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Freshman Tutorial
General Description of Freshman Tutorials
During the fall semester of his freshman year, every Wabash student enrolls in a Freshman Tutorial. This class, limited to fifteen members, introduces you to academic experiences characteristic of the liberal arts at Wabash College and emphasizes academic skills basic to your Wabash education. Instructors (note: your tutorial instructor may also be your academic advisor) select topics of importance to them and ones they judge to be of interest to students.
You need not have had previous experience with the topic in order to enroll in a particular tutorial. Although the topics, often interdisciplinary and non-traditional, vary among the tutorials, all students engage in common intellectual experiences and practice both written and oral self-expression. Reading, speaking, research, and writing assignments, of course, will vary with individual instructors, but the goals of every tutorial remain the same: to read texts with sensitivity, to think with clarity, and to express one's thoughts (orally and in writing) with precision and persuasion—all in terms of each tutorial's particular subject.
Nineteen tutorials will be offered in the Fall Semester, and all tutorials will meet on Tuesday-Thursday at 9:45 a.m. The schedule of your other classes will be set so as not to conflict with the tutorial. Tutorial Assignments are determined in the order of electronic selection (first respond-first assigned).
Tutorial Selection
Read the following list of available Tutorial Titles and Instructors. Click on a title to read a full description of the tutorial’s content, readings, and class activities. Click here for a printable list of all tutorials with course descriptions.
Select a tutorial that is interesting to you, regardless of your concerns about possible majors. Once assigned to a tutorial, you will not be able to register for another tutorial, so before making your final decision, read the course descriptions for several of the tutorials whose titles interest you. SELECT CAREFULLY AND RESPOND PROMPTLY! IF YOU DO NOT REGISTER FOR A TUTORIAL, YOU WILL BE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED TO ONE. As each tutorial is filled, the title and description will be removed from the following list.
To select a tutorial, click on the tutorial’s name, read the description, and click on “Sign Up For This Course.” If you get into the course or the course fills up, you will be notified immediately.
Tutorial Titles and Descriptions
FT 011-A 9/11 and American Culture
Crystal Benedicks, Department of English
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The worst terrorist incident to occur on American soil, the 9/11 attacks were a transformational event. They took the country into “The Global War on Terror,” land wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the curtailment of civil rights. The attacks brought new terminologies into our lexicon, like “Al-Qaeda,” “National Threat Level,” and “Homeland.” 9/11 is one of a select few moments in modern American history—the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Challenger disaster are others—that is etched in our collective cultural memory, carved into our national soul. We still live today, as Art Speigelman put it, “in the shadow of no towers.” In the aftermath, people sought to express their grief, rage, bewilderment, and love as people always have: through art. As a result, 9/11 has also had a seismic effect on our culture. In novels (Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), films (World Trade Center, United 93), plays (Anne Nelson’s The Guys, Neil LeBute’s The Mercy Seat), graphic novels and media (Art Speigelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation), and poetry, (Seamus Heaney’s “Anything Can Happen”), artists and writers sought to make sense of an event that rendered even the idea of artistic representation problematic to some. Drawing on these texts, some of which were written while the towers still smoldered, we will also try to make sense of an event that transformed all of our lives, and confronts us with questions every day. How shall we commemorate the dead? How is the omnipresent threat of terrorism represented in culture? How do art, literature, and performance represent trauma? In this course we will ask: ten years later, what does 9/11 mean?
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Benedicks, Crystal
Credits: 1
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