Posted on 02/17/2009 9:16:29 AM PST by bs9021
2008 MLA Unplugged
by: Bethany Stotts, February 17, 2009
When the Modern Language Association (MLA) held its 2008 Convention in San Francisco this December Executive Director Rosemary Feal decided to blog the conference. Among the notable Convention experiences Feal covered were her packing supplies, flight experiences, community college workshops, “Welcome to the MLA” socials, and pedagogical seminars, and award ceremonies.
“I’m really looking forward to this convention, because it showcases what’s best about the MLA,” wrote Feal the day before the Convention started. “We are, first and foremost, an association of teachers.” She marks out sessions such as “a roundtable on politics and the classroom, a panel on the gap between sciences and humanities, and a session on teaching digital natives” as well as “a reading by three black South African women writers.”
As readers of this site already know, much, much more goes on at these conventions than meets the eye. In the spirit of Feal’s blog, Accuracy in Academia would like to offer its own, uncensored, top-ten list of this year’s MLA presentations:
1. Professor Robert Samuels claimed that a scene in Jurassic Park is about “the mother who attempts to toilet train and socialize the child.”
2. At a panel on “Religion Today,” Professor Linda Kaufmann compared Pope Benedict XVI to Osama bin Laden.
3. Women’s Studies professor Rebecca A. Wanzo, suggested that the U.S. government’s decision to promote abstinence-only education is a human rights crime against women as severe as female genital mutilation.
4. Quoting from Rolling Stone articles and Barack Obama’s speeches, Professor Andrew William Smith devoted an entire speech to his conversion into this “big tent of hope with a political hero at the helm.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
What is a digital native?
If you wanted to see a gathering of koolade guzzlers, I think that the MLA Convention has to be a prime attraction. A meeting of the old Soviet Politbureau would be more conservative than these ‘language teachers’!
People who have grown up with computers.
Oh. Nice.
Do you happen to how (or at any rate what the MLA CLAIMS is how) this affects ones ability to learn to read and write the English language?
Correction:
...happen to KNOW how...
Sorry!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.