Possible Honors College seminar on The Wire

[throatybeard]

I am proposing a humanities course at the 3000-level for the Pierre Laclede Honors College at UMSL. For a middling school, albeit with a superb research faculty, not Harvard, but hey, my senior colleagues are real good....we are very lucky to have this resource. They quarantine the top, I don't know, 5% of our UGrads in a separate College, thru admissions, and they have a budget to buy faculty out for one course out of their home Depts. Then faculty propose courses about 10 months before the semester in question and the Honors College evaluates the proposals. You get a once-a-week 2.5 hr seminar like a Grad class, with the Honors kids, although the instructor can get a kid who's not in the Honors college into their course. The beauty of this is that the Honors college acts as an incubator for really neat topical courses, some form of which may make it into their home Dept, or act as a catalyst for research with Ugrads.

I once kicked around the idea of a class about the English poetics of Hip-Hop, but figured that was a post-tenure project. And I've given a class over there in African American English (AAE).

I think the closest thing to this at Duke back in the day was some of the very topical seminars in FOCUS. I bet they have something similar now. At any rate. it gives instructors a lot of freedom in what is usually a bonecrushing, demoralizing disciplinary cage. It's the sort of thing people who think college professors are evil jackoffs both only do and never do. Hyper-educated people think we spend all our time giving four grad students handjobs in an abstruse area and then mopping off the resulting article. BA-educated people think we never do anything except when we're lording over a 400-man Chem lecture. Most other people think we never work and make the grad students give us handjobs. So, it's a blessing, an opportunity from something like heaven.

In particular, I'm up for tenure in 2012-13. While this may be successful, our upper-level power structure doesn't think much of people in Humanities Depts no matter what they do, and I need to rigorously contingency-plan in case I get thrown out on my ear on Natural Bridge Road. So if I do this course, I've got one hell of a conversation piece at Convention in 2013 and 2014. That's the bit of this that is very selfishly just for me. The rest is for me and my students too. Most of my teaching is taken up by courses that serve the English Ed majors. About once every two years I get to do something else. Instead of the Grad Seminar in Sociolinguistics, I want to do something else. I feel sort of like the old Japanese dude in Ikiru or Clint's character in Gran Torino. I've got one last chance to do something in or for the world. I'm not dying, but I might professionally, and I want to give something really good to the students.

So I have decided that what I most want to do is to teach a seminar on The Wire . This is my chance to do it. This is my chance to share with UGrads the most incisive recent look into the heart of the US in an artistic work. The pitch has to include language, since that's my qualification, and I think three or four of the fifteen or sixteen classes will deal with language, especially AAE. I've already taught a seminar on AAE in the Honors College and that went well. But I want the sensitizing of the students to the reality of language variation to come almost by osmosis, sprinkled throughout. I'll get my gradskool office roomie who works, has early tenure (!) I think at UMBC to fly in and talk about language in Baltimore. But more importantly, we need to talk about class and ethnicity, about the dysfunction of institutions, about what's going on in our public schools, about urban disinvestment, many things. We'll bring in Gramsci. I have friends who know about Urban Studies and can recommend a UGrad-appropriate book (so I don't have to use Kunstler). I want to do a whole day on film references in The Wire. Ep 3.11 alone is a goldmine in that respect. I know peeps in flim studies whose brains I will pick too. The "reading assignment" will be about five episodes a week, and The Wire Re-up book from The Guardian, and theory essays when apporariate, not too many, but half a dozen or ten. Five seasons, you need to do about a season every three weeks. And make the topic relevant to what you just saw, but get all the topics in. It's hard as shit to construct that syllabus, but I reckon I can get there. This is gonna be some interdisciplinary-ass gold.

So anyway, I know there are some people here who are literate with this show, and I am soliciting far and wide advice, ideas, anything about this project. Anything constructive. I have eleven months to build it. I want it to work really well, and, selfishly, I want to be able to point to it as my shining moment in teaching. No one cares that some future 7th-grade English teacher actually knows English didn't "come from Latin," like her igmo 7th-grade teacher told her, even though that's what my days hopefully result in. And if I get tenure and get to stay, I want to use this as a text in a course we work into the curriculum in my Dept. Something like "Language and Ethnicity in Urban Environments." Christ, we're Saint Louis. If we've got a sister city it's Baltimore.

Cross post to DBR and BTD.