I’m with Michelle, Caitlin, Andrea, and Dorothy on the general dissatisfaction with Chapters 15 and 17 of WLMA. The thematic arrangement of the texts is okay – if that’s how you wanted to organize your readings – and I like how they mix short stories, poems, essays, paintings, plays, songs, and films. Actually, the CD is great in theory but confusing and erratic in practice: for example, the “Enhanced Reading” of “Bartleby the Scrivener” contains some interesting questions that appear when you mouse over certain hyperlinked words, but the one for “The Taming of the Shrew” offers only a note at the top promising annotations to come “during the upcoming school year,” whatever that means. And it would have been nice if the CD actually contained some film snippets instead of just still images from the films (although, since the video clips that are there didn’t play on my computer, maybe it wouldn’t matter.)
Mostly, I’ll join everyone in their biggest complaint so far: that the questions that follow each of (or, I should say, most of) the readings are generally formalist, tokenizing, and just plain lame. Some of them are okay – the second question at the end of T.C. Boyle’s “The Love of My Life” could maybe lead a class into a discussion about gender, parental responsibility, and abortion – but if you were really trying to get some critical thinking going, you’d have to come up with your own questions.
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