Finishing the Job

We took on the last of Job and J.B. this week, and once again, the students got in their best fight over the endings. On one side were those who thought that "I'm the one worthy of rule, not you, so you don't get to cite rules at me" was a pathetic way to answer Job's questions, on the other were those who thought that Job was better for having "gone through" what happened to him.

And before that, on Monday, we had our annual festival of Job movies. (There weren't really movies, only ideas for movies.) Here were some of my favorites:

• Job in Oz instead of Uz: At least one of his children dies of a poppy overdose, a good witch and a bad witch instead of God and Satan test Job, the whole thing ends with Job waking up and realizing it was all a dream so that the story isn't so much of a downer
• The Jobman Show: Like The Truman Show, except instead of one Christof in the booth, there's a God-figure and a Satan-figure
• Job: The Horror Movie: Satan takes on the form of an axe murderer and does the dirty work himself; after Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar accuse Job of bringing it upon themselves, the axe murderer gets them too. Job wins a desperate fight with the murderer at the end and pulls the mask off of the dying killer to discover that it was Bildad all along.
• Job in Hollywood: Job, having signed a stifling contract out of desperation, is assaulted both by his agent Zophar and a tabloid reporter, Bildad, as he struggles with a God-judge figure to get the contract revoked.
  

If I teach this class again in the fall (I'm tossing around a couple other ideas, and I might get picked up for something other than freshman comp), I think I'll make this project worth some grade points. I'd have to develop some sort of rubric, but I think it could work.

I've now met with all three of my professors and have three green lights for paper topics. I've got one of them pretty much scripted, one solidly in mind with some research still to do, and one for which I need to finish a rather substantial book before I can even begin drafting. Then I've got a set of papers coming in Monday and final portfolios two and a half weeks after that. I imagine I've got about five weeks to get it all done. Ah, graduate school.