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What I Want My Students to Find When They Google “How to Comment on a Poem”

I teach a lot of poetry workshops; this summer I’m teaching one at Harvard Summer School. Today was the first day of class and students developed ideas and assignments for their first poems. On Wednesday, we’ll discuss those poems and have our first workshop.

This means it’s time to talk to the students about how to comment on their classmates’ poems. I want this conversation to give the first workshop a useful structure and I want the students to take away a model for how to comment on classmates’ poems outside of workshop.

I do this differently every semester — different groups of students have different levels of comfort and anxiety with one another. This group seems particularly thoughtful and charming. But invariably someone will worry that they aren’t qualified to comment on someone else’s poem, so I like to start with the basics. I’m going to give my students this handout on Wednesday:

9 Things to Consider When You Comment on a Classmate’s Poem: A Checklist

(click here for a PDF version of the checklist!)

Continue reading “What I Want My Students to Find When They Google “How to Comment on a Poem””

Teaching Difficult Texts

I recently taught Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” to my summer school students. It is a difficult text, if only because students’ responses tend to be simply that it’s very weird (it is, and that’s why I love it). In truth, the story is difficult because it is so dense and because it’s so far from anything most first year college students expect in a story. While the prose is matter-of-fact, the story itself is not. My students are not particularly attuned to the idea that a short story might be a parable – and because students in introduction to literature courses generally do not read slowly and deliberately, they will frequently miss important details that help illuminate meaning.

In addition to teaching this story, I also decided that it was time to begin working on getting my students to interact with one another. So far, they have been willing to respond to my questions, but they haven’t quite made the move to discussing the texts with one another. They’ll talk to one another while I’m not in the room (I’ve sometimes left the room for this very reason), but not necessarily while I’m there. Those interactions are a bit more hesitant.

To begin to work on this, I assigned each student a set of questions about “A Hunger Artist,” questions simply drawn from an instructor’s manual. Each student had to first briefly summarize the plot of the story, then answer two more complex, interpretive questions that required delving into the material carefully. I gave them ten minutes to do this. Continue reading “Teaching Difficult Texts”

Ensnared by Memory

The recent announcement that the University of Missouri is closing its academic press has led me to revisit some of the books published by the press over the years. This morning, I’m re-reading parts of Joe David Bellamy’s excellent book Literary Luxuries: American Writing at the End of the Millennium. Bellamy was one of my very first creative writing professors—he taught a fiction workshop at St. Lawrence University. Every Wednesday night from 7 until 10, a group of 12 to 15 students would get together to discuss craft with a man who had once directed the literature program of the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m not sure I recognized what a unique opportunity this was while I was experiencing it.

At the time, I believe Bellamy was most well-known for his fiction, but Literary Luxuries is a great nonfiction book that I think any writer—regardless of genre—would do well to check out. It is equal parts memoir, personal essay, craft guide, and survey of the literary landscape of the late twentieth century.

One of the chapters in the book—a craft essay titled “The Autobiographical Trap”—should be of particular interest to nonfiction writers. The essay’s target audience is fiction writers, but I think the lessons he imparts are important for nonfiction writers to hear as well.

“When one writes from life and memory,” Bellamy writes, “there is always a tendency to become so involved emotionally with the material that the work becomes ‘too thin’ or anorexic. The least suggestion (the slimmest outline or reminder) of the traumatic events you wish to write about causes the floodgates of emotion to open up for you … So it is not difficult at all to persuade yourself that the floodgates will open up for the reader as well.” There’s danger in making such an assumption, though—our readers don’t have our experiences, haven’t perceived the world as we have, and those suggestions, outlines, and reminders that resonate so much with us need to be developed and described in more detail if they are to resonate with the reader. As Bellamy explains, “This means a careful and full rendering of the action, the motivations, and the expository details that are so familiar to the writer that they are easy to overlook.” Continue reading “Ensnared by Memory”

Pop Culture and Teaching Shakespeare

When I teach literature – any of it really, but Shakespeare in particular – I have a tendency to use references to popular culture to help my students make sense of the texts they read, and in particular, the characters that populate them.

For example, I’ve pointed out to students that there’s a certain Cartman (of South Park)-esque “Respect my authoritah” attitude in much of Richard III’s interactions with other characters (other Cartman catch-phrases work equally well with Richard II, incidentally). I’ve also taken great advantage of YouTube clips to draw students into an understanding of the cultural relevance of Shakespeare: we’ve watched a video of Peter Sellers reciting The Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” in the style of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, and we’ve compared the President’s speech in Independence Day to Olivier’s rendition of the St. Crispin’s Day speech.

