it's that kind of day, apparently
This article doing the rounds on Twitter made me well up:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2012/08/25/classroom-making-classic-literature-matter/UzGfR7nI9g70eTkaHjg8DM/story.html
I'm fairly worried about going back into the classroom in a couple of weeks, after having all of last year off on a dissertation completion fellowship, and partly it's because I want every encounter to be transformative in this way, and yet I never see it happening. It's possible that it has and I've missed it - after all, beyond evaluations a few weeks after the course is over, we don't really get any followup with our students - and it's a gift of another sort to have had a fair number of students who already love Shakespeare or Austen or whatever I happen to be teaching. But I want my students' encounters with literature to offer them the possibility of making them different, because literature made me different - and yet I don't know how to achieve that goal. But it's lovely to read about it happening here.
In only slightly related news, I bought about sixty dollars worth of used books yesterday. *facepalm* But it was a pretty good haul! (she said, defensively.) The expensive book that tipped the scales was A Companion to Shakespeare, the Blackwell one edited by David Scott Kastan, but given that I check it out of the library all the time for one essay or another (in fact, I have it checked out right now), it seemed like a worthwhile purchase. I also picked up a paperback copy of Stanley Wells' Shakespeare & Co., two older New Mermaid paperbacks (Arden of Faversham and The Knight of the Burning Pestle), and a recent Arden edition of Everyman and Mankind. So, you know, it was a scholarly investment. Yeah.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2012/08/25/classroom-making-classic-literature-matter/UzGfR7nI9g70eTkaHjg8DM/story.html
I'm fairly worried about going back into the classroom in a couple of weeks, after having all of last year off on a dissertation completion fellowship, and partly it's because I want every encounter to be transformative in this way, and yet I never see it happening. It's possible that it has and I've missed it - after all, beyond evaluations a few weeks after the course is over, we don't really get any followup with our students - and it's a gift of another sort to have had a fair number of students who already love Shakespeare or Austen or whatever I happen to be teaching. But I want my students' encounters with literature to offer them the possibility of making them different, because literature made me different - and yet I don't know how to achieve that goal. But it's lovely to read about it happening here.
In only slightly related news, I bought about sixty dollars worth of used books yesterday. *facepalm* But it was a pretty good haul! (she said, defensively.) The expensive book that tipped the scales was A Companion to Shakespeare, the Blackwell one edited by David Scott Kastan, but given that I check it out of the library all the time for one essay or another (in fact, I have it checked out right now), it seemed like a worthwhile purchase. I also picked up a paperback copy of Stanley Wells' Shakespeare & Co., two older New Mermaid paperbacks (Arden of Faversham and The Knight of the Burning Pestle), and a recent Arden edition of Everyman and Mankind. So, you know, it was a scholarly investment. Yeah.