Is This Thing On?
Man. I am really technologically impaired. I honestly don't know if this is how you add an entry to your journal or not. When I'm done composing this first piece of LJ shite, I won't even know how to check and find out if it posted or not. I'm feeling some ire for all of you who dragged me into this virtual world. I can't post a photograph because I can't figure out how to make any of the damn things smaller than 40K. What's that "K" stand for, anyway?
Collin wants to hear "The Sylvia Plath" story, so here it is. But, actually, am I supposed to use the name "Collin" or is it LJ etiquette to only use LJ names? Does this mean that I have to learn ANOTHER NAME for all of you? Sheesh. Like Connie Champagne said last night, well, at least all this memorization helps ward off the Alzheimers.
So, I've been teaching university level English classes for (gasp) 10 years. Once upon a time in Ohio I had this one student, in this one class, who was somehow under the impression that "papers for English class" or "papers about literature" could be about any number of lying things a person tells himself about what the world means. In other words, he believed that interpretation of poetic language basically just involved getting really high and imagining whatever the fuck you wanted to imagine at that moment, and then attributing these personal fantasies to the author of the poem you happened to have been reading moments, or days, before your reverie commenced.
We read a poem by Sylvia Plath called "Tulips." If you have not read this poem, you should. To make a long story short, the poem involves a narrator (who is NOT necessarily equal to Sylvia Plath)lying in an ether-state on a hospital bed, swimming in and out of consciousness, and--when she is awake--resenting her fucking family ("little smiling hooks"). The line "I have nothing to do with explosions" most likely refers to the blast of color emanating from the bouquet her husband or some other "loved one" has brought along to band-aid her convalescence with what, to this narrator's mind, is a brutal and out-of-place reminder of just how much she wants to get away from these people and their fucking fucked up "love."
Granted, I made a major mistake in telling my students that Plath had committed suicide by "sticking her head in the oven," because this student of mine gets the wild notion that "I have nothing to do with explosions" MUST be interpreted in the following way:
Sylvia Plath, he writes (note he does not say "the narrator")tried to kill herself this one other time BEFORE she actually succeeded. In that first (editor's note: completely fictional!!!) suicide attempt, Plath failed to off herself on the gentle wings of toxic gas, but instead managed to blow up her entire house, survive this blast herself, but which ended up killing her husband and kids.
Even when I tried to explain to this student that he was making up completely fake stories about an actual woman and author, and that this was not how one went about interpreting a poem (which mentions nothing like this absurd story related above), he refused to believe it. Not only did he get up in my grill and practically assault me in front of the entire class (and despite the fact that I gave him a "re-write this paper" instead of an "F," which I could have easily done), but he refused to believe that his own, wholly imaginary and completely baseless, version of what happened was wrong, EVEN AFTER I offered to call up Ted Hughes (poet laureate and Plath's husband, who was still alive at the time) and ask him if he was still fucking living or not.
The story actually ends well, though. The guy was forced to apologize to me profusely before I let him back into the class, but I did relent, and by the end of the semester he told me that he had never ever ever read an entire book in his whole big long life, and that this was the first time he had ever read anything he'd cared about enough to finish. That book was Russell Banks's _Rule of the Bone_ and was a book I put on the syllabus solely to please the "typical male students" I assumed I'd have at least a few of. So.
If you'd like to hear more great teaching stories (like how my one student wrote a paper talking about how he was "NOT the 'Valid Victorian' of his high school graduating class), let me know. Assuming this actually posts.
Collin wants to hear "The Sylvia Plath" story, so here it is. But, actually, am I supposed to use the name "Collin" or is it LJ etiquette to only use LJ names? Does this mean that I have to learn ANOTHER NAME for all of you? Sheesh. Like Connie Champagne said last night, well, at least all this memorization helps ward off the Alzheimers.
So, I've been teaching university level English classes for (gasp) 10 years. Once upon a time in Ohio I had this one student, in this one class, who was somehow under the impression that "papers for English class" or "papers about literature" could be about any number of lying things a person tells himself about what the world means. In other words, he believed that interpretation of poetic language basically just involved getting really high and imagining whatever the fuck you wanted to imagine at that moment, and then attributing these personal fantasies to the author of the poem you happened to have been reading moments, or days, before your reverie commenced.
We read a poem by Sylvia Plath called "Tulips." If you have not read this poem, you should. To make a long story short, the poem involves a narrator (who is NOT necessarily equal to Sylvia Plath)lying in an ether-state on a hospital bed, swimming in and out of consciousness, and--when she is awake--resenting her fucking family ("little smiling hooks"). The line "I have nothing to do with explosions" most likely refers to the blast of color emanating from the bouquet her husband or some other "loved one" has brought along to band-aid her convalescence with what, to this narrator's mind, is a brutal and out-of-place reminder of just how much she wants to get away from these people and their fucking fucked up "love."
Granted, I made a major mistake in telling my students that Plath had committed suicide by "sticking her head in the oven," because this student of mine gets the wild notion that "I have nothing to do with explosions" MUST be interpreted in the following way:
Sylvia Plath, he writes (note he does not say "the narrator")tried to kill herself this one other time BEFORE she actually succeeded. In that first (editor's note: completely fictional!!!) suicide attempt, Plath failed to off herself on the gentle wings of toxic gas, but instead managed to blow up her entire house, survive this blast herself, but which ended up killing her husband and kids.
Even when I tried to explain to this student that he was making up completely fake stories about an actual woman and author, and that this was not how one went about interpreting a poem (which mentions nothing like this absurd story related above), he refused to believe it. Not only did he get up in my grill and practically assault me in front of the entire class (and despite the fact that I gave him a "re-write this paper" instead of an "F," which I could have easily done), but he refused to believe that his own, wholly imaginary and completely baseless, version of what happened was wrong, EVEN AFTER I offered to call up Ted Hughes (poet laureate and Plath's husband, who was still alive at the time) and ask him if he was still fucking living or not.
The story actually ends well, though. The guy was forced to apologize to me profusely before I let him back into the class, but I did relent, and by the end of the semester he told me that he had never ever ever read an entire book in his whole big long life, and that this was the first time he had ever read anything he'd cared about enough to finish. That book was Russell Banks's _Rule of the Bone_ and was a book I put on the syllabus solely to please the "typical male students" I assumed I'd have at least a few of. So.
If you'd like to hear more great teaching stories (like how my one student wrote a paper talking about how he was "NOT the 'Valid Victorian' of his high school graduating class), let me know. Assuming this actually posts.