> I'm sure that the students in my SF and
> >gender class thought I was "privileging boring but intellectually
> >complex texts" when I assigned The Female Man and The Door into Ocean,
> >two books I love, when they'd rather have been reading easier stories.
>
> What exactly did they object to in Door Into Ocean? I would love to teach
> it, but I've had a bad experience before--I taught More Than Human, and the
> students were universally thumbs down--I haven't yet figured out if it was
> because it was too dated, not interesting to them, or if my presentation
> fell flat.
I should mention that Door into Ocean is probably out of print now and
unavailable. Our university bookstore was able to round up enough copies
by contacting a number of their branch stores since the distributors and
publisher didn't have any.
Based on class evaluations and comments during discussion, it was too
complex and too slow, nothing much happened, passive resistance doesn't work
and isn't very believable, suicide is not an acceptable option, and they
couldn't connect with the viewpoint characters.
Sigh.
Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:01 PDT