May 16, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Cereal in Composition

[Anothersemester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semesterreflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes.Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

When you’vebeen doing this as long as I have—finishing year 19 at FSU and 24 of teachingoverall this week—you can often see stand-out moments coming; that wasdefinitely the case with the Larsen and Zhang conversations I wrote about inthe last two posts, for example. But if I ever find myself entirely unable tobe taken by surprise, I’ll know it’s time to retire. Fortunately thatdefinitely isn’t the case yet, and of the many moments and days that surprised methis semester, none stands out more than a phenomenal discussion in one of my First-YearWriting II sections about this 1960s PostHoneycomb Cereal ad. I found that ad at the last minute, looking through anarchive I had shared with the students and hoping to find a text that seemedtargeted toward kids (the subject of one of our scholarly article readings inthat unit), and—get ready for some pedagogical inside baseball—had not watchedit in full prior to sharing it with the students. And then it became the sourceof the best discussion we had all semester in that section, with more than halfof the 18 students sharing thoughtful takes on choices and details in the ad.Surprise stand-outs ftw!

Laststand-out tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?