Well, we finished upstairs yesterday and moved down to one of the big rooms after lunch. More on that later. But first, a few final comments on the muckraking question.
I was deeply indebted to the student who informed me that "muckrakers are the people who tell us that Lindsey Lohan now attends AAA meetings." After the mishap with her car--which many students wrote about--I'm glad to hear that she'll be well versed in how to get roadside assistance.
On a more serious note, though, I was deeply disturbed throughout my reading of this question by the students' all-too-often failure to know what investigative journalism is. In far too many of the essays, students equated the work of Jessica Mitford with the writing that appears in rags like The Enquirer. Rare was the student who read the prompt and thought about Watergate, Enron, or even Lewinsky.
Thom believes that we can expect little more, and I think he has a point: if CNN (or MSNBC or even Fox News...wait, is that an oxymoron?) can move seamlessly from stories about the ongoing war in Iraq to Paris Hilton's legal trouble, it only makes sense that students would have a hard time even knowing what serious journalism is.
I do have to share a humorous but effective use of the semicolon from one of the students' papers: "Michael Jordan will miss a shot; Tiger Woods will miss a putt; Bill Clinton will sleep with Monica Lewinsky." Which is something like saying, "I was aiming over there with my penis, but somehow it ended up in Monica's mouth." Ugh.
Several students did effectively use references to 1984. Where students went wrong with this was in discussing Orwell's dystopia instead of discussing real events, real journalism. But there were students who used the novel to augment their discussion, most notably, one who, after a discussion of Watergate and Cronkite's visit to Vietnam, posed this rhetorical question: what would our society look like without this sort of muckraking? The answer, of course, involves posters of Big Brother.
No comments:
Post a Comment