Pop Culture for the Soul

I officially have all the classes set up to teach at APU this fall. I will be teaching Freshmen Writing Seminar, Intro to Journalism, and Studies in Popular Culture. I'm so incredibly thrilled. For FWS, movies will be my theme. I'm planning to have the students write critically about such films as Princess Mononoke, Pan's Labyrinth, Moulin Rouge, and Enchanted. They'll do reviews, a film journal, and a major paper about a specific film. I think it'll be a great way to teach writing. Intro to Journalism should be a blast. It'll be part writing and part critical understanding of the journalistic media. I'm planning to have the students read a book called The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, which addresses the changing cultural environment that cares more about visual rather than textual mediums. I'm also going to address current journalistic trends through such books as Nickel and Dimed, Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, and When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. The students will learn to write like a journalist and appreciate and critique the different styles of media coverage of contemporary society. I think Pop Culture might be my baby. I've already begun compiling a reader, which will have certain chapters from different books, along with three other books the students will read in their entirety. The class should be a lot of fun.
This and other things have really made me optimistic about my future. It's weird how paranoid I've been, and how things have really started coming together. It's all been rather surreal lately. I owe a lot to my old teacher Karen Sorensen. She plugged me for The Clause job and continued to plug me for other positions, which I now have. So, I've never written a syllabus or run a class in this kind of a setting. I have quest lectured before and spoken at conferences. This is going to be a very unique experience and should give me a good clue as to what I'll be doing in the future and how I should go about. I can't wait until fall...though summer should be interesting as well.