Hello Students!

This site will grow and develop during the semester, just like you will grow and develop as critical readers and writers.

Please take a minute to get to know our OpenLab site. We will refer to it every week.

 

If you have any questions, please let me know via email:

sscanlan@citytech.cuny.edu

Best wishes,

Prof. Scanlan

 

Thoughts for Monday, January 31, 2022:

 

I often think, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had camps, like summer camps, that grown people could go to where they could fellowship together with books. I was talking recently about whether Oprah’s book club was beneficial and someone pointed out that those of us who are writers and academics are accustomed to a world where we have someone else to talk to about what we read. But for most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don’t have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community.

—bell hooks

 

McLoed, Melvin. “‘There’s No Place to Go But Up’ — bell hooks and Maya Angelou in Conversation.” Lionsroar.com. 1 Jan. 1998.

 

To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself. (bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 1994, 3)

 

HOMEWORK DUE WEDNESDAY, JAN 2, BY CLASS TIME:

  1. Sign up for OpenLab and join our class
  2. Fill out the Questionnaire–see below
  3. Sign up for free cloud storage–if you haven’t already

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First Week Questionnaire