drift boss

My senior class last semester used a flipped syllabus, where students picked the readings for each week and led discussions on them. Results were moderately awful. Our discussion leader had to deal with discouragement and quiet every week since nobody read. Outside of class, we laughed at the participation farce. One end-of-term lecture, my professor delivered an impromptu lesson that connected earlier ideological arguments. He wrote poetry on Marx’s criticism of ideology, the forms of reality, and Deleuze’s picture of Foucault, sketching his own on the whiteboard with spectacles. Students‘ eyes lit up. Heads nodded enthusiastically. Afterward, discussion was drift boss richer because we had a framework to study the passages that had confused us.