These aren’t simply gimmicks to encourage student interest; aside from my own appreciation for pop culture, I have a larger purpose in introducing these comparisons, a purpose based in my own educational training. Taking its cues from cognitive psychology, constructivist educational philosophy* suggests that we organize all of our experiences and all of our knowledge in “cognitive schema.” Essentially, we build information on already existing knowledge and attempt to make sense of new information based on those structures of understanding. In order to facilitate significant learning and thinking, educators need to create a sense of cognitive dissonance – a point where the student must grapple with information that does not fit within his or her cognitive schemata. From this point of dissonance, individuals construct their own understanding of information. Continue reading “Pop Culture and Teaching Shakespeare”

The Workshop Workout

As a student, I was never really a fan of writing exercises—they often seemed gimmicky or overly directed. Only once did an exercise ever turn into an actual story. (On my desktop I titled the exercise “Stupid Ron” because I so resented having to do it—I have since spent quite a bit of time apologizing to my then teacher, the beloved Ron Carlson; the story that resulted was published in Glimmer Train, served as the writing sample for my now tenured job, and won me a $5000 grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, which I used to go to Bread Loaf.) Despite that one success, when I became a teacher I remained suspicious of writing exercises; they seemed like an awfully convenient way to expend a chunk of class-time. But, mostly because my students say they value them, I have gradually come to use writing exercises in my workshops. I still don’t do them (I don’t eat lima beans either, now that nobody can make me), but I’ve come to believe in their value.

The student-me was only ever assigned one kind of writing exercise, intended to inspire—to lead to the creation of new work. And I have never really been short of ideas for new work. But I’ve found that there are really three types of writing exercises; those intended for:

inspiration
exploration and revision
fun

Inspiration exercises often work best for beginning students who haven’t discovered that they are allowed to write about all kinds of things. For example, in my intro class this semester, I had the students brainstorm historical and current events that they’d like to write poems about. This was a pretty surprising idea for many of them, even though they’d just read a host of poems about the Vietnam War. In the intro class, I’ve come to depend on writing exercises as a way to get students away from more clichéd topics and styles—to break them of habits they were somehow born right into. Continue reading “The Workshop Workout”

What’s the point?

For the final writing assignment in my Introduction to Literature course, I want students to think about the implications of what we’ve been doing all semester, to think about the larger picture of why literature is a part of our culture. To do this, I give them a list of six concepts we’ve been working with: love, war, identity, family, death, power, and the following question:

How do the ways that various literary texts define [concept X] suggest the role of literature in creating a broader (cultural) understanding of that concept?

This question works with any number of broader concepts or themes in a literature course: I simply choose those six because they’re the ones that we’ve focused on, and they’re the ones we focus on in our final reading, Hamlet.

I like to have the students think about this question because it allows them to do a number of things. First and foremost, it allows the students broad range in what they talk about. In their previous assignments, I’ve dictated which texts they can select and even limited the maximum number of texts they can write about – an attempt to encourage careful, close reading. For this assignment, I give students a minimum number of texts (three) to discuss, no maximum number, and free range over anything in the anthology. Doing this encourages students to explore their potential sources, cull the most relevant material, and develop an argument beyond summary. These are important skills in any academic paper. Continue reading “What’s the point?”

Reading and the Material World

Several years ago, I had the privilege of participating in a Folger seminar entitled “Accessorizing the Renaissance,” and since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the material culture of the early modern period, my primary field. I’ve also been thinking about how to teach students about the material world in relation to reading – and about why it’s important and relevant to the study of literature.

I wish that I had impressive sewing skills or cooking skills so that I could make things for my students to try on and try out; and I wish I wasn’t short on money, so I could take my students to London to actually see the material space of the city. We have a number of places in the area that I would like to take advantage of: the outer banks and Roanoke Island, St. Luke’s Church in Smithfield, Virginia, and the Harriet Jacobs sites in Edenton, North Carolina. As of now, I’ve yet to find the time to prepare such a trip, and I don’t always have the relevant literature to teach in my classes. And – like many of us – my workload outpaces my imagination. But in my most recent Introduction to Literary Studies classes, I hit upon a plan to make the material world relevant to my students, a plan that took advantage of the resources in our small, historic town: We met one day in the local historic cemetery.

We prepared for this trip by talking about how we can read material objects much the way that we can read texts: material objects, particularly ornamental ones, can show us a lot about the attitudes and lives of the people who lived with them. We can do this with clothing – I’ve used changes in women’s dress to introduce new periods of literature. We can do this with architecture – I often show students Baroque and Rococo architecture when we talk about eighteenth-century literature. And we can do this with tombstones.

