Freshman (First Year) Classes:
Science (Ryan Patin, Instructor)
Stay tuned!
Composition 1 (Ryan Abshire, Instructor)
This week’s topic was “The Forms and Functions of Fiction,” with focus on short and flash fiction. The goal through readings and exercises was for students to produce a functional, unique short story of roughly three pages for Friday. We read four stories in class and discussed them in a workshop format.
Monday: Some students shared their revised versions of the group-written stories from Friday. We then read “The Pedestrian,” by Ray Bradbury and used it to discuss the six basic elements of fiction–character, setting, POV, theme, style, and plot.
Tuesday: Students received detailed assignment sheet with expectations for story due Friday. We discussed their homework reading, “The Beginning,” by Radha Zutshi Opubor. We discussed perspective in narration, levels of diction, and different ways to tell stories.
Wednesday: We workshopped the story “Charles,” by Shirley Jackson and explored Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg” concept, as well as Freitag’s pyramid, as an approach to adding depth to stories. The students broke into groups to pitch their story ideas to each other and come up with their titles and a one or two sentence plot summary. For homework, they were required to write at least 100 words of their stories and read “Mud,” by Geoffrey Forsythe.
Thursday: I asked for a volunteer to lead a brief discussion of the homework reading and the student (Eleanor) gave a brief synopsis then guided the students through some questions about symbolism, meaning, and whether the story was literal or metaphorical. She received a blue Brain Buck for her brief stint as instructor. Then, the students worked individually on their short stories while I met with them one-on-one at the back of the classroom to discuss their concerns and check progress.
Friday: Many students read part of all of their stories and we talked about expectations for assignments. I reinforced the importance of self-reliance and following instructions for classwork while being respectful and participating. The students wrote a brief response to three questions about the week’s work and what they were looking forward to for next week’s topic, poetry. We then talked a little bit about poetry and what to expect.
Humanities 1 (Chris Hebert, Instructor)
Week Two of Humanities I has our Gifties starting to explore Plato’s seminal work, “The Republic”. This week we covered the first two chapters—chapter one establishes Plato’s definition of “justice” and chapter two proposes the thought experiment of Gyges’ Ring. Plato defines “justice” as everyone fulfills their given role, very much in the same way a machine has gears and spokes. If a gear or spoke is messed up, the machine doesn’t work. Gifties applied the same logic to the government, the world, society, and even to family structures. The Ring of Gyges asks the simple question of if you had unchecked power, what would you do with it? We looked at how this idea influenced pop culture as well, with Aladdin and his three wishes (a poster for the most recent movie shows the lamp and the ominous warning of “Choose wisely”), “The Lord of the Rings” and the One Ring, among other things.
Monday-Tuesday: Chapter One and discussion
Wednesday-Thursday: Chapter Two and discussion
Friday: Juneteenth Presentation
Sophomore Classes:
Composition 2 (Ryan Abshire, Instructor)
This week’s topic was “Approaches to Fiction.” We explored different genres and used open discussion to assess what students knew about stories, as well as their personal preferences and goals for writing a story. Through assigned readings and class time writing, the students were introduced to both traditional and unusual stories to encourage creativity.
Monday: Some students shared their revised versions of the group-written stories from Friday. We then read “The Red Fox Fur Coat,” Teolinda Gersao and talked about different genres of fiction and the students’ experience/preferences in fiction.
Tuesday: Students received detailed assignment sheet with expectations for story due Friday. We discussed their homework reading, “Harrison Bergeron,” by Kurt Vonnegut. We discussed perspective in narration and how a simple plot could be expanded to include more than the surface subject.
Wednesday: We watched a video of Kurt Vonnegut presenting “The Shape of Stories” as a jumping off point to examine how writers can take classic, familiar tropes and archetypes and make them unique. We had a lengthy group discussion about their homework reading, “Axolotl,” by Julio Cortazar, and compared it to an earlier reading, “The Panther,” by Rainer Maria Rilke. Students presented their ideas for their stories and the few who were still stuck brainstormed together and I spoke to them individually to get the wheels turning while the others worked on their writing.
Thursday: We briefly discussed the homework reading, “The Ugliest Babies in the World,” by Vanessa Chan, then spent the rest of class working on their short stories at their workstations. Together, they helped each other with formatting and computer issues and most students had a large section of their stories completed.
Friday: Group assembly/presentation for Juneteenth, stories collected.
