Comments on: Teaching Porn

By: krishna sankar kusuma

krishna sankar kusuma — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 17:34:31 +0000

dear sir,
your are doing a great job.Im working as lecturer inthe department of mass communcaiton in delhi, india. i would like to start the porn studies for the benefit of society in a systematic way. i wante to start with a research wing aswell as a course. pl. guide me in this regards.

thank you.
kusumakk@srediffmail.com

By: Cat

Cat — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 02:21:05 +0000

Your post reminds me of a class I once took: The Psychology of Sex & Sexual Deviation. I wouldn’t call it porn, but we watched and talked about a LOT of sex.

I remember one day listening to a graphic comparison of elephant copulation with that of worms and thinking, “Oh dear God how did sex get to be boring?”

Got a 4.0 that semester. My mother was none too pleased about the class either. But I found it very enlightening, and I learned a whole lot.

By: Em

Em — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 16:17:00 +0000

Hey, Alex, over here in NH results are similar, though under quite different circumstances. Just gave back an exam, average score 57%. It’s upper-division, all majors, 21 students enrolled, and, a very straightforward exam. ugh. My current interp revolves around the popular misconception that humanities are merely (key word) opinion-based, rather than knowledge producing. Or, simply put, they didn’t study enough. Anyway …

PS: I think teaching this porn course would drive me bananas!

By: Alex Halavais

Alex Halavais — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:05:20 +0000

Richard: Frankly part of it, for us, is that we (under the provost’s urging) nearly tripled the number of undergrads in our department while barely increasing faculty numbers. As a result, class size is larger, and we have ended up the major of last resort for the university. We’re reversing this (requiring a C or better in statistics and a a computer science sequence, and agreeing that the average grade in the gateway courses is a C to avoid inflation), but it will take a little time before we have classes full of students who actually want to be studying communication.

That’s less the case with my class — it’s actually a nice mix of people from the campus. I am tempted to be ageist and say that students were more serious when I was an undergrad, but I sincerely doubt that. Really, I suspect the problem is two-fold:

1. Far more people go to college than before. This is a good thing, but they aren’t coming because the quality of education in the high schools has increased. That makes it difficult. A segment of our incoming class is utterly unable to write a simple paper (or email).

2. Exacerbating #1, our classes are far too large — especially at the lower levels — to provide the kind of writing instruction and one-on-one interaction that these students need. By the time they get to the senior level, you have some who have sought out that help, or got it in high school, and they are doing fine. The trick is, the gap has widened rather than narrowed over their time here.

It troubles me when, for example, about a dozen students all misspell the word “rediculous” (at least I think that’s how they are spelling it). As much as I talk about a new culture of text — thanks to IM, blogging, etc. — it’s clear that many of our students cannot communicate at the level we might like.

By: Richard Smith

Richard Smith — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 06:14:42 +0000

I don’t know about the topic you’re describing but the concern that your students aren’t doing well is familiar to me. I just gave my midterm and the class average was 61% – for something that I thought was an easy exam. What can we do about this?

By: tom sherman

tom sherman — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 04:11:19 +0000

It’s amazing, in a class of 400, what people can take to be a double entendre.

That would get real old, real fast. But it’s hilarious to see you call them out on it.