Chicago

The Honors program at Columbia College is in distress—trimmed back to a bare scaffolding. Sad, since I’ve taught over a fourth of all the classes they’ve offered. I thought I’d missed the proposal stage this year, but it turns out they didn’t even solicit ideas.

Still, sometime, I’d like to develop this class with Amy, a Communications teacher, and the brand new head of Honors. Something like: Chicago, Arts and Culture. We’d read novels, poems, plays, some history, more about how the city itself works. But the highpoint of the class would be a long-weekend trip to Chicago, by train. I’ve never traveled by train, in the U.S., and I’d guess most of our students haven’t either. So the train trip from St. Louis to Chicago would be part of the learning experience. But so would planning the trip and exploring this major city.

Some voices/topics we could explore:

Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Sinclair’s The Jungle, Wright’s Black Boy, Hansberry’s A Raison in the Sun, more than a few films, more into Jane Addams, a look at the Daly machine and the 68 Democratic Convention....

And we might include books like:

Chicago: A Biography, by Dominic A. Pacyga, 2009

or

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon, 1992


I’d hope the class would provide students not just exposure to literature, but also a starting point for culture studies, perhaps geography, and the experience of researching a place and going to see more—direct experience to match against all the reading and web.

If the school would pay for at least a good chunk of the hotel bill, this could provide a model-incentive for a sinking program. I’d like to expand to do a longer trip by train through Denver-Boulder to San Francisco, on the Beats. And then there’s New Orleans...

bob