why Miss 17; thoughts of one of your classmates

Hey all:

After our conversation about language and gender, this afternoon when responding to some of your blogs, I suddenly realized that my "name" in this blog is "searching for miss 17." Since this might seem a little strange and disturbing to some of you (and rightfully so), please let me explain. Miss 17 is a prolific graffiti writer and this summer I wrote two articles that dealt with her and the gentrification of Brooklyn. One of the articles is for a web based journal and I uploaded many photos that I took of her work on another blog. This was my first blog and so when I organized our class blog, it automatically used my name of my first blog "searching for miss 17").

So if you had any concerns about me because of my name, I hope they have been calmed.

Speaking of misunderstandings, I want to bring your attention to one of your classmates journal posts. In it, Kindergarten Cop questions my reasoning to include images of the world trade center attack in our class. K.C. considered it a cheap shot and I feel bad that she does. I do not feel bad about showing the images (I would do that again) but that I didn't ground the images in more discussion. But then again, maybe I wouldn't because I didn't want to ground our conversation down to our own personal feelings--I wanted us to each remember them and think about them, but I wanted us to use that angst and emotion in a disucssion of THE MERCY SEAT. I responded to the post (please read my comments to the post on K.C.'s site) and I tried to offer some of my pedagogical reasoning for doing what I did.

I spend a lot of time thinking through how to run and organize my classes and I attempt to both allow you to have your own voice in class but also to guide discussions into areas that I feel are important. That's why I included those horrific and disturbing scenes of the wtc attack. But if you do have issues with the class or with my methods, please do speak up about them in class or on these posts. I should be able to give you a rationale to why I do/did some things. Again, you might disagree with them but you should know why I do them--and quite posisbly you could change my mind or help me think through my own teaching methods in a practical manner. So thanks to K.C. for bringing up the issue.

Onward!