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. [...]
Cold
About 10° below last night. The river is frozen over except for the channel along the far bank where it runs the fastest. Low pearl-colored sky. Only a few chickadees at the bird feeder. Lucky for me, I don’t have to go farther than the post office today & not until afternoon. Friday is my [...]
Modern American Poetry: Openings
In the opening days of my Modern American Poetry class I have been trying to get across three things: 1) What we mean by “modern” in the course title; 2) a sense of Whitman & Dickinson as founders; 3) some basic information about versification, which some of my students have but others don’t — the [...]
Project Challenge
I’m going to spend the next five Saturday mornings teaching a poetry writing workshop to fifteen-year-olds. My university runs the a program for local students in which we bring students to campus faculty teach them something about their discipline. Tomorrow morning, my wife Carole is going to come along and show the students how to [...]
Whew!
The first week of the semester certainly knocked the wind out of my Bach blogging. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to resume in the next day or two. I’ve met all three of my classes & each seems fine in its own way. I’m doing three preps for the first time in twenty years [...]
Rough Cut: Poets & Poems for Modern American Poetry
Whitman, “One’s Self I Sing,” “I Hear American Singing,” “For You O Democracy,” “*Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “I Hear It Was Charged Against Me,” “A Glimpse.”
Emily Dickinson, (There is a certain Slant of light), (I felt a Funeral, in my Brain), (After Great pain, a formal feeling comes), (I heard a Fly buzz–when I died), (My [...]
I Love Teaching
This is my twentieth year teaching at Clarkson & my twenty-sixth year teaching, not counting graduate school. Yesterday I met my first classes for the semester, which is going to be a busy one. In going over the syllabus with each class, beginning to lay out the themes we’re going to develop, I felt a [...]
Search Phrases
Looking at the search phrases that brought viewers — I won’t say readers — to one’s blog, little stories suggest themselves. This one, for instance:
Poem Analysis of “dead boy”
The grammar belies a certain — how shall we say? — lack of sophistication that makes one think of a desperate high school student who has been [...]
