Using Music to Teach Ethos :: Personal Narrative Teaching Essays

Using Music to T apiece EthosIntroduction subsequently com gentlemans gentlemandment high school English reading and writing for four years, conduct led me to apply for a position teaching English at a state university. I was hired as an adjunct might member, but in my eyes, I was basically a utility man in the Major Leagues. The brief hour-long meeting with the adjunct coordinator was my first word picture to rhetoric and anything related to it. I knew what a rhetorical question was fag outt we all?and I had heard people make comments much(prenominal) as He might think he humps what hes doing, but in all reality, his talk is all rhetoric. Still, did I know how to teach this stuff to other people? On the college level? I sat down with the information the coordinator had given me and I found many another(prenominal) helpful hints, ideas, and terms. I love terms. If I am given a list of terms, I can often use the definitions to find the commonplace links and make the material teachable. I did an online search and found a Web site that broke down the various elements of rhetoric and include a list of terms. I was in heaven, rhetorically speaking. This first delineation to rhetoric was, I must admit, dull and dreary, much like Latin seemed to be where I used to teach. Dead languages, dead conceptswere the Ancient cultures goodly for anything other than art, stories, language, and great food? I decided that this seemingly wry material would have to be souped up a bit to pluck college freshmen whose attention spans run between 10 and 15 minutes. Then, as inflamed Skelton might say, I had an apostrophe. I realized that the compositions my students write are comprised of sections, each an entity unto itself which contributes something to the overall essay. I remembered my senior year at UGA, taking narration and Analysis of Rock and Roll Music, and the lessons we learned about the different sections of a song and how those sections are merged to create one complete unit. After reading a bit more about rhetorical appealsethical, logical, and wound upI realized that the songs we listen to every day can be linked to this previously unknown, dry material.