Skip to main content

Bunny Research -- Writer's Poke #150

For Writers:

The kid was no doubt intelligent, but he admitted that he never did well when boxed inside the structure of a college class. By semester's end, he had only produced three of the seven required essay assignments, claiming he just couldn't get into the assigned topics.

Although the topics I assigned gave students a lot of flexibility, I told him that I was open to foregoing the regular classroom assignments all-together, as long as he had some good ideas ready to present. Since he needed to write the equivilent of four 2-page essays, I suggested that he do an eight-page research paper. We should meet during office hours, I said, so that we could hammer out the details.

The following day, he came to my office carrying a box of Playboy magazines. My dad is a collector, he said, and he has Playboys all the way back to the 1950s. Great, I thought, as I watched him starting to remove Playboys from the box.

Take a look at this one, he said, as he pulled out three more from the box. Suddenly Playboy magazines started multiplying all over the office.

He didn't seem to comprehend that there was anything wrong looking at Playboys on a college campus. And my worst fear was that the Department Chair or College President would walk in at that exact moment. How would I explain to the college administration that the student was just using these magazines for the articles?

If you did an analysis of Playboy magazines from the 1950s until today, what might you learn a) about culture, b) about America, c) about yourself?

"Students have initiative; they should not be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves -- and be free." -- Cesar Chavez

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it.  Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years.  Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him.  Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog.  https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...