Quoth the Students

“‘The Raven’ sounds like a Dr. Seuss book.  Only … more depressing.”

“What’s ‘surcease of sorrow’?”

“Mrs. Lowe, you read that so well!  You should be, like, an actress!”

“I don’t know what literary devices Poe uses in the fourth stanza, but there’s a piece of paper on your shoe and it’s been driving me crazy.”

“So, he’s basically crazy, right?  ‘Cause birds can’t talk.”

“You look just like my cousin, Mrs. Lowe … she’s 5.”

“That made absolutely no sense.  Who’s Lenore, anyway?”

“Plutonian … Plutonian … OH!  I KNOW!  Pluto, like the dog?”

Modern Love

So a couple of nights ago, instead of grading papers or cleaning the kitchen, I went to the movies.  Ever since I read in The Week that the *average* rating of Drive was four stars, I had wanted to see it — even though I enjoy cars less than probably anyone else I know.

It was just as fantastic as everyone says it is: gripping and understated at the same time.  I don’t want to go into a lot of detail (I’m certainly not a qualified film critic) but I think what got under my skin the most, and has stayed with me in the days since, was the depiction of the two main characters, who fall in love during the course of the film.

(Possible spoilers ahead, depending on your pickiness; continue at your own risk.)

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The Dialectics of Dialect

It's always a fun surprise to study the Imagists in the midst of studying Gatsby.  Although published within a decade of each other, the works are about as far apart as two works can be: on one hand are Fitzgerald's crazy aphorisms -- "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired" -- and on the other, this:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

The students reacted with unanimous delight.  "I LOVE this poem!"  "It's so easy to understand!"  "I can just picture a farm in sort of a misty rain."

I agreed with them: "Every word contributes so much to the image.  It's powerful because it contrasts: white, fluffy feathers against a wet, shiny wheel barrow."

"Wait, what are you saying?" one girl asked. "Wheel barrel?"

"Barrow," I said, slowly and clearly.  "Bear-row."

"I thought it was 'barrel,'" they murmured, almost to a person. "Wheel barrel."

Aghast, I realized their Baltimore dialect had reared its ugly head.  "Barrow," I corrected them.  "There's no 'l' at the end.  See?"  But they didn't.  They tried and honestly couldn't say it.  "Barr-oww?"  "Bear-all?"  "No, there's definitely an 'l' in there."  "It makes sense because wheel barrels roll.  They're on wheels, right?"

They were laughing now, and I was still stupefied.  "You really think so?  What about straw?"

"Strawl?" they responded.

I wrote the word on the board.  "S-T-R-A-W.  See?  No 'l.'"

"Strah?" "Straaaa?" "Stroah?"

Now I was laughing.  "You guys are SO from Baltimore!"

They loved it.  "Do another one!  This is so fun!"

We had to return to the poem then, although I was dying to hit them with "pull," "egg," and the ever-popular "down to the ocean."  With a little luck, they'll remember Imagism for a long time to come.

Down in the Dumps, and Climbing Out

Pascha is always the high point; after it, everything seems to tumble.  End-of-year deadlines approach with alarming speed.  Carefully-made professional plans unravel left and right.  Weekends pass in a frenzy of social events and dump me abruptly back at Monday morning, where class after class seems to have lost all interest in learning:

• Yesterday one (out of fourteen) students got one (out of eight) geometry problems right.  In case math isn't your thing either, that means there were 111 wrong answers and just one correct one.


• Other classes struggle with Fitzgerald (Did he have to spend a whole paragraph describing a drunk, weeping singer?) and Eliot (Would Prufrock please stop mooning over mermaids and just make a decision for once?)


• This evening I asked a piano student, who wore a slightly-sullen expression, whether she was all right. "Yes," she replied.  Then, thoughtfully: "Well, my nose itches."

Somehow it's still only Tuesday, though this week is a short one (we leave Thursday for five glorious days of travel in the South.)  So in case your week is going anything like mine, I wanted to share my best advice for climbing out of the deepest of fogs: friendship.

• Have pulled pork at Little Havana with people who love you too much to care (or even notice) that your eyes are swollen and red from the atmospheric pollen.  Laugh a lot.  Optional upgrades: coconut custard, Flying Fish Summer Ale and half-price entree night.


• Watch an episode of Anne of Green Gables.  Preferably one of the first ones, in which her rare and precious friendship with Diana saves her from a life of loneliness and despair.


• Read this heartwarming portrait of two teachers who stuck by each other through personal and professional difficulties and remain the closest of friends.  In New York, of all places.

Don't get me wrong.  True love is grand.  But friendship is what makes this all worth it.

 

Fiction

They are done with poetry, they say, and in spite of myself I have to agree: as usual, the villanelles were deeply compelling but the epics lacked, well, a certain epicity.  We read in earnest, and I made them laugh and grimace with plot summaries and gory details from the sections we had to skip for reasons of time and sensitivity.  Someday, someday, I will be able to open their eyes to the desperate beauty of Homer the way a professor once did for me.  For now, I revel in the small steps forward: the student who wrote with surprising conviction and gravity about an epic match between football teams, and the fact that most of them can at least differentiate between Achilles and Agamemnon.

Today we begin something new: a new set of texts I will painstakingly select read and reread, agonize about how to introduce and discuss them.  I will have to talk them down from the ledges of convoluted plot and melodrama, convince them that characters with slowly-developed depth are the only ones we can mentally invest in.  I will scour my shelves for new and fresh excerpts, authors they will not have read, premises they will find absurd and inspiring.

But not just yet.  First we will all take a much-deserved break.

We pray, of course: for friends and family who are suffering, fading, departed, and for college decisions, and for the requests they can't bring to leave their lips, which die unspoken in their mouths.

Then they write while I set up the projector amid furious speculation (Is it a movie?  Will we watch it for the whole class?  I hope it's funny.  I hope it snows tonight!)  And I end it by saying that yes, we're going to spend the next two classes watching and discussing one of my favorite movies about writing, creating and justice.  It's sweet, sad and funny.  Oh, and by the way, I made popcorn.

It is this last statement that causes them to erupt into cheers as I open the bag and pass out cups.  But I like to pretend it's partly for the other stuff, too.