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.

I’ve found that letting students poke fun at hypothetical poems before writing their own helps them to a) stay attuned to the siren song of schlock so that they can better resist it and b) maintain a sense of humor about the whole thing so that when someone does write a poem featuring that single tear or an alarmingly mobile heart, we can talk about it without the writer feeling defensive. After all, the battle against sentimentality is one we’re all fighting.

Oh—and the dead kitten thing? A grad student took on that challenge, and wrote a beautiful, spare, weird poem that opened with a dead kitten in a shoebox. The poem surprised at every turn and was just accepted for publication. Of course a dead kitten could be even more sentimental than a live one, depending on how it’s rendered—the moral here, I think, is that if we as poets choose our words and our images with an eye toward circumventing the expected, we stand a much better chance of writing poems that are resonant, moving, and completely inappropriate for Hallmark.

I’m going to use that assignment again.

Next semester, I also plan to spring a “radio drama” assignment on my upper-level fiction workshop. I’m thinking that students would work in pairs, create a drama that is five minutes long, with nothing but dialogue and sound effects. No voiceover. My hope is that the assignment will cause them to pay close attention to dialogue and narrative structure. It should also be fun. We’ll play the finished five-minute recordings in class, maybe burn CDs with everyone’s work—an audio anthology of radio dramas. Perfect for long car rides.

So my question, as this semester draws to a close, is this: What have you got up your sleeve for the spring?

After years of being one of the veritable army of literature graduate students who teach freshman composition, I was ecstatic to be given my first literature course in the spring of 2010. My excitement quickly turned to terror, though, when I realized that while I was teaching said class, I would also be preparing for my doctoral exams and beginning to draft my dissertation. I unashamedly admit that my first response to these complications was to try to design a class that minimized my day-to-day responsibilities as much as possible. However, this somewhat less-than-honorable approach actually led me to what I believe is a very effective method of teaching literature.

At the center of this approach is an assignment I call Discussion Openers, which puts small groups of students in charge of generating the class’s daily lecture and discussion content. At the beginning of the semester, I put students into groups and show them the course schedule; they then sign up for particular topics and/or readings that interest them. On a group’s assigned days, they are expected to “expand the class’s learning about an issue or issues from the readings beyond what is obvious in the text.” Rather than conceptualizing this assignment as a “presentation,” then, where the group simply shows their comprehension of the assigned readings while the rest of the class falls asleep, students are required to provide context to the readings. Some examples include:

• a group that presented on Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food by having the class participate in a blind taste-test featuring organic and non-organic oranges.
• a group that critiqued a text on the interactivity of video games by showing veterans’ reactions to World War II-themed games such as Call of Duty and Medal of Honor.
• a Scandinavian student who brought in examples of local poetry from his birth country to show thematic parallels between it and Beowulf.

After this portion of the Discussion Opener, students lead class discussion on the assigned texts and the contextual materials they’ve chosen. Usually this takes about a third of the class period; however, when groups do an exceptional job, it’s not uncommon for them to spend the entire class leading discussion from front of the room. Not only does this assignment minimize the amount of prep I need to do, it prompts students to learn more pro-actively, which goes a long way in helping them understand content and succeed in the course.  Sometimes it’s difficult for them to see that the point of the Discussion Opener is not rote regurgitation, but rather an opportunity to spark a constructive, class-wide discussion. On the other side of the coin, I sometimes need to step in during a Discussion Opener to keep the conversation from going too far off track thanks to an overabundance of enthusiasm on the part of students. By and large, though, this approach to discussion in the literature classroom – “lazy” as it seemed to me at first –gets my students to think critically and participate in the course on a much deeper level.  An added benefit is that the experience of getting in front of the classroom on a regular basis makes students more comfortable with collaboration and peer review,  qualities I’ve seen emerge through various in-class and online activities I’ve since designed to build off of the success of the Discussion Openers.

If you are a graduate student and have experiences teaching literature that you would like to share on this blog, please contact Tim Hetland.