lists

List-making can be useful pedagogically. List-making is a form of mind-mapping, figuring out "where we are" in terms of our thinking, in terms of our social context. This weekend, I asked my honors students to blog a list of leisure-time activities that have been represented in our course readings (hanging out in bars arguing politics in Lindquist's book, for example). I hope the lists will inform our discussion next week of the extent to which there's such a thing as "working class culture." In the second-semester comp. course here at UMD, I've asked students to wander around their neighborhoods and make lists (also on blogs) of odd things they see. Geoffrey Sirc, in "Composition's Eye/Orpheus's Gaze/Cobain's Journals," talks about lists and other 'personal journal'-type genres as self-indulgent, banal, and extremely generative. But not just as pre-writing, as a legitimate form of discourse in and of itself.

Lists happen on blogs all the time, via memes, rants on what people did during the day, and tasks that folks plan to do. I do this sometimes. List of books I'm reading right now, for example. I do this in other realms, too. In 2004, I lost 100 pounds by writing down lists of everything I ate (and via other strategies too). At the end of the year, as I'm recuperating from finals week's usual grading frenzy, I like to read the ubiquitous end-of-year pop culture lists: 50 Best Records of the Year, etc.

At the campus rec. center yesterday, as I walked on the treadmill, I saw several people keeping lists of repetitions of exercises. I also listened to my i-pod. Here are the random songs that played, in list form:

• I Can't Help Myself, The Four Tops
• Heat Wave, Martha and the Vandellas
• Addiction, Kanye West
• When You Come, Crowded House
• We're Going to Be Friends, White Stripes
• When Ya Get Drafted, Dead Kennedys
• One Love, Bob Marley
• Endless Endless, Kraftwerk
• Cosmic Slop, Funkadelic
• European Son, Velvet Underground
• Let's Buy a Bridge, Swell Maps
• Watching the Clothes, The Pretenders
• Pet Sounds, Beach Boys
• White Tornado, REM
• For No One, The Beatles
• Blenheim Shots, Swell Maps
• Kiss the Children, Gram Parsons
• So Says I, The Shins
• Catfight, The Gossip
• Fame and Fortune, Mission of Burma
• Help Me Make It through the Night, Kris Kristofferson

Lists construct identity, map our current situatedness, help us think, entertain, document lived experience, and serve practical ends. Ain't that reason to think through a pedagogy of lists?