Project Challenge: Week 5
Posted on February 29, 2008
Filed Under Poetry, Teaching | 3 Comments
Note: I started this last week, after my run of Saturday mornings with the high school students had concluded. On the last day, I didn’t try to introduce new material; instead, I tried to consolidate some of the fundamentals I had worked on in the previous weeks: concrete language, drawing playfully on the unconscious, listening to language, structure as a way of shaping expression . . . So we did some short exercises that repeated some of the things from earlier weeks in shorter form, then I showed them a video tape from the Lannan Foundation that edits together bits of interviews & poetry readings with the likes of Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Phillip Levine, Allen Ginsburg, Yehudah Amichai, and others. The focus of the video, called Where Poems Come From, is on process as both freedom & discipline. And it was that dynamic I had been trying to put over throughout the whole workshop. After the video, I talked a little bit about the way going to school & living in a media-saturated culture tends to dull our ability to use language freely for our own purposes. I suggested that the students keep writing in a notebook & keep reading things their teachers don’t approve of as a way of keeping their access to their own language & to the language of poems & stories. After that, I opened the boxes of donuts I’d brought, passed out the orange juice, and we simply chatted. Since many of my students are in the process of getting ready to go to college (not necessarily to Clarkson), we talked about everything from the food in the dorms to what you have to do in Freshman English. A lovely group of students with whom it was a pleasure to work. [Previous posts on teaching Project Challenge]
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3 Responses to “Project Challenge: Week 5”
what of the artwork –collage notebook work–that was produced? did you scan those? i forgot how many students–less than 15 i recall. i want to know more abt the process in your summation but i don’t know what my mind hungers for because the promise of the enterprise seemed so much like a poem itself, a poem in the making wherein there is so much destruction and so much discovery. edward mycue
Joe, are you familiar with work of John Taylor Gatto on education? I’ve recently found out about his work. He was New York State Teacher of the year, and famously quit while still holding the title. He’s been advocating his ideas for changing education with some excellent books. A young friend of mine is using this book in an undergraduate thesis: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm
Thanks, Albert. I’ll check it out.