Overheard

Student: I love poems! They're so much easier because they don't have to make sense!

Me: Hey, cuff your socks so the logo doesn't show, please.
Student: Why?
Me: It's the dress code. Also, I've heard it's a sign of gang activity.
Student: I plead the first!

Me: What are you doing?
Student: I need to jump to my death from that chair.
Me: . . . ?
Student: I'm playing Aegeus.

Six Ways to Sunday

Every day these little vignettes pass me by, when Sunday's peace seems a distant memory and I'm just trying to make it through another week. But now that I have a five-day weekend to reflect (thank you, late winter storm!) I find them coming back to me, making me smile all over again.

  1. We've just finished learning venir, to come, and bid goodbye to the early-dismissal track star; as she leaves, I explain to the class that revenir, to come back, is conjugated the same way. "So if you want to ask someone to come ba--," and inspiration cuts me off. I stride to the doorway and shout, "REