Captain Planet 09/06/09

For the past two years in CMC, I’ve struggled with grasping the new age concepts that are throw at us. I did all the readings and attended class, and for the most part was able to get by, relying on long study sessions, TJ’s tutors, and help from classmates, but I think this year is going to be different. So far this semester, I’ve entered the classroom with very little idea about what Barthes, de Saussure, or Macherey were talking about. But by the time class ended I felt that I had grasped the concepts… or at least started to understand the fundamentals. A huge part of this new level of understanding is The Notorious Dr. Rog’s teaching style. Everything we are learning about is demonstrated to us through a current ‘happening right now’ example. When we discussed the signifier, the signified, and the sign, Dr. Rog gave us the example of a BYOB party and an Exxon sign. How much more relatable can an example be? When we talked about Barthes meaning of trope, Dr. Rog gave the example of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, _____? (boy gets girl back). By first sharing with the class the meaning of trope – little segments of meaning we see so many times that we start filling in the meaning even though we’re missing parts – and then asking us to finish the statement; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, ____?, we are quickly able to place the word trope with a phrase that we immediately identify with. All of the hard concepts and unfamiliar words Dr. Rog relates to things we know about. This key teaching strategy was missing from my previous CMC classes. We would talk about Habermas, Schor, Giroux, etc, and none of their theories would be tied to things going on in today’s generation. I’m hoping that I leave CMC 300 at the end of the semester knowing all about different theorists and being able to know and use words that I didn’t know existed.