The Same Title For Now

Continued from the previous entry is the fact that every day I think about my job and how long I want to do it.
As planned, I passed my sheet of commentary (grouped around "elements of fiction"--setting, language, plot and the rest, ending with theme) and did my loop through the 7 table clusters. Even at that more intimate level, the students were reluctant to talk, unless I put a question or comment to any one person directly. My questions about "the experience of listening to and reading along with 'Sweethearts' the other day" didn't seem to make sense.
Sitting at each table, I could respond better to individuals, and they to me, I suppose. But the whole exercise didn't do much to get them closer to the story, I don't think.
I had the sense that just before and just after my pop-in, each group subsided, but for the diehards (bless their hearts), into talk about anything else but "Sweethearts".
Over at The Catcher in the Rye, I was engaged in a similar task: getting to know Holden Caulfield, with a class of 33 English 110 students. Holden's easy, in one way, bringing me up against an issue, call it a problem, across all classes: people content to do the minimum--in this case, pin Holden to a convenient definition.
In case this all sounds too negative, I'll say again that the act of inventing these ideas or variants of existing ideas--let's put them all into that category--is what I love about my job. When, as with Catcher, the acts of understanding the achievement of that novel and getting students into Holden's voice, so to speak, overlap, that's when the good stuff goes on.
I think I've decided to continue in this vein.

Job

It occurs to me today (a clause I'll eliminate later) that getting students to feel the poem or story, feel what comes from commitment to word and line--even to accept for a split second the notion that language could move them if they let it--is all I do.
Today I read aloud in class Richard Ford's "Sweethearts" in its entirety, pausing occasionally for student questions, comments, reactions, thoughts, predictions. None. In fact, we all seemed content for me to read. The students relaxed into a read-along rate of, I'd say, 85%. It took the whole class. "Have a good afternoon," I said when it was over.
On the premise that more vigourous motivation might seep through by tomorrow, I've readied a page of my commentary, which they'll talk about in groups of 2-5. And with me when I come around to their table.
This is the fun part of my job. Just getting ideas for things to try is fun. In the face of granite-skinned resistance, I'll try to draw them out, trying not--as Elaine in Seinfeld put it so memorably (about men she'd like to date)--"to make any loud noises or sudden moves that might scare them away."
The pay-off--I need hardly remind you, dear reader (that's you, Uncle Roy and Aunt Rogers)--is many voices speaking in the classroom, not just mine. And every time a student speaks of his/her experience with, say, a poem, the poem expands. (Here I don't count the rehearsed disdain uttered by the young man or woman who needs English 100 but never wants it, never stoops to engage.)
As soon as I write this, I run into L______, my waitress at a south Regina pub, who says she can't believe how much she loved my class years ago. I thank her.

Seen

          The PCL guys—don’t any women work at this construction site?—return from lunch, walking slowly, as if they’d eaten that extra burger at the all-you-can-eat Luther cafeteria.

          I got an email from my sister in Kelowna this morning, saying that one of her old school pals from our home town had died. “Another one of the old gang gone,” she wrote. The funeral will take place in B.C., but there’s to be a memorial at his farm somewhere near Regina. Although I didn’t know the guy—he was 12 years older—I told my sister I’d attend the memorial on her behalf if she wanted. She’ll let me know.

          The workers get up to the 12^th floor in an elevator that crawls up a shaft fixed to the southeast corner of the new residence tower. I can see their yellow safety vests through the grille of the elevator car. I’m curious now about how that elevator works. I can’t see any cables but I hear the motor.

          This Jake, my sister’s friend who died, played on a ball team for which I was the batboy, years ago. They were men; I was a boy. As I saw it, they inhabited a world I wasn’t yet qualified for. They smoked cigarettes and drank beer and knew how to talk about girls. Jake, a tall powerful first basemen, was one of their leaders. I think he became a high school principal.

          The elevator holds at least 8 of the PCL workers, I see. The 8^th guy hangs back long enough to finish his cigarette, which he flicks over the railing at the entrance to the elevator. Three more guys file in, and the car ascends. I see now part of the pulley system that runs it.

          And we all carry on into the afternoon.

14 Minutes

They found my silence and gestures odd but brought in their leaves (or as we hockey fans say, Leafs). I tried to keep it going until everyone had dropped his/her leaf onto the silver tray I passed around. I guess it was no surprise when the whole room got silent, until "Well, that was a goofy idea," I said. The leaf-words didn't seem that interesting, at first pass. But I'll bring them back and see if I can get them to think of words more as sound than meaning events for a while.

Notice of Attempt at Personal Best : Longest Time Not Speaking While Engaging Class in Useful Language Activity

Depending on the system of measurement, my PB stands at a mere two minutes, maybe two and a half. The idea I'm about to present, however, guarantees, if successful, a score of 20 or more on the Minutes scale. Here's the plan. I present 14 expository writing students--skilled, if unchallenged, writers--with this set of instructions:

As soon as you finish reading this, get up and go/wheel outside. Leaving everything here, where it will be secure, take nothing with you. Nothing at all.

Your task is to find a leaf big enough to have a single word written on it. Therefore, the leaf cannot be too brittle, or too fresh. Attention to detail is required.

Think of a specific word. These words are banned: love, perfection, beauty, truth, creativity, honesty, joy, health, money, travel, happiness, peace, life, mercy, tenderness, desire, sex, sympathy, understanding, brains, magic, pain, heaven, faith, serenity, everything, One, good looks, music, melody, harmony, unity, heart, autumn or any season, humour, disease, certainty, silence, Name, hope, generosity, spirit, moon, sun, earth, blood, colour, light, sound, sensation, mystery, death, wonder, disappearance, violence, pleasure, splendour, breath, birth, sadness, temptation, or any word like them.

When you’ve found your leaf (with maybe a back-up leaf) and thought of your word, come back to class. Maximum time outside: 15 minutes.

Using the felt-tipped pen I will provide, write your word on the leaf and drop it into the container.

Yes, and I'll come up with something to do with the words later.

What Happens

Just now I compared a notebook entry from Jerez de la Frontera, March 27, with its present iteration as a poem called "The Right Size". The first had a Saramago move: "...engaged in the study of what we call, choosing the most common metaphor, borderlands...". This never made it to the poem.



Where the notebook entry goes on to coin edgethropologist, the poem gets to its five stanzas and sees itself looping at the end, as did the entry, now that I read its last half-page.
Anyway, I've been noticing with such material a drift from where I wrote the entries--I can't remember the exact place in this case--and what I saw, to the form it's taken now. Maybe that's why I've kept the place and date bottom-right of each poem (not in photo above). To keep the lines of the place moving my way.



Could have been written here.

How Long It Will Take to Read The Great Gatsby a Page at a Time

It will be easy to get my students engaged with the first sentence on page three: My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. Admire the hyphens, first of all. This gradual zoom--what could a zoom be but gradual, I'll propose to the class--on who's narrating, never mind who Gatsby might be.
I blame this on fame. What new might a person say or write about The Great Gatsby. Better to read it, a page a time. So far it's all the narrator's worry over how he hears people, how he got tangled up last summer back East.
But back to My family, in a minute.
Today I asked--in honour of the designation of "selfie" as Word of the Year--what word do you like and why? Write it on the board; we'll all see it. We'll read it out. One of the results was "family," a word selected for meaning only, not sound.
That was fine, of course, but the word that turned out best, for me anyway, was chug, which I've tried to do since then.
The rest of page three gives us Carraway and his story, though not yet his first name. (Pssst, if you've read past 3 don't give it away.)