Robert Coles on Fact and Fiction

In his essay entitled "Tradition: Fact and Fiction" Coles struggles with this idea of representation. The documentarian's aim is to represent "human actuality," he contends, but how can such a representation be attained through the subjectivity of a human lens? Coles says that his students just don't get it. They emphaize the responsibility to fact when doing documentary work and speak of the alternative as fiction, as if the two are clear-cut opposites of one another. They fail to acknowledge the subjectivity of the choices made by the documentarian--the writer, the photographer. Despite the best of intentions to represent that which is "actual," the representation will always be influenced by the subjectivity of the writer or photographer.

Events are filtered through a person's awareness, itself not uninfluenced by a history of private experience, by all sorts of aspirations, frustrations, and yearnings, by those elusive, significant "moods" as they can affect and even sway what we deem of interest or importance...

We are subjective human beings. To ignore that and carry the pretense of objectivity is a futile effort.

Commonplace Books

I have asked my students to keep a commonplace book--a sort of scrapbook for language--wherein they capture snippets of language as they read it in the texts we are working with in the class and as they hear it in the lives they live and then respond to those snippets in writing. The idea is that they will be working with challenging texts and seeking to understand them by writing about them. At the same time, they will be raising their awareness of language and how it operates on many levels to affect us all as readers and as consumers of texts.

So, I thought I might offer a few commonplace book entries of my own in this blog. As I read the texts of the course along with my students, I will try to make entries into this blog about what I've read and what sense I can make of it and how it is affecting me. More soon...

The first week's almost behind me...

Friday morning, 15 minutes before my classes. It's been an exhausting week for a variety of reasons. The most likely of which is an avergae of 4 hours of sleep a night. The students are good. I just need more sleep and a shorter commute.

Day 1 - So far so good

Orientation is behind me and I'm off and running with day one of a new semester. I've met three of my classes so far and everyone seems quite friendly--a good bunch. It puts me at ease somewhat to meet the students. The orientation process heightened my anxiety, but once back in the classroom that all seems to go away. Let's hope tomorrow goes as well as today. Actually next week will probably be a better measure of how things are going. The first week, with syllabi and all, is still very much an orientation.

A new beginning

I am in the midst of moving to a new college, which is a good thing for a number of reasons. Primarily, it will allow me to continue teaching as I can adequately provide for my family with this new position--benefits, decent enough pay, and so forth. Beyond that, however, I am excited to be starting at the new college as it is the district I grew up in. I tell people it's a kind of homecoming. My feelings on "coming home," however, I must confess, are mixed. I am comforted on the one hand as it is not an entirely unfamiliar place. I am anxious on the other for reasons I cannot entirely explain. The institution is quite large compared to where I am coming from. I feel very much like a small fish in an overwhelming sea. I hope I can swim with rest.

This week is orientation. We've only completed day two of the five days of orientation and already my head is spinning. While I'm a little stressed with it all, I am looking forward to getting back into the classroom, which is where I expect (and hope) to feel most comfortable with it all. The highlight thus far for this week was a chance run-in I had with one of my students. Strangely it was comforting to meet a student. She was friendly and enthused. I hope that meeting proves to be an accurate indication of what's to come with all my students. Well, off to more orientation now.