As seems to always happen in this class, the semester’s end sneaks up on us. There are just too many interesting stories to hear, points to consider, and aspects to discuss. I’m afraid I’m shortchanging the literature book, for which I apologize. We’ll work with some of it the last class session, and this week we’ll work exclusively with Studs Terkel’s working. I’m proposing to have two roundtables this week, and for that, I’m going to see if I can get some volunteers to rearrange furniture at the beginning and end of each class. Get us so we can sit arena-style, in a circle, with desks in front of us.
I’m going to ask you all to enter into a general discussion about your “worker”. I thought for awhile about having you do this the same way you wrote your Samaritan Paper (I even thought for a couple of minutes of having you dress up as the character, but that was too far out of the box even for me). But as best you can in a very few minutes, I want you to share your perceptions of your worker’s class and status with the rest of the class. What are his/her satisfactions and/or dissatisfactions with life as they encounter it? How do they feel about themselves and their social role(s)? How do they perceive their futures? All the characters won’t talk about the same things–age, gender, and race will have their impact.
Finally, from what you can determine from our readings to date, and from the sources we’ve looked at (Craig’s List, Monster.com, etc.) bring your character into the present. Assuming they were in the same occupation, would their lot in life have improved, deteriorated, or remained the same? In some cases, would their social role even exist today?
As I said after class Monday, enough of you thought the roundtable approach worked well enough that an encore performance was called for. So we'll clean up some of the persons who didn't get introduced to us on Monday, and then commence with the second round of the Terkel characters you chose. As an added treat I thought you'd like to hear what some of the more famous ones sound like.
Bud Freeman had a very long career in Jazz. Above, you'll hear how he sounded in the 1930s, below, how he sounded in 1984. He lived until 1991 just before his 85th birthday.