I asked the students to read a tombstone from the nineteenth century against an Emily Dickinson poem to show nineteenth-century attitudes about death. It was a difficult project, because while the students wanted to talk about what the tombs said about life and what they said about the families that erected them, the assignment also forced them to stretch their idea of what reading is and what the material world shows us. Continue reading “Reading and the Material World”

Photographic Memories: Using Photos to Prompt Writing

At some point while he was running, the kid’s batting helmet must have fallen off, because you can see his light blond hair—still short from the disastrous haircut his father gave him before his First Communion—practically glowing under the California sun. He’s in the second grade and his t-ball team is the Reds. Inexplicably, their t-shirt (the only “uniform” t-ballers get) is orange. He is sliding, kicking up dirt, but he has already passed home plate. Afraid that he’ll wind up short, he always waits until he has already tagged up to begin his slide. Sliding is his favorite part of the game—that, and the free snow cones they get after they play.

Obviously, this young athlete is me, and this is my wife’s favorite picture of me when I was a kid. I loved to play t-ball, though I obviously wasn’t very good at it. In t-ball—at least in our league—there were no strike outs, probably because swinging at and missing a stationary ball mounted on a tee wasn’t the sort of thing that tended to happen. It did to me, though. All the time. I would approach the tee confidently, bring my bat back, and then twist my entire body into that swing, to the point that my eye left the ball long before the bat in my hand woooooshed right over it. The grown-ups would let me do it over. Eventually, I’d wind up on a base. Continue reading “Photographic Memories: Using Photos to Prompt Writing”

Seeing Molly Sweeney

I decided to read Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney just before I went to see the Irish Repertory Theatre’s recent production. This is not something I always do. Often, of course, I would have read or sometimes even have seen a classic play, but usually not immediately before seeing it again. I was concerned that my emotional response wouldn’t be as immediate with the lines so fresh in my mind. Molly Sweeney is a young woman, blind for forty years, just about to experience an operation that would give her sight. It is a profoundly emotional time in Molly’s life and in her husband, Frank’s, life.

I read the play knowing John Millington Synge’s The Well of the Saints (1905), on a similar theme, and also knowing that Friel had been moved by Oliver Sacks’s “To See and Not to See,” which is about sight and knowledge. All of these influences were here, but they were dwarfed by the power of actors Simone Kirby (Molly), Jonathan Hogan (Dr. Rice), and Ciaran O’Reilly (Frank). Molly’s first speech caught me immediately. Kirby’s delivery of the lines was so direct, so innocent, so filled with the ambiguity of fear and joy that I felt a rush of emotion. If anything, reading the play immediately before seeing it intensified my pleasure and my response—even as I anticipated the lines I remembered best.

Everything depends on how the actors deliver their lines because this is a play with little overt action. I’m sure some theatergoers might doubt that it is a drama at all. In the tradition of Friel’s own Faith Healer, the actors stand and speak one after the other to the audience, telling them their very distinct view of the same story. This may seem undramatic—and in the hands of a lesser writer it almost certainly would be. But Molly Sweeney is riveting in part because the story is surprising and the actors are moving. Storytelling in Molly Sweeney, especially from three points of view, constitutes significant drama.

Being able to bring your students to the theater after reading a play is usually regarded as a good idea. I can see the reasoning behind it, and in this case I wasn’t sorry I’d read before, but I don’t always feel it’s the best idea. What do you think? What have your experiences been, taking students to the theater just after reading a play?

Experiential Literature

I’ve been thinking about multimodal learning lately, and I’ve been drawn to the idea of making literature experiential, almost tangible. I’ve had my students work with the material, physical experience of literature in a couple of different ways – and I’ve been brainstorming other possibilities.

Perhaps the most obvious idea in teaching students to experience literature physically is to have students act out scenes from plays. I don’t mean just having them read the scene aloud; rather, I mean having the students physically act out the play at the front of the classroom. For example, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl includes a street scene with three separate shops and a group of characters moving among those shops, conversing and sampling the wares. I think that this scene is often quite difficult for students to comprehend on the page, so I have students not only read it aloud, but also follow the stage directions. I draw points on the board where the shops would be located, and recruit students to act the parts; then I have the actors move around the “stage” in the front of the classroom, with one extra student acting as a stage manager to remind people to move if necessary. In this way, the students still sitting in the class can visualize what occurs, and the students acting it feel the almost dizzying experience of moving between these shops. This is particularly useful in a play that’s deeply rooted to the city of London, a space that contemporaneous theater-goers would have known well. Continue reading “Experiential Literature”