posted 2005/06/19 at 22:29
As promised, a brief rundown of my latest order from Amazon (sans the one book that was shipped seperately and is now, according to Amazon, on its way to me):
On the book front, we'll start with Ira Shor's Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. This is actually a precursor to Chuck Knoblauch and Lil Brannon's Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, the book I read for a class in the fall of 2003 that first introduced me (along with the professor who taught the class) to critical teaching/radicalteaching. I had a chance to read through part of this book when I borrowed it from the library for a paper I did last autumn, but I really need a copy of my own here, not only to help me with the construction of my own classes, but also as a reference to debate the points made by the Brainwashing 101 crew.
Keeping with books, I also picked up Peter Elbow's Writing with Power (New Edition). This was another book I referenced for a paper last autumn, and if I had my druthers I'd use this as the primary writing text for my composition class. As it is, I'm stuck using the inferior John Trimbur-penned textbook The Call to Write, but I'll probably photocopy chapters out of Writing with Power to help "supplement" Trimbur. Elbow should help with my pedagogy as well, even if we don't exactly come at writing instruction from the same perspective.
Turning to CDs, I picked up a couple of Catherine Marie Charlton CDs like I said I would. The first, Strange Attractors, seems to focus a bit more on Charlton's jazz tendencies, and while it's a strong solo piano album, it might not find a regular place in my "CDs for studying" rotation simply because some of the pieces would be too distracting for that. However, the other CD of hers I bought, River Dawn, is perfect for studying and other things, and may, in fact, be the best piano solo album I've ever heard. (Believe me, that covers a lot of ground.)
When I place my next order with Amazon -- which I'll need to do soon here, since I still can't pick up many of the books for UT's MA exam here locally -- I'll probably keep growing my CD collection by picking up some of the solo piano albums from Narada Records' glory years in the 1980's: CDs by Michael Jones, David Lanz, and others. Maybe someday I'll copy the tracks to my computer here just so I can set up Musicmatch to play a random stream of piano solos whenever I'm working on stuff, but of course I still have a problem with the whole MP3 compression thing and stuff. Bah.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon