I’m Celebrating My Achievement as an Educator

Since it’s my Birthday, I will treat everybody to self-congratulatory posts.

Our students will be presenting their senior research projects next week that they have carried out under my guidance. I’m happy to report that, for the most part, I managed to steer them away from trashy analysis of trashy flicks and books. They have worked on Pérez Galdós, Bombal, García Márquez, Laura Restrepo, Paula Varsavsky, and Andean folktales.

I can only do as much as I can do, so there was one project on Laura Esquivel (a very trashy Mexican novelist) and two on Isabel Allende (a very trashy Chilean novelist.) However, one of the Allende projects was a very clever analysis of her Eva Luna on the basis of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.

Plus there was one project on the Cuban revolution where the student started out with ideas gleaned in their entirety from the Cato Institute and somehow ended up as a passionate fan of Che Guevara and Fidel. As you can imagine, that was not my influence.

And there was also an absolutely fascinating project on how the Dominican national identity was formed on the basis of rejecting the Haitian identity.

Not a single movie was analyzed which cost me a lot of pouty faces of disappointed students who hoped to avoid reading anything in the course of the project.