Geek Love illustrations

Here's the link to the website with the interesting illustrations of Geek Love:

http://picturebookreport.com/category/geek-love/

Positive Classroom Environment Guidelines

Keep cells on vibrate

Food is fine

Be respectful of opinions and ideas

Inclusive and open-minded discussions

Discuss disability theories and how they intersect with sexuality/gender

No verbal arm wrestling

Encourage all students to participate in class

No side conversations (respect the speaker)

Vote before holding class outdoors

Offer positive reinforcement

Provide clear assignment expectations and guidelines

Provide helpful research resources

Employ consistent grading style (letter grades vs. percentages)

Marks to be returned quickly (within a week)

First Class

During my undergraduate days at McGill, I loved taking summer classes. Although they were intense, they were short enough to maintain my interest and full of keen students. I particularly remember my Postmodern American Fiction course, which I anticipated despising, but from which I can recall nearly every lesson and discussion. A truly terrific and inspiring class.

Today is the first day of my Spring course “Freaks and Geeks” and I hope it’ll prove as engaging and intellectually exciting. Well, perhaps not today’s class per se, given it’ll encompass a lot of bookkeeping details, but the course in its entirety.

Geek Love sets the tone for the class. A strange, but enthralling novel written with imaginative language. Take the opening line: “‘When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets, “ Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing’” (3). The first sentence itself demands reader focus, as though we’re already spectators of the carnival, prepared to watch the show and listen to the story of these dreamlets and their parents that form a nuclear family. A family not unlike the ones that populate television shows such as Heroes (which featured a carnival this season).

The idea of breeding a freak show certainly guarantees that the children will always have jobs and raises questions regarding genetic control and/or cloning, which we’ll encounter throughout the course. Although the discussion topics that will arise from the required texts will prove interesting to most students, I’m unsure they’ll all enjoy the narratives themselves. Geek Love, for example, will either be adored or dismissed; it reminds me of Vandal Love, a novel I’ve taught before and on which I’ve written a chapter of my dissertation. Students had quite the reaction to Vandal Love – most expressing disappointment with the one-dimensional characters. What struck me was that many of the critiques of the novel focused on how the markers of difference in Vandal Love made it impossible for students to relate to the characters and care about the story. Several students felt the novel’s focus on deformed figures, in conjunction with the distortion of the text’s diction with interspersed French, prompted a sense of alienation and distance. Yet, I would argue that this perception of distance and disassociation is Béchard’s way of inspiring in the reader the same loss and dispossession experienced by the characters of the text. Most students understood my position, but I felt they were still disenchanted by the novel overall. Nonetheless, those who wrote term papers on the text, wrote the top essays – often the best papers stem from texts that students dislike, rather than texts they want to carry in their back pocket through trenches and over mountains.

Geek Love’s characters are more well rounded than those of Vandal Love; and the plot is more mysterious, prompting, perhaps, more engagement from the reader. But at the end of the day, both novels do seek to open minds and question perceptions of normalcy, the unbearable weight of idealized bodies, and the theoretically challenging and inspiring imperfections of humanity.