For everyone who's trying to get together syllabi and course descriptions for E314 courses for the fall, please remember that eFiles is full of materials for you.

http://efiles.cwrl.utexas.edu/e314

The 314 section gives a short introduction to the goals and purposes of each course, offers a few examples of course descriptions and syllabi for each variant, and also includes assignments.

If you are teaching E314 next year, remember to mine these resources!

If you have taught E314 in the past or are teaching it currently, this is a great time to submit resources to eFiles.

There's a good NYT editorial about the JFK-Obama comparison that would be interesting to discuss with students because it specifically tries to address (among other things) the role of poetry in politics. In other words, it touches on the ways candidates must divine and speak to people's unspoken, not-yet-spoken, affective, spiritual wants and wishes.

The article states:

There's been lots of talk about "Free Rice" lately on my poetry listservs. Have you all been doing this?

You build your vocab by playing their vocab game; they donate the money from the on-screen advertisements to the United Nations World Food Program: www.freerice.com

If anyone is talking about gender in classes, you should at least read this recent editorial from the Daily Texan. It's probably too illogical to spend much time on in class, but it would make a good example of poor reasoning.....

The founder of PostSecret is coming to campus November 1. In my RHE 309K, we talked about PostSecret quite a lot. As a community art project, it interestingly updates 60s and 70s mail art. I'm also interested in how it uses a blog as a public art space, and how it constructs its public.

Leave it to public art of the semi-conceptual sort to create stunning cultural texts. Canadian artist Thom Sokolowski has installed 100 nineteenth century tents on New York's Roosevelt Island to commemorate the many populations who were institutionalized there in the 19th century--orphans, smallpox victims, people with mental illness.

I wondering if people have good methods for writing letters for recommendation for students from two, three, four semesters back. I have a good method for composing these letters, involving a few questions the student answers, upon which I can build a solid, detailed letter in a very few minutes. But this method is less effective when the student is semesters away from my class (and my memory).

What I really could use is copies of old, graded papers, a chance to revisit their work and my comments on it.

Yesterday's campus events surrounding the unveiling of the Cesar Chavez statue were very exciting. The red United Farm Workers flag flew on the Main Mall while senators, state representatives, the US Undersecretary of Education honored Chavez's legacy and called for a continued struggled toward racial equality, workers' rights, and social justice. Like the Martin Luther King, Jr. statue on the East Mall, the Chavez statue and the Barbara Jordan statue (set for unveiling in Spring 2009) were the result of student-initiated campaigns and were financed by student fees.

write poems!!

So, on a whim (sort of), I set up a forum for original poems. That is, poems written by students in my E314 Reading Poetry class. I sensed I had a number of writers, but was a little hesitant to ask them to actually lay it out.

I love Banned Books Week. I love reading the reports each year. There are always the old standards (Judy Blume, Alice Walker), and the new-old standards (the Harry Potter books), and then there are always some surprises.