"A Change is Gonna Come"

If you can watch this without chills, you are dead

Barbie Fulfills Her Feminist Vision

At the end of a unit on body image, eating disorders, media images of women and Barbie as a cultural icon, my students in Intro to Women Studies at Bowling Green State University bring Barbies and digital cameras and take Barbie out to fulfill a more feminist vision.

My Review of Thin DVD

Originally submitted at HBO

The HBO Documentary film Thin takes us inside the walls of Renfrew Center, a residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders, closely following four young women (ages 15 - 30) who have spent their lives starving themselves, often to the verge of death. The film deftly chronicl...

Thin DVD

Powerful, realistic look

By Dr. M from Bowling Green, OH on 11/9/2011

 

4out of 5

Pros: Eating disorders, Informative, Constructions of beauty, The Beauty Myth, Women's studies

Best Uses: Adult Viewers, Women's studies classes

Describe Yourself: Casual Viewer

I use this with my women's studies classes to break through the silence around eating disorders in college women. This film is shocking, realistic and confrontational and sparks strong discussion.

(legalese)

The hunger for more

Over the last couple years, I am feeling the birth of a desire to more directly help relieve the pain and suffering of those most in need in the world. I have been teaching in college for the past 22 years and lately have experienced more and more students exhibiting a rudeness and discourtesy I would have never dreamed of performing for my own professors, or anyone else, for that matter. Mind you, this isn't a majority of my students...most are wonderful young men and women. But dealing with the obnoxious students is beginning to wear me down and make me feel that I am merely babysitting a bunch of over-entitled, over-privileged, and overgrown kids. I don't like feeling this way...I find it disturbing and disheartening. I feel less and less like what I am doing is worthwhile. I am beginning to think when I retire I will join the Peace Corps or some similar organization and try to take my skills where they will be truly useful.

The white rose..or finding things in your garden you did not expect

I have moved more times than I care to say and made gardens at all of them, including apartments. The items I have consistenly found over the years when I am digging are old marbles. It has come to be a sign of good luck for me to find them and I have a mason jar in my living room filled with them. I have yet to find one at my current home, but keep hoping. But the best treasure I uncovered happened like this:I was living in a 96 year old house in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was pregnant with my only child. There were some neighbor kids who kept cutting across my back yard through a hole in the fence and I located an old "granny gate" behind a neighbor's house, asked permission and dragged it home. I plugged the hole in the fence with it and when summer came, just before my son was born, a beautiful old-fashioned white rose grew up. My life was very difficult at this time, with an abusive husband, and that rose gave me new hope. My beautiful son was born soon after and eventually I was able to leave my husband and start a new life. That rose was such a gift.

"I hate EBSCO"

My student Brian, very frustrated, said this to me yesterday as he was trying to find sources for his research assignment. Brian is angry about a few things right now. He has a crummy math teacher who doesn't teach, an art teacher who doesn't explain anything, and now there's EBSCO, which I think is the safety valve he can release. I know that I could have spent some time with him and suggested key words, but he was so worked up, I switched him over to Google Scholar, and we went through the whole keyword process he would have used in EBSCO and found a goodly number of scholarly articles. I also called up the math dept and set him up with an appointment to discuss his complaint, and he himself made an appointment to talk with the dean of his college, so I feel like he made some progress academically, even if he didn't use EBSCO to get there.a side note: the students, many of them, have taken to calling EBSCO, "ebesco." Very cute, i think. And the same day, many students showed me their EBSCO folders with new articles.

Keep encouraging your students in their new skills

Thanks to this faculty library learning community at BGSU, I have seen tremendous growth in my students' independent use of their EBSCO accounts and folders, and of their ability to find articles. Now they tell me they check there first, before heading out to Yahoo or Google. They are now aware also of Google Scholar, of keyword searches, of checking out books from the library (I have to tell you it does my heart good to see students with library books!), of ordering books through OhioLink, to just name the beginnings. I also see students who give up the fight too easily, who want to "change their topics because they can't find anything."Instead of letting them change their topics, I call them in to work beside me, questioning them about other key ideas, suggesting possible key words, and in this way, they feel I care about their own work, that I am a "literate responder" to their scholarly interests--and they get better at deepening their thinking about their topic and at performing their database searches.These are first-year students in ENG112 at BGSU and it is a real joy to see them progress. The more able ones dive right in and ask very advanced questions, which keep me breathing as a teacher!Namaste