warmed-over soapboxesclever would be nice

About that presentation

§ March 15th, 2009 § Filed under edutainment § 1 Comment

or, San Francisco Convention redux

After nearly missing my plane on Wednesday morning, I finally made it to San Francisco, found my flatmates, and got settled onto my Hide-A-Bed in our little apartment. I sat in on several panels, including:

• An excellent panel on parody and its usefulness in the composition classroom
• Another excellent panel on satire, including the teaching of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, in the composition classroom
• A horrible, horrible panel where two of the three presenters didn’t show up. One canceled (and didn’t send her paper — shameful!), and one canceled and sent her husband in her stead to (1) read her paper, and then (2) discuss his foray into contract teaching (this second part involved him going point by point through his, yeah, TWENTY PAGE SYLLABUS, and an audience member finally spoke up after fifteen minutes when the presenter had only reached page four and asked him to move along to the writing part; awkward!); and finally, the only original presenter, who got taken to task, probably because everyone was frustrated with Mr. Long-Winded Syllabus Reader, and probably because the final presenter was unable to articulate why we should teach digital essays. The redeeming point would be that the third guy had his students doing some pretty cool stuff that I hope to use someday. If I, like, get a job and stuff.

And of course, my own panel, which went really well. We had three other excellent presenters and our chair was the aforementioned Cynthia Selfe, which combined to produce a pretty good turnout for a Saturday afternoon presentation of around thirty people. I had a couple people come up to me afterward and ask for my e-mail address so they could get more assignments and suggestions on teaching multimodal composition. It was pretty cool. And Cindy Selfe gave me a hug and told me I’d done an excellent job. Cindy Selfe! hugged me!

(Okay, I promise I’m almost done name-dropping now. One more.)

I saw Anne Waldman in a hotel bathroom (Anne Waldman!). Yes, dear readers, I had the privilege of washing my hands next to Anne Waldman. My life is complete now.

Last night and today I get to hang out with some pretty cool people, and then tomorrow it’s home to see The Husband. Whom, I admit, I kind of miss.