Did some actual school work today. I've been reading The Sorcerer's Stone to get ready for the new book and for my fall class. One of my friends from school and I wrote our fall syllabus together, and we got together today to write some of the paper prompts, etc. It's nice to have somebody else to work with and validate ideas. I do wonder though if I'm actually going to be teaching (or rather facilitating the learning of) anything or if its all just smoke and mirrors. Like when I explain to others (and myself) how we're reading the first Harry Potter book, watching the second movie, and then reading the third book and watching the third movie so that we can talk first about written rhetoric, than visual rhetoric, and then the relation between/differences in the two....does that mean anything? Can I actually do that? Do I have any idea what I'm talking about?
Tonight I watched a documentary on Steve McQueen that my brother made. I've never seen any of his (McQueen, not my brother--I've seen all of his) movies. My entire family (including my mother who sees half a dozen movies a year) was chastising me for my lack. I see lots of films, but I don't have time to see them all. I wish I did, but I don't. Just because I'm a 'movie person' doesn't mean I've seen them all. Although if we muse back to my obvious insecurity about my subject (see above paragraph), maybe I'm not a qualified individual. How on earth would I ever teach a class on film and create a syllabus if I hadn't already taken it? How do professors deal with the pressure of deciding what is important for the students to learn about and what isn't? If Steve McQueen is so pivotal, and I've missed out, what other gaping holes are there in my knowledge?
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