Connor
Undergraduate
English Education |
Connor
Undergraduate
English Education |
This week saw me getting to teach just a bit on Wednesday, which is all I can report, but it was still pretty illuminating! As I've said the previous post, I am starting the Lynn Nottage play Sweat, which is a fairly modern play that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Synopsis: It’s the year 2000 in Reading, Pennsylvania and a group of friends go to work at the steel mill and then decompress at the bar like they’ve been doing for over 20 years. But, unbeknownst to them, their lives are about to be uprooted. Their steel mill, Olstead’s, is making some changes and the blood, sweat and tears, not to mention the generations of loyalty these workers have shown, don’t seem to amount to much. These middle class, unionized, steelworkers have made plans to save money, go on vacations and then retire with a nice, healthy pension, but when rumors start flying that the company is considering layoffs, and flyers are hung to recruit non-union Latino workers for less money, the war between community and capitalism begins, and tensions start destroying not only jobs, but also relationships. This poignant play takes a look at the de-industrial revolution through the lens of a history play, but also delves into the issues of today: the economy, immigration, race-relations in America, and politics. Lynn Nottage’s Sweat gives us characters filled with the good and the bad and asks us to reflect on our own views and the views of others. Nottage never tells us who’s right or who’s wrong, but always shows us who’s human. I had a period to get to speak about it, but as you can probably see there are a lot of parts to it that are very complex and interesting. Teaching about The Rust Belt was not so difficult, as Google Images had a lot of very good images and was able to help and show what the town was and what the students should visualize in the play. Some other things, such as trade unions, striking and what being a "scab" meant were not as easy to explain to the students. I think it's going to be an interesting time to teach the students. I also am teaching the play under the topic of intersectionality. The term intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It is an analytical framework for understanding how a person's various social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage.(gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability etc), and how these can be both empowering and oppressing to people. I have taught my last bunch of students in Tapestry High School about this topic, which seemed to go well, but these students didn't totally get to understand. I plan to show them a video of Crenshaw explaining this in a TED Talk to them on Wednesday, which I recommend for anyone interested in the topic. I sadly only get to see them this Wednesday, which is fine, but I don't know how much I will be able to get done with them. We shall see what we can do, hopefully. In other news, culturally I went quite wild with learning new things. Last Tuesday here, it was Liberation Day, which marks the end of fascist/Nazi rule in Italy. As a result, there were plenty of parades and celebrations, so Grant, Marita and I went to what we thought would be a parade in one of the main piazzas, but it turned out to be a parade for the Italian Communist Party and we ended up right in the middle of it unknowingly. I ended up buying a newspaper just to say that I had. Yesterday on Sunday, the three of us students got invited by Grant's mentor teacher Rosie to go to the sea, which was unfortunately very rainy, but we ended up swimming in the sea and having a great time despite the fact that it did not stop raining from the time we arrived to the time we left. But I still went swimming, and the water was so nice despite being freezing. We had the whole beach to ourselves and stayed up totally late into the night singing and talking. So nice.
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AuthorHello! My name is Connor and I am thrilled to be on this journey of teaching. I'm from Buffalo, born and raised, and am starting this experience as an English Education major. Looking forward to meeting my students and seeing all that Siena has to offer for the next few months! Archives
May 2023
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