assignment ideas – Lit Bits

Early on in my introductory poetry workshop, we discuss the difference between sentiment (emotion) and sentimentality (mawkishness, Hallmark cards, Lifetime holiday movies). First we talk about the ways in which sentimentality undercuts our ability to imbue our poems with real sentiment—it leads us toward cliché, it looks for the easy or more palatable way into an experience, it doesn’t require the level of intellectual and creative engagement we expect from good poems.

Then we start making fun of poets.

Okay, I say, imagine that you’re writing a parody of a poem and you want to make it wonderfully bad—full of clichés and cringe-worthy sentimentality. What are some key words you might use? “Heart,” someone always offers. We look for a little more specificity. “What should a heart not do in a poem?” I ask. “Skip a beat,” says one student. “Break,” says another. “End up in your throat,” offers someone else. Once we exhaust the heart possibilities, we move on, looking for the big offenders. What are some other words or tropes that might lead to sentimentality? I can usually get someone to come up with “soul,” which affords me an opportunity to write the word “soul” on the board, then draw a giant X through it—something I always like leaving on the board for the next class to see and fret over what sorts of things are being taught in creative writing classrooms. Usually someone mentions roses. Someone mentions the single tear. All of these go on the board (and I always offer the disclaimer that none of these rules is absolute—certainly, fantastic poems can be written using any number of potentially problematic words or images, provided the poet is savvy about how he or she uses them). Finally we move on to animals—butterflies as symbols of innocence, a bird as a vision of freedom. And, of course, there’s cuteness to be reckoned with—puppies, kittens, any three-legged quadruped. Sometimes I tell my students that they can only use a kitten in a poem if the kitten is dead. Continue reading “Kill the Kitten: Helping Students Skirt Sentimentality”

In the student-centered literature classroom, one of the skills we try to teach is the ability to evaluate other people’s claims about a work of literature. We can do this in a variety of ways, but one way I’m particularly fond of is based on an exercise that I found in Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty by Elizabeth Berkeley, K. Patricia Cross, and Claire Howell Major. Their exercise is called “Send-a-Problem,” and it asks students to answer a series of open-ended questions about theme and character development, and then evaluate a set of answers. Their version of the exercise calls for the instructor to write each question on the outside of a manila envelope. Students then work in small groups to answer the question, slide their answer into the envelope, and pass it along to the next group. Eventually, groups will have answered all but one question; upon receipt of the final envelope, each group will evaluate all the answers to that last question, a question they have not yet themselves answered.

Conceptually, I like this exercise. Logistically, I hate it. So I’ve adjusted it to suit my needs. I simply create a list of questions, print each on a separate sheet, and give each group all but one of the questions. Students take their time – often the bulk of a 50 minute class period – answering the questions as thoroughly as possible, then we redistribute and evaluate. Continue reading “Answering Questions, Questioning Answers: A Collaborative Assignment”