Humanities 2 (Chris Hebert, Instructor)
Week Two for the Gifties is the reading and discussion of the famous play “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller. While usually not typically taught as a work of dystopian fiction, there are many traits shared with that genre of fiction. We had a crash course into the history of the Protestant Reformation and how that gave birth to the Puritan movement. We discussed their desire to come to the new world to establish a new holy land. We also discussed why the group no longer exists but a lot of their beliefs still persist. Students discussed the themes of “the other” and “assimilation”. We read the first three acts, with the fourth and final one for Week Three.
We read and had discussions each day of the week.
Senior and Grad (Third & Fourth Year) Classes:
English (Jack Vanchiere, Instructor)
This week the students and I began investigating varieties of forms through a short creative challenge. Students developed poetry prompts, inventing a form, and using them like spells in a battle, cast them at their opponents. We went through a few rounds, sharing our prompts with eachother. By the end of it all, we decided we weren’t the biggest fans of “competitive” poetry, rather, we enjoyed thinking of prompts for each other that highlighted our strengths, and challenged us to new and inventive ways of thinking.
Monday-Tuesday, prompt and guideline development. Wednesday-Friday, in class competition.
History (Carson Savoie, Instructor)
For our second week of classes, we built off of our previous discussion regarding Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., by going beyond the scope of the individual. Instead, our focus for this week’s seminars identified an analytical theme developed by movement veterans/scholars known as the “Master Narrative of the Civil Rights Movement.” The language of the “Master Narrative” hails from Julian Bond, former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Bond describes the Master Narrative as the typical “Rosa sat, Martin dreamed,” narrative of the socio-political organizing in the fifties and sixties. By identifying the “Master Narrative,” our class prioritized analytical themes over solely dates and names as the building blocks of history.
In doing so, our class engaged in discussion regarding power, silences, and the production of history. Some key questions we asked and built answers for are:
1.) How is objectivity, in the context of historical memory, created through a process of exclusion?
2.) What are the two different meanings of the word “history?:
3.) What are the two sites in which our understanding of the past is produced? And how do silences enter the stories we tell ourselves about the past?
4.) What does the phrase “Every way of seeing, is a way of not seeing” mean? And how does that concept apply to historical language?
Using our discussion surrounding these questions, our class prepared an oral presentation in honor of Juneteenth. We then presented our analyses to the remainder of the GPGC students in a special forum.
Monday, June 15th
Identifying the Master Narrative
Reading: Payne, Charles, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Preface.
Audio: Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Beyond the “Master Narrative” with Nishani Frazier & Adam Sanchez from Teaching Hard History Podcast, episode 2, season 3.
Tuesday, June 16th
Unlearning the Language of Desegregation & Civil Rights
Reading: Charles Payne, “Looking Back: Historical Language and Historical Memory,” from Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968 (2006)
Wednesday, June 17th
Civil Rights? Or Black Freedom?
Reading: Jeffries, Hasan, “Black Freedom Movement” from Keywords in African American Studies, NYU Press, 2018.
Thursday, June 18th
The Rough Draft of History
Reading: Payne, Charles, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Chapter Fourteen.
Friday, June 19th (Juneteenth)
Oral Presentations
International Relations (Joshua Brown, Instructor)
We spent most of the second week going over the first few chapters of Zombies. Drezner uses these chapters to set up the rest of his analysis and does so in a tongue in cheek simulation of a more serious academic work – that is, there is a literature review (of academic and popular culture work about zombies) and a discussion of the debates involved (with a few tables and charts). This was an opportunity to discuss what’s expected in academic writing (the literature review) as well as a brief refresher on hypotheses and independent and dependent variables.
Musically Gifted (MG):
(Brandon LaFleur, Instructor)
This week we discussed an article describing how popular music is getting progressively worse. The authors are data scientists rather than trained musicologists and the music sources that are cited, are only applied superficially. The students were rightly critical of the content of the article and voiced dissent about what metrics can measure if music is “good”. Later in the week we continued to develop our reading skills and began to study distances between pitches (intervals) in earnest. Students began to work with the specific intervals, a compound system of naming that pertains both to the distance in pitch and the distance on the staff. We also introduced the imitative counterpoint and surrounding historical context of the early Renaissance period. This built a discussion on the 3 primary textures used in music: Monophony, Homophony, and Polyphony.
M: Article Review and Discussion.
T: From Generic to Specific Intervals (Key Signature Practice).
W: Introduction of textures and Renaissance aesthetics.
TH: Specific interval practice and application.
F: Specific interval practice and key signature review.