Image via WikipediaSummer term has ended, and Rhonda actually managed to get almost everything done. As you can tell from her postings, she stalled out on her journal. If you're a teacher, this won't surprise you; if you aren't, it probably seems strange. The research journal, at least in my classes, is an ungraded assignment. This means that all that matters is quantity. The students are free to discuss their projects and problems without worrying about the quality of their writing hurting their grade. It's worth 10-15% of their course grade, and it is possible to get full credit even if you are a lousy writer: all you have to do is submit the maximum number of entries. You'd think that all of them would be sure to max out on this, since it often means the difference between passing and not passing, but the truth is that around a third of each section (class) turns in the minimum or less. Even more strange is that some of these students are actually very good writers, suggesting that it would be easier for them to keep the journal up to date, but they don't care, I guess, and this often brings them down an entire letter grade for the course.
What a waste!
The flipside of this situation is that those who do max out their journals usually make comments in them near the end about how much having to do the journal helped them keep on track and think through what they were trying to do with their projects. And this is true for students across the board.
Image via WikipediaI mentioned last time that I have learned a lot about men's studies, but I didn't get into the actual sources. I'm almost finished with my annotated bibliography, and here are a few of the more interesting sources.
Brod, Harry, ed. The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies. Boston: Allyn and Unwin, 1987. Like many of the books I found, this one is not terribly recent, but it was very helpful in understanding the way men's studies developed and its connections to other gender-based theories. (It's a collection of articles, so I got several entries for my bib. Yay!)
Cohan, Steven and Ina Rae Hark. Screening the Male : Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. New York : Routledge, 1993. This is interesting, especially with the ongoing changes in how American culture shifts with regard to how it defines masculinity and concepts related to masculinity.
Lehman, Peter. Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture. New York:
Routledge, 2001. It's amazing to me how many scholarly books there are about men and film. This one has some different ideas than the two above, and it really helped me get at how to write about film using this critical approach.
Powrie, Phil and Ann Davies. The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. Not finished looking at this one yet, but I have great hopes--the Bond films are not actually Hollywood films, so I need material on that.
Image via WikipediaBelieve it or not, I'm still not happy with my research question, but I have to move on. My annotated bibliography is due on Wednesday, and I still need a couple more articles and a book review. Added to that, the draft of the paper is due the following week, so I'm swamped. I've actually learned a lot about men's studies since I started working on this project, which is good, as far as it goes. One of the things I'm finding is that some of the Bond characteristics are problematic in terms of current American men's culture (I can't speak for the UK on them, though), which seems to regard dressing well, for just one example, as unmanly.
Image via WikipediaSummer term has ended, and Rhonda actually managed to get almost everything done. As you can tell from her postings, she stalled out on her journal. If you're a teacher, this won't surprise you; if you aren't, it probably seems strange. The research journal, at least in my classes, is an ungraded assignment. This means that all that matters is quantity. The students are free to discuss their projects and problems without worrying about the quality of their writing hurting their grade. It's worth 10-15% of their course grade, and it is possible to get full credit even if you are a lousy writer: all you have to do is submit the maximum number of entries. You'd think that all of them would be sure to max out on this, since it often means the difference between passing and not passing, but the truth is that around a third of each section (class) turns in the minimum or less. Even more strange is that some of these students are actually very good writers, suggesting that it would be easier for them to keep the journal up to date, but they don't care, I guess, and this often brings them down an entire letter grade for the course.
