Palin essay question draws GOP fire
Article Launched: 09/18/2008 07:09:56 PM MDTA part-time English teacher at Metropolitan State College is under fire from conservatives after he allegedly told students to write essays critiquing Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
The adjunct instructor, Andrew Hallam, has not been available for comment since one of his students went to a Denver TV station with an allegation that he bullied and harrassed conservative students.
Hallam is teaching two classes this semester, his first at Metro State, according to the school.
Today, Republican legislators in Colorado called for "immediate corrective action" against Hallam.
"Good grief, this is supposed to be an English class," Republican state Sen. Mike Kopp of Littleton stated on the GOP legislative website Coloradosenate.com.
"Once again, it looks like an academic at a publicly supported college in our state is using his classroom as a soapbox for his personal politics. And he is trampling on students' free speech in the process -- actually telling them what opinions they are allowed to express."
According to the conservative news website WorldNetDaily.com., Hallam assigned students to write about Palin, noting "her body language, facial expressions, the way she dressed, what she said and who she pointed out or talked about in her speech. How do these elements form a 'fairy tale' image about Sarah Palin as a person and as a politician that the Republican Party may wish its members and the American public to believe?"
Yes a major American newspaper quoted The World Nut Daily. I have figured out that Conservative students are the biggest pussies in the world. Can these cocksuckers do anything other than piss and moan? And why didn't I turn in the professors I had at Wayne who were republican to the core? They BULLIED ME BOO HOO HOO
Suck it up pussies.
Oh and if you want your head to explode read the comments left form the right wing douchebags.
10 comments:
It's all that nasty pressure to actually think, Count. They're so unaccustomed to it, when one of them there nasty perfessers insists on it, the pressure is unbearable.
Time to transfer to Regent or Bob Jones...
Well, it is pretty shoddy teaching. How is a student supposed to do the assignment if s/he thinks Palin is the real deal?
I actually went to Metro State for one semester but when I went back to college 4 years later I did not bother to have my credits transferred.
The guts of the assignment might have been more neutrally phrased, but the substance is absolutely legitimate for an analytical essay: they're being asked to discuss how a public figure's narrative is being shaped so as to present the speaker in a positive light, in much the same way as you would evaluate a given writer's literary techniques for making clear who the protagonist of the story, poem or novel is meant to be.
The assignment didn't use the word "critique" or "opinion." It asked for an analysis of the things in her stump speech and presentation that rhetorically reinforce the candidate's desired "small-town-gal-makes-good" archetype.
There's no reason, of course, that a student who thinks she's "the real deal" couldn't discuss all these things from the point of view that they reinforce what s/he sees as her legitimate qualifications.
It's ideological excuse-making. What's next? "I can't write this essay on existentialism because I'm not personally an existentialist"? Jeez.
And two blatant pieces of opinion from me:
Those who never expect any of their assumptions to be challenged should, maybe, consider other options than higher education.
Based on my own teaching experience, you'd think the class would appreciate that for a change they weren't being asked to READ some "boring" essay or short story to hold forth on. One less thing over which to bemoan the instructor's insistence that they "tear it apart" instead of "just enjoy it."
Here is what I want to know. Would the DP quote a story from KOS? I am not saying KOS is a left wing equivalent to WND. But since DP actually put some stockin WND would they quote a left wing site? It use to be when I lived there, and Roachman can correct me if I am wrong or it's changed, the Post was the "liberal" paper and the Rocky Mountain News was the conservative paper.
OK I have my answer. According to Wiki...
The parent company of The Denver Post is MediaNews Group Inc., founded in 1983 by William Dean Singleton and Richard Scudder, MediaNews is today one of the nation's largest newspaper chains, publisher of 61 daily newspapers and more than 120 non-daily publications in 13 states. MediaNews bought The Denver Post from the Times Mirror Co. on Dec. 1, 1987.
More on Singleton...
On April 14, 2008, at the AP luncheon in Washington, DC, Dean referred to Barack Obama as Obama Bin Laden.[2]. He immediately apologized after his remarks.
OH THAT LIBERAL MEDIA!
I removed my rant from earlier today because I was...well...ranting.
I'll leave it at this: I think it's intellectually dishonest to expect everything in your university curriculum to reinforce your personal opinions, and that using your opinions as "evidence" for your point of view is sloppy.
"The assignment didn't use the word 'critique' or 'opinion.'"
No, but it did use the phrase "fairy tale".
it did use the phrase "fairy tale"
And the imagery of folklore and fairy tale may well be the most basic and most powerful in literature to elicit the desired response in a reader (or voter) to a given character (or personality). There's a reason a variation of the Cinderella story exists in just about every culture on the planet. Check in with Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and Jean Shinoda Bolen.
Sorry - these students are hearing what they want to hear and looking to be offended, rather than taking the opportunity to learn something about how language and other factors shape a narrative...irrespective of whether it's a narrative one agrees with.
And here's another thought...take the wording of the assignment, change the pronouns from feminine to masculine, "Sarah Palin" to "Barack Obama," and "Republican" to "Democratic."
Tell me if you can that had that been the assignment, this same group of students wouldn't have been up in arms that their instructor was trying to advocate for Obama.
They're all carrying hammers and therefore everything looks like a nail...
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