In the beginning... I think I taught Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" a few times before I realized that the students didn't understand Connie's symbolic attempt to reconnect to her mother as she screams into the phone. My students had never used -- to any real degree -- a phone that was connected to anything! So I was tickled to discover at a local antique store a whole volume of books dedicated to the telephone! How appropriate that we have moved into
Frankenstein at the same time. As they are awakening to possibility, we have been talking about what it means to have access to knowledge that we haven't learned to understand or control. Their maps reveal their own concern with what they labeled "dangerous" knowledge.
