The CEA Forum - Winter/Spring 2007 - SPECIAL SECTION: EMPATHY AND ETHICS - THE "I" OF THE STORM - Teaching English

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by SANS

A reflective essay for the CEA Forum’s Special Section on empathy and ethics examines how a post-Katrina, post-disaster teaching context shaped instruction for students and instructors in New Orleans. Nancy Dixon frames teaching as deeply personal and discusses “storm lit” literature, student responses, and unusual course adaptations under displacement, including grade inflation and condensed workload. The essay centers on her own survival narrative, describing the hurricane stay, the levee breach, rising floodwaters, and classroom-related lessons drawn from catastrophe.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time13 min

AccessFree to download

SPECIAL SECTION: EMPATHY AND ETHICS

THE "I" OF THE STORM: Teaching English and Helping Students and Instructors Cope in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Storm lit and course adaptations

Personal narrative: surviving Katrina and rising floodwaters

The CEA Forum Winter/Spring 2007: 36.1 SPECIAL SECTION: EMPATHY AND ETHICS THE "I" OF THE STORM: TEACHING ENGLISH AND HELPING STUDENTS AND INSTRUCTORS COPE IN POST-KATRINA NEW ORLEANS Nancy Dixon This essay is entitled “The ‘I' of the Storm” in order to stress the very personal nature of teaching in the immediate, post-Katrina semester of Fall 2005. The University of New Orleans (UNO) was the only university in the city to open that semester, and many traumatized instructors, myself included, were serving the thousands of traumatized students to the best of our ability, online and in satellite classrooms spread throughout the city, while the storm-ravaged campus was being repaired. I will discuss teaching works that so closely reflect the natural/manmade disaster that so many of us in the online classrooms had recently suffered, which I refer to as“storm lit.” And I will discuss the students' reaction to such literature and to the course in general. I will also discuss some of the unusual practices that came into play in such a trying semester, such as grade inflation and condensing the workload. This semester came with no teaching manual, and while we educators were displaced or had lost everything, we were constantly reminded that our students had as well. I will begin with my own storm lit, which details how I survived the levee breach and the ensuing flood. First of all, I love hurricanes, or did before Katrina, and I am one of those who does not evacuate, nor have I ever had reason to, until August 29, 2005. I live in Midcity in a hundred-year-old house with my partner of eleven years, Bill Lavender, and my dog Renny and cat Kitterz. Since the house is 100 years old and has survived countless hurricanes and because we were dogsitting we decided to stay; that was our pretzel logic, so we called our neighbor Charlie, inviting him to come over for a hurricane party, a common practice in these parts which entails cleaning out the freezer in advance of the inevitable power outage, cooking an elaborate “last supper,” and drinking lots of wine by candlelight and hurricane lamps. Well, the house did survive Katrina quite well; in fact, Bill was outside at the height of the storm in his motorcycle helmet posing for the video and pictures that I was snapping, and we had the back windows of the house open to let in some much needed breeze, if that's what one calls winds of up to 100 mph. We actually even managed to fall asleep during the storm, but we had to turn off our cell phones to do so, as family and friends from all over were calling nonstop to tell us that“this is the big one; you've got to get out,” hours after any evacuation was even possible. When we awoke, after calling our loved ones to assure them that we were okay, we went outside to assess the damage: a tree on the house, a foot or so of water in the street, limbs down and garbage and debris as far as one could see, the usual. But we wanted to explore further, so we crossed the street and “borrowed” our neighbor's boat to row around the neighborhood, first picking up Charlie to accompany us. By lunchtime, we were back in the house, and oddly enough, the water was a few inches higher than it was when we left. We still didn't think much of it, until it was about 2 and ½ feet deep by sundown. By that time, we were very glad that we'd gotten our neighbor's boat and knew that it was going to be used for more than exploring the neighborhood. For the next two days, we listened to the radio to find out just why the water was rising and rising and not subsequently receding, as it usually does after a hurricane. We heard our senator tell us that there was a rumor spreading about New Orleans filling up like a bowl but that it was simply untrue, yet that gave me absolutely no consolation, for one, because he's a Republican, and for another, it was becoming obvious that indeed the city, at least Midcity, was filling up like a bowl, albeit very slowly. (We measur

FAQs

Why is the essay titled “The ‘I’ of the Storm”?

The title stresses the personal nature of teaching in the immediate post-Katrina semester, when instructors’ experiences were central to how courses were conducted.

What challenges affected teaching and course design after Katrina?

The essay describes a lack of teaching manuals and displacement, along with practices such as grade inflation and condensing the workload to cope with an extraordinary semester.

What does the author call “storm lit,” and how does it relate to teaching?

“Storm lit” refers to teaching materials that closely reflect the disaster the instructors and students had recently experienced, and the essay addresses student reactions to this literature and the course overall.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by SANS