, if this is the case) but it’s quite an interesting list of topics. Here we have sociologists writing about popular music, fashion, fads, bars, leisure, grooming and audience participation. The terminology, methodology and political stance is definitely 50s, not 00s, but I’m always struck with a sense of the uncanny when I see how familiar some of the discussions are in this older body of work.

A Few Other Things I Forgot to Blog About

1. I participated in “No Music Day” on the 21st of November. I didn’t listen to music all day and tried to reflect on the role of music in my life. Unfortunately, the evening before I had watched Monday Night Football. Viagra ads are common during football games, Viagra’s current ad features a song called “Good Morning” which sounds like a classic show tune. Unfortunately, a google search for “viagra” and “good morning song” yields no helpful information, as you might imagine. So I had this insipid tune playing over and over in my head all through No Music Day. I also had no profound insights into the nature of music, the role music in my life or anything else. But “Good Morning” played on and on and on in my head and I could not put anything else on to stop it.

I will not observe No Music Day next year.

2. It’s hard to find hats in size 2XL. I have taken to patronizing Henri-Henri, an old-fashioned men’s hats store which charges not-so-old fashioned prices. But their hats are good. I learned in looking up their phone number that the store is the point of origin for “hat trick” in hockey. Apparently, the owner offered any hockey player who scored 3 goals in a game at the Montreal Forum a free hat.

3. It’s been really nice to find a little time to write (here and in my book) over the last week.