Pop Culture Pedagogy

The Krabappel – or – What Is “AP Literature and Composition” – A Socratic Dialogue in Two Parts - Part 1 – What is Literature? Edna Krabappel: Okay class, please turn to page 357 of Tedious Times, where we left off yesterday, analyzing Dryprose’s prophetic critique of education under industrial society. As I was explaining before, for those who were listening, we noticed the savage irony of a teacher who could not even conceive … Continue reading The Krabappel – or – What Is “AP Literature and Composition” – A Socratic Dialogue in Two Parts →
Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit Part 4 – Assessment - This was tricky for me because they were being asked both to create the texts they would eventually analyze, and then in later analyze them. Here’s what I did: As I’ve posted about previously, the students each participated in 5 85-minute block days where they did 3 things: Let me say more about 3, because … Continue reading Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit Part 4 – Assessment →
Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit – Part 3 – Day to Day Lessons - The Adventure – ~3 weeks of class time (5 85-minute blocks) This post and the next will be more nuts and bolts – I’ve previously written about the why, now I’ll share about the how. This one will be about the bulk of the unit, where kids plays D&D and read Beowulf (some of them … Continue reading Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit – Part 3 – Day to Day Lessons →
Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit – Part 2 – How I Set Up the Unit - How I Tried to Make This Work in the Classroom [I will write more later about how the individual class days went as things got moving, and also how I tied this more directly into AP Lit in terms of assessments.] Dungeons and Dragons is notorious for its baroque rules structure. If the first thing … Continue reading Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit – Part 2 – How I Set Up the Unit →
Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit – Addendum to Part 1 – White Supremacy – What Counts as “Literature” - “What do D&D, the Odyssey and Hip-Hop Have in Common?” This question may feel strange because your vision of D&D may conjure up some very specific images of a very specific type of white male. Wanting to press at this a little, when I first posed this question to my class, I then I asked … Continue reading Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit – Addendum to Part 1 – White Supremacy – What Counts as “Literature” →
Dungeons and Dragons in my AP Lit Classroom – Part 1 – Why Did I Want to Try This? - [I will write more later about what happened in the classroom, what lessons I learned for next time, what I ended up doing to grade them, and how I think this will help them with the rest of the AP Lit curriculum and test) Part 1 – Where Did I Get this Idea? – Or … Continue reading Dungeons and Dragons in my AP Lit Classroom – Part 1 – Why Did I Want to Try This? →
Twice Inna Lifetime (Track 13) and Conclusions about Teaching - [This is the final part of a longer series – previous track – “Thieves in the Night”] Reaching the end of these posts I’m brought back to the beginning, the first time I listened to Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star. I got to “Twice Inna Lifetime”, about 4.5 miles into the 5 mile early … Continue reading Twice Inna Lifetime (Track 13) and Conclusions about Teaching →
Interlude – Some Light in the Darkness – Student Adventures in Pandemic Podcasting - [This is part of a longer series – previous track “Intro” – next track – “Astronomy (8th Light)”] I’ve asked students to analyze Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star for the last three years – the first time came that winter was just a couple months after that first listening (right after the 1/6 insurrection, as a … Continue reading Interlude – Some Light in the Darkness – Student Adventures in Pandemic Podcasting →
What I’ve Learned Bringing Kendrick Lamar into my Classroom - When Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize today, I think more than a few people probably dismissed it as somehow the committee trying to be trendy but that the award itself is undeserved. They’re wrong. For me, the question is not whether he deserved it, but why it had to wait until 2016’s DAMN, when … Continue reading What I’ve Learned Bringing Kendrick Lamar into my Classroom →
Teaching Students Past Moral Relativism – Some Experiences in a High School English Classroom - “That’s just like, your opinion, man.” Jeffrey (“The Dude”) Lebowski, The Big Lebowski In the Coen Brothers classic, the Dude is called “a lazy man… probably the laziest in Los Angeles County, which puts him in the running for laziest worldwide.” We laugh at the Dude’s outdated 60’s radicalism in lots of other forms. His … Continue reading Teaching Students Past Moral Relativism – Some Experiences in a High School English Classroom →

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