Jean Kahler English 101

Oh, hi, that’s me!

I am Jean Kahler — you can call me Jean or Professor Kahler, whichever you prefer. My first name is pronounced like blue jeans and my last name rhymes with sailor. I DO like it when you spell my name correctly on your papers.

I’ve been teaching at BMCC since 2012 and teaching in some way or other for a lot longer than that. I’ve taught little kids and big kids and college students and graduate students, at a lot of different schools. BMCC students are my favorite (and I’m not just saying that). Most of the time I teach writing and literature; I also teach history of healthcare, which I mention in case someone reading this is just dying for a lecture on what grits and tamales have to do with vitamin deficiency diseases….

I’ll introduce myself in more detail in this week’s discussion forum, but for now, here’s what I look like in a silly hat and mustache:

…and here’s what I look like in my teacher drag, heading to BMCC campus.  Like Walt Whitman and all of you, I contain multitudes. 

Look, Blackboard is a powerful tool that does lots of things. No disrespect. But between you and me, when I log into BMCC’s Blackboard site and open a course, I feel like I am descending dripping stone stairs into some forgotten dungeon. I don’t feel like learning or engaging or exploring, let alone like PLAYING, which is what the best learning should feel like; I pretty much just want to curl up and make it all go away.

Nobody ALWAYS wants to go to class, but personally, I’d like to at least not dread it. So I took a class from the good folks at CETLS — that’s the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship; it only SOUNDS like a bunch of underwater beetles — and made this site instead, which I hope feels less grim.

We still have to go to Blackboard for some things — wordpress isn’t really built for things like gradebooks and exams — but at least most of the time we can be here.

There’s this ’80’s movie called Spies Like Us that I watched so very many times in my misspent youth that I can’t ever hear “why are you here” without hearing Chevy Chase say, “why am I here? Why are you here? Why is anybody here? Wasn’t it Jean Paul Sartre who once said — how do you spell Sartre?” Look, just because this class is online means you are free from tangential qualities of my classroom presence.

Ahem. Let’s be real: you are here because you want this credit, so that you can go on to English 201 and the rest of your amazing lives. I am here because I have a job, and this is that job. However, given that, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a good time in the process! And maybe even learn some things. With that in mind:

We are here to explore ideas. We are here to think about how language works and how arguments work. We are here to play in so doing get better at making arguments and writing them down. We are here to listen to each other and learn from each other and help each other make our writing and arguments better.

Yep. Playing is how human beings learn. Look it up. I expect you to work hard. I don’t expect you to always love the work you are doing, because sometimes hard work does feel hard. But if you are never having fun in that work, let’s figure out why and fix that.

FINE. You like concrete details; I can respect that.

The course is divided into 4 units. Each week, we will do work on whatever unit we are in, which means reading things and writing about them, plus we will have one synchronous meeting on Zoom, to talk about the work we are doing.

Unit 1: Language and Identity In this unit, we will read essays by James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldua, and Natalie Diaz. You will write short responses to those readings in the form of comments on blog posts here. You will also contribute to glossaries of the important terms and ideas in those readings. Then you will write, revise, and finally publish your own posts about a specific word or phase that belongs to a subcultural language you use. Don’t worry; we will talk a lot about this and you will understand what I mean by the time you get there.

Unit 2: Art and Social Change This unit covers the departmental requirement for a “documented essay” but in what I hope is a more fun and meaningful way that the usual thing where you work your tails off writing a paper that only I will ever read, which is, let’s face it, not the most rewarding result for all that work. First, we will look together at several examples of artists and art movements with a connection to social change. Then you will choose and artist or movement to learn more about. We will have a class meeting with a librarian who can help you with that research. Finally, you will make an exhibit about your chosen topic for our online gallery. The cool thing about that gallery is instead of all your work living and dying in my email inbox, you will end up with a page you can be proud of and show to other people, in this class and even in real life. Plus you will be helping build a project that future 101 students will benefit from. I’m excited about this, and I hope you will have fun with it. Or at least more fun than you would have had writing a more typical paper. (Hashtag low bar.)

Unit 3: Choose Your Own Adventure The traditional purpose of unit 3 is to practice the format of the final exam, which in an in-person class means writing and revising an in-class essay. Since online classes have different format requirements for the final, our unit 3 won’t look exactly like the in-person version. You will work together as a group to propose a topic for this unit. I will assign you two essays to read on that topic. You will then write your own essays responding to a question I give you, such that your essay puts forth an argument of your own and uses quotations from the source essays to support that argument. Then we will do it again, because I have discovered that the process of trying again is one of the most effective ways to improve your performance on the final. You’ll submit this assignment on Blackboard, because that’s where the final exam happens, and I want you good and comfy with that process while the stakes are fairly low.

Unit 4/Final Exam All English 101 sections at BMCC end with a final exam, based on two essays chosen by the Composition Committee. The CC also writes the exam questions; I don’t see them myself until you do. Is this my favorite piece of teaching design? No, but the important thing is that we will work together to defeat the CC by simply blowing them away with how good your final exam essays are. Take THAT, you scurvy knaves!

The final exam is worth 30% of your grade. Again, this is the departmental rule, not my idea. But by the time we get there, you will be ready to kill it dead. That killing will likewise take place on Blackboard.

Don’t panic! If you are feeling this way before our first class meeting, just show up and lots will make more sense. If you are reading this at any other point in the semester:

1. Talk to me about it during class.
2. Come to office hours.
3. Email me! If you don’t get a reply within 24 hours (on weekdays — cut me some slack on the weekend), write me back. Sometimes I am absent-minded, but I am never intentionally ignoring you.