Happy New Year!
I have been trying to finalize the readings for the Spring 2010 class I am teaching. Since, we are all supposed to teach In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, I am also using his recent New York Times article. It complements the book nicely, it's an essay rather than a book. And in my own experience, freshman students who mostly take this class, find it easier to process single essays than full-length books. Most of my students refer to any full-length book as a "novel", and most of the times I have to devote a class-period to explain to them the difference between "fiction" and "non-fiction." I know I am old and cranky, and like all old people like to fall back upon nostalgia, but still, when I was eighteen, I did know the difference between a novel and a full-length non-fiction book! But my students don't, and in order to be realistic, I prefer to teach more articles in class, rather than full-length books, precisely because I want them to process the stuff I am teaching, and use them for their own essays, and not just merely gloss over them.
I will keep the Susan Reizman blog post I had used for my Fall class and will add Amanda Marcotte's essay from Pandagon.net to the list, because I think, it does provide an interesting feminist critique of Pollan's view, but from a slightly different perspective from that of Susan Reizman. And this will help me to demonstrate to my students that a controversy need not always have just two sides. In fact, it can have many!
Now, that I have figured this out, I need to go back and read the essay I wrote on Belinda's Petition, and figure out where it needs extension/re-vision and re-writing.
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