Resentful Dreams
Funny how dreams lag behind events. Folk wisdom says that dreams predict the future, but my experience is that they predict the past. Over the last couple of nights I have dreamed, just before waking, about crappy things my colleagues have done to me. The events in the dreams are fictional, but related to things [...]
Project Challenge: Week 5
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 [...]
Does Libertarianism Cause Brain Damage?
The comments to this article at Inside Higher Ed would suggest as much. Later: See also this remarkable series of brain-damaged responses to Sean Carroll’s (very mild) critique of the right-wing online link dump Arts & Letters Daily.
Questions for the Take-Home Midterm in My Modern American Poetry Course
Instructions: Choose two of the first four questions and write a clearly organized, extended paragraph in response; aditionally, everyone must answer question 5.
Articulate the relationship between alienation and the modernism of Pound and Eliot. Use specific quotations to illustrate your general statements.
Describe the speaker’s relationship to traditional systems of religious belief in Wallace Stevens’ poem [...]
Starting Out Late
I was talking to my friend A. at dinner last night about getting older as an artist & about the way age & reputation interact in the culture of the arts. A. is a sculptor. We started out by agreeing that in the current artistic culture, one has to “make it” at a fairly young [...]
Light Blogging Here / Heavy Blogging with Students
I’m spending quite a bit of time blogging with my students, which means that I am not often moved to crack open the WordPress editing window and write anything here. I use blogs with students for a number of reasons: 1) It’s more efficient that copying handouts for them to read, at least for some [...]
DeKalb
Project Challenge Weeks 3 & 4
I’ve been reporting on my experience teaching Project Challenge, my university’s Saturday morning program for high school students. We live in a rural area & high school students don’t get the same opportunities for “enrichment” they might get if they lived downstate. “Enrichment” is, I suppose, the approved educator’s word for cultural capital. On the [...]
Teaching Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
I almost didn’t include Frost’s most famous poem on the Modern American Poetry syllabus this semester. It is nearly impossible for me to read the text outside of a kind of Thomas Kincaid penumbra of sentimentality. Frost was of course a very canny operator & assiduously cultivated his image as a simple New England bard, [...]
Project Challenge Week 2; or: Three Hours with Eleven Teenagers
Warm-up: Write anything you want but keep writing. Try not to lift your pen or pencil from the page except between words. Let whatever is in your mind out (you won’t have to share any of this unless you want to). Try following the rhythm of the music if you want to, or describe it. [...]
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