Meme: Passion Quilt

Lumpenproffesoriat tagged me for a meme a few days back, and I've been thinking about it for a few days now as I've been finishing finals and doing my best to get grades in and random departmental stuff done. It seemed like a nice way to end off the semester, thinking about why I do what I do, and trying to express it somewhat creatively.

The rules of the meme are fairly simple:

• Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
• Give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."
• Link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

Now I'm not going to tag people, but I thought the meme works nicely with the semi-recent thread about why people teach (you can see my answer to that meme here). I've got the same concerns I had then - do I want to out myself in terms of what I teach with this or should I find a way around it? As before, I'm trying to find a way around it, not just because I want to maintain some small vestige of privacy, but because beyond my subject area there are some lessons that I want students to get.

This topic has been much on my mind this year (see this post for some early thoughts on it). And I don't know that I can phrase it better than I felt I did that day. I teach my subject because I'm interested in it. But there are broader lessons to be learned from the course. I remember a professor telling me early on in my own undergraduate career that college was as much about classes and a field of knowledge as it was about learning to make smart decisions and take responsibility for yourself. Those aren't the lessons my picture is about, per say, but you get the idea.

When I started to think about what the underlying themes to what I teach, it boils down to this (and we can call this my title to help satisfy the meme requirements):

You have a choice, and that choice not only matters but it affects others.

So with that in mind, here's my image. I decided, since I've been playing with Photoshop lately, I should play a bit and make my own. Here goes:


The image is far from entirely my own. When I first read about the meme, I immediately thought of the old cover for the "Know Your Rights" single by the Clash, and so part of that is seen here in the center. But I also thought a bit about a series of images by Scott McCloud who, in giving his explanation of how we read comics, also does an amazing job of explaining signs, signifiers, and signified in his book Understanding Comics. So I've plucked some things from both of those images, and combined them a bit to make my own.

Now rather than tag five people, I'll let whomever is interested nominate themselves (but please let me know if you do it, as I'd love to see what everyone comes up with). It would be fun, too, to have someone collect the images and answers someplace (honestly, shouldn't someone pitch this as a book?).