The Critical Essay: Popular Culture

Here's the basics: Popular Culture is, as the course title implies, a critical essay course in which the students analyze today's popular culture, searching for underlying meanings and implications on today's values (among other things). In this course, the student will write five essays, each about different subjects of America today--topics include analyzing: a "Myspace" web page, magazine advertisements, movies, songs, and college campuses (or learning environments in general). While writing five five-page plus handwritten essays on these topics seem like a daunting task, the workload isn't much different from Crafting the Essay, which is a prerequisite to the popular culture course. In fact, this class is, in many ways, less stressful. Students in this class get the chance to watch many movies (upwards of 4 to 5.. in my class at least [Lan06.1]) and listen to various contemporary songs.

In essense, Popular Culture is a cooler, more interesting and thought-provoking version of Crafting the Essay, except not as focused on essay structure, but rather on style and content. It is a great course. Trust me-- I've written a Wikipedia article.

btw. Jason Koo and Noah Edwardsen = best teacher/TA combo for this course.