November 2013
Welcome to our e-newsletter
Minds in Motion  

 

Free Minds students have spent some serious time on Shakespearean tragedy this month, and yet, we find ourselves brimming over with good news. Find out which Shakespeare films go best with popcorn and meet a student who brings the word tenacity to life. Plus, literature professor Patricia Garca shares her favorite moment of the semester.   

 

Shakespeare Surprises and Delights    

 

Standing in the video store on a Saturday night, Free Minds student Yvonne Flores found herself picking out two movies she'd never imagined she'd rent: Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V, both adaptations of Shakespeare plays. Reading Romeo and Juliet in high school left her feeling intimidated, but her immersion in Shakespeare in Free Minds shifted her thinking.

 

"I finally took the time to rent some movies because I saw a clip in class of James Earl Jones doing a piece from Othello," she says, "and of course reading Othello too, I was intrigued."

 

Over popcorn and wine, Yvonne and her sister watched the movies and talked about them. "It was something I'd never in a million years think of doing, but I'm glad we saw them, for it opened my mind. I understand the stories, the words and love the work."

 

Shakespeare has become a fall semester tradition for Free Minds, and each year students fall in love with The Bard as we approach the plays as readers, performers, and audience members. This year students tackled Othello, a tragedy that ends with the death of innocent Desdemona. Literature professor Dr. Patricia Garc�a describes the unit in her Final Word, below, where she commends students for pulling out the play's dark themes of jealousy, racism, and insecurity. She also makes a promise for the spring: something a little lighter.

Help Austin Families Build a Financial Future

 
As we ramp up for the 2014 tax season, Foundation Communities is seeking volunteers to help in their Community Tax Centers. Available opportunities include tax preparer, client liaison, and translator. Click here to learn more! 
Student Irene Salas Doesn't Want to Miss a Thing

 

When you meet Irene Salas, you learn one thing right away: her family means the world to her. Whether she's proudly discussing her son Thadeus's gift for science or explaining her decision to leave a job she loved with Travis County to care for her sister, who was suffering from kidney failure, her commitment is fierce. A family member even used the word relentless, telling her, "You don't give up on anybody, especially your family. If you say you're going to help them, you do everything, every which way to help them."

 

That relentlessness applies to her learning as well. "I don't consider myself smart like my sister and my brother were," she says. "They could read a book one time and they got it. I have to study and read and think about it and read it again before I get it." But she adds, "I'm gonna get it." The way she sees it, her curiosity and enthusiasm, rather than raw intelligence, were what helped her to become the first member of her family to graduate from high school.

 

"I always wanted to go to more school, but I feared that that was going to be it for a while," she says about her life after high school. "I knew I had to work, I had to get money, and do all these things before I could go back." When her husband, Benny, heard about Free Minds, he passed the information on to Irene, knowing she wanted to start back to college.

 

Three months in, a quote from Ted Kooser's Poetry Home Repair Manual, assigned for the Creative Writing unit, resonates for Irene. Kooser advises students to "be one of those on whom nothing is lost." Says Irene, "I got a little more confident reading that... what got me through school was the fact that I wanted to know what everyone else knew, and be able to see it in that way." It's clear that this desire to know and pay attention and even be a little relentless will take her far.

Issue 43
In This Issue
Shakespeare Surprises and Delights
Help Austin Families Build a Financial Future
Irene Salas Doesn't Want to Miss a Thing
The Final Word

  

 

 

 

Special Thanks

 

 

This month we were living and breathing Shakespeare. Thank you to those who made the unit such a success, including:

 

Elizabeth Cullingford 
Chair, UT Austin English Department 
for her generous donation of Othello tickets to this year's class

Clayton Stromberger
Outreach Coordinator, UT Shakespeare at Winedale
for sharing your expertise in an engaging  performance workshop



 
If you are interested in volunteering with or supporting Free Minds, you can find more information on our website.

 

 


 
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 Minds in Motion

Archive

    

 

Introducing the Free Minds writing instructor and a student starts college 27 years after high school.

 

We're diving into the philosophy unit and appreciating our new mentors this fall.

 

 

Lots to celebrate at the outset of this academic year: exciting funding news and a brand new group of students.
 

 

 

Looking for earlier newsletters?

Visit our complete 

online archive.

 

The Final Word

Literature Professor Patricia Garca on Teaching Othello

 

My love for Shakespeare probably began in college when my professor described his plays as a tapestry. One could look closely at the words, like studying threads in a canvas, or one could step back and enjoy the interplay of images. A summer studying with other teachers, actors, and scholars at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. helped me realize that I couldn't understand the play completely without viewing it or, even better, performing it myself. Both these lessons made me a better teacher of Shakespeare, and I hope that came across to Free Minds students this fall as we studied Othello. We were lucky enough to attend a performance by the Actors from the London Stage and to welcome Clayton Stromberger from the Shakespeare at Winedale program to workshop the play. I'm now spoiled and will only want to teach Shakespeare in the future with such resources at hand!

 

For our first class meeting, I wanted students to work with the language and to imagine what sort of world Othello lives in. So, we read aloud a short version of scene one. In that scene, the villain Iago's use of racist and demeaning language sets the tone for the play. Free Minds students who walked into class expressing their concerns that they wouldn't "get" Shakespeare, immediately called out Iago for such attitudes. By the time we saw the performance, they had a great sense of not just the plot, but character, conflict, and language. In our final meeting, students considered our course theme, "who do we think we are," in relation to the last words of the main characters, especially Othello who asks us to "Speak of me as I am."

 

As for whom I think I am, I am a teacher profoundly changed by my students every day. My favorite Free Minds experience this semester occurred after our discussion of the roles of women in the play. I had posed this question beforehand as a journal entry. A student came up to me afterwards, showed me her journal, and said, "Pat, you are such a great teacher. Look--my journal matches what we discussed in class tonight." I beamed from the compliment until I realized and shared with her the truth: she had come up with such answers on her own before the class discussion! It's not so much that I am a great teacher, but rather that she, like her classmates, is a great student. I look forward to working with these brilliant students again in the spring.




A program of Foundation Communities, in partnership with The University of Texas at Austin and Austin Community College, Free Minds offers a two-semester college course in the humanities for Central Texas adults who want to fulfill their intellectual potential and begin a new chapter in their lives.

Free Minds Project
Foundation Communities
3036 South 1st Street
Austin TX, 78704

Project Director: Viv� Griffith

Program Coordinator: Amelia Pace-Borah

 

Ph: 512-610-7961   F: 512-447-0288

 

www.freemindsaustin.org