syllabus stuff

"Subject matter in this course may be of a graphic or psychologically disturbing nature, and students who will have a problem with this, or who enjoy a full night’s sleep, may want to seek a different class."

how many teachers get to put that line in their syllabus? at least one. since i have something akin to full and total rights and power when deciding what to teach my kids, i get to teach interview with the vampire and grendel too. and "call of cthulhu." you know what? "lawnmower man" made it onto my syllabus.

perhaps there is a segment of my mind which is sick and twisted, and this is why nearly every piece on my syllabus is dark, morbid, gory, horrific, or a wee bit gross. but these are the types of stories that just don't get enough credit, and i'm going to fix that 30 students at a time. at the very least, i'm going to keep 30 kids awake for a whole semester.

i can already see the icebreaker for the first day: on the 3x5 card given to you, write your name, preferred email, class (sophomore, super-duper-senior, whatever), one interesting thing about you, and the one thing you are absolutely terrified of that you'd rather no one ever know about. i'll fill one out too. we'll share. it will bind us together as a class. and set the tone for the semester, which deals with generally horrific writings.

i can see myself reading all these things over the summer, ranking them in terms of disturbing qualities so i can warn my students. "okay, guys. this next story you want to go ahead and read between breakfast and lunch tomorrow. don't wait until 10 pm tomorrow night and read it at the last minute before class thursday morning. you won't sleep well." or "okay, this one's got bugs. lots of bugs. and a few rats. that squicks you, you want to read in broad daylight. sleep with a can of raid on your nightstand. you'll be fine. see you next week."

class discussion could regularly open with a list of what we found creepy about the story. it would be like freaked-out-readers-anonymous. hi, my name is rehkmira, and the elder gods give me the heebie-jeebies. oh, this will be marvelous.

and i do look the part of a horror teacher, right? i'm short, female, young, kind of cute-looking in that she-couldn't-be-up-to-anything kind of way. and yet... when given free rein to make my first working syllabus, what do i put on there? call of frikkin cthulhu. yeah. but it's okay. we'll still be talking about narrative arcs, character development, point of view, symbolism, theme, and all that. just, we won't be reading "a white heron" or "the necklace" or those other over-done classics.

and this syllabus, while an assignment for a class at the moment, is going to end up (with tweaking) being an actual syllabus to be taught to actual students in an actual course... this fall! fall is simply the best time to teach this course. halloween falls on a wednesday, so i can have poe week in october. how cool is that?

well, got to go. that's just the alive and well and updated kind of post. and it's on my list of stuff to be done... tomorrow.

love and peace!