Late last week, my colleague Amy and I began our final unit in English 9: advertising as text, aka rhetoric in advertising. Our students are visibly excited. We're talking about advertisement, after all: shopping, flipping through magazines, watching TV, going to Reds games, playing around on the Internet, and chatting it up on Facebook are all relevant activities from a curricular standpoint. But now that I've heard my first handful of This is so much more fun than reading a novel-type remarks for the year, I'm going to write freely, a 'free write,' as it were, about my ambivalence.
To be clear, I'm not actually ambivalent about the unit itself or any of the assignments we have been giving or will give (these include readings from Picturing Texts, an advertising scavenger hunt, the task of finding advertisements that illustrate different types of persuasion, eventually a huge group project in which students develop a series of advertisements for a hypothetical product). It's a great facet of our course, in my opinion: interesting, new, relevant to the students' lives, sophisticated in its expectations, forward-looking in its design and principles. The students sharpen critical tools they were unaware they had and learn terminology and concepts that they will use as students, businesspeople, and consumers. The emotions I vent here will lead me to change exactly NOTHING of substance in this unit.
But I am torn about this pesky notion of "fun." First of all, my class is ALWAYS FUN. We laugh, we enjoy one another's company, I make silly jokes and do awkward things, the kids enjoy a reasonable amount of license to lead discussion (even astray) and generally to be themselves while being academic. Secondly, we have consciously designed the entire English 9 course -- which is only two years old in its current form, so it has maintained its original character -- with student engagement in mind. I'll grant you that engagement does not strictly mean or require fun. Reading Homer's Odyssey is not fun per se, although the issues the epic raises echo throughout literature and our own experiences; Much Ado About Nothing, while hilarious to comfortable consumers of Shakespearean English, may again not be fun for a more challenged reader. But we just read a comedy, for heaven's sake, and I don't mean Much Ado About Nothing! We read The Laughing Sutra! It's hilarious! Ridiculous stuff happens left and right! The title even says 'laughing'! How much do you need, people?
One more thing: Since when does English class, or any class, need to be fun? Academia is good for your soul, or something like that.
OK, somewhere in all of that ranting, I said some things that I don't really mean. I won't identify which those are.
What I really believe is that the sort of backhanded insult constituted by This is so much more fun than reading a novel (or reading poems, or just reading) is instructive and ultimately of only as much consequence as I choose for it to bear. It's great that our current unit feels fun to kids -- how often does school, work, or even day-to-day, get-the-laundry-done housework feel fun? I know this; the kids know it too. Secondly, kids have short memories, and the simple fact that we just finished a novel that was, in fact, a pleasurable read does not make them remember "f-u-n." The daily deadlines or final essay test involved in our study of that novel are also not particularly fun (in other words, fun reading and fun reading for school with deadlines are two different things), and in general one "fun novel" does not the new belief "It's so fun to read novels" make.
Furthermore and for the moment finally, looking at advertisement is fun. My students (and yours) are shoppers and magazine readers and TV watchers and sports consumers. So are we. It's interesting and valuable to learn more about how the advertisements we see in the venues work. Learning about this rhetoric in school does feel like a secret vacation in our lives outside of school -- fun, in a word.
So fun it is (imagine a curmudgeonly voice here).
PS: Novels and poems and plays ARE fun too. THEY ARE.
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