On Friday, I visited my son's 4th grade class to teach the kids about poetic meter. I used an activity that I actually use at Bucknell where the students invent movements to go along with each metric foot (like a skip for an iamb -- an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one) and then have relay races to see which metric form is fastest. On Friday, dactyls won the race. It was highly entertaining, and showing kids that poetry can be fun is pretty awesome.
Today, I got a packet of thank-you notes, many with pictures of the kids leaping around and some with poems they wrote. They thanked me for teaching them about meter, and many of them wrote about meter in ways they showed they really understood it. One kid wrote, "Thanks for showing us how to dance to poetry," and another wrote, "I learned more about meter and poetry than I will ever learn." Reading their notes has completely filled me with joy!
In my novel, the main characters attend a poetry camp, and I feel a renewed sense of commitment to that part of the novel. Poetry is accessible and interesting and entertaining to children! Maybe I can find a way to get some of the joy from meter tag and from the thank you notes into my book.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Monday, April 26, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Queen Victoria and Blogging
Today was the first day of classes this semester at Bucknell, and I met both my classes: Victorian Literature and Culture in the morning and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers in the afternoon. The C19 Women Writers is an advanced seminar and so I asked them to do a short reading assignment for the first day of class: the aim being to introduce stereotypes and immediately break them down and thus elevate our discussion from the get go. To this end, we read some material by and about Queen Victoria.
Victoria is a fascinating figure in many ways, but for the purposes of this class, I wanted us to focus on the fact that while we might imagine most Victorian women resented the restrictions placed on them by society, Victoria, the one women who could have thrown off those restrictions, chose to live with them, chose to subordinate herself to her husband, chose a simple, middle-class, domestic life.
The conversation went in a direction I didn't anticipate, though. We talked about how difficult it is to know what she really wanted or felt or even what her life was really like. Her image was carefully managed and probably carefully constructed, so even when we read her private letters to her daughter, we can detect her awareness of her image and observe how she manages that image.
And this is where blogging comes in. A blog, in my view, is an odd form at once private and public. That is, we write blogs hoping they will be read not just by friends but probably also by strangers, yet in tone and content they are often cousins to the journal or to the old-fashioned letter. As I write this now, I am pretty sure no one will read it, but when I am finished, I will click "publish post" and doing so is an acknowledgement that I am making this post public. Someone might read it. Victoria wrote letters to her daughter first and foremost for her daughter, but given her position and her evident media savvy, she likely anticipated that her letters would one day be published. So her private correspondence is haunted by the prospect of becoming public, and so she surely must have modulated her comments, her attitudes, her image with that prospect in mind.
A blogger must be sympathetic to her plight, a writer who crafts personal sentences in a space that appears private but is really public. I am appreciating for the first time what a peculiar genre a blog post is, and it is Queen Victoria who illuminated this peculiarity for me.
Victoria is a fascinating figure in many ways, but for the purposes of this class, I wanted us to focus on the fact that while we might imagine most Victorian women resented the restrictions placed on them by society, Victoria, the one women who could have thrown off those restrictions, chose to live with them, chose to subordinate herself to her husband, chose a simple, middle-class, domestic life.
The conversation went in a direction I didn't anticipate, though. We talked about how difficult it is to know what she really wanted or felt or even what her life was really like. Her image was carefully managed and probably carefully constructed, so even when we read her private letters to her daughter, we can detect her awareness of her image and observe how she manages that image.
And this is where blogging comes in. A blog, in my view, is an odd form at once private and public. That is, we write blogs hoping they will be read not just by friends but probably also by strangers, yet in tone and content they are often cousins to the journal or to the old-fashioned letter. As I write this now, I am pretty sure no one will read it, but when I am finished, I will click "publish post" and doing so is an acknowledgement that I am making this post public. Someone might read it. Victoria wrote letters to her daughter first and foremost for her daughter, but given her position and her evident media savvy, she likely anticipated that her letters would one day be published. So her private correspondence is haunted by the prospect of becoming public, and so she surely must have modulated her comments, her attitudes, her image with that prospect in mind.
A blogger must be sympathetic to her plight, a writer who crafts personal sentences in a space that appears private but is really public. I am appreciating for the first time what a peculiar genre a blog post is, and it is Queen Victoria who illuminated this peculiarity for me.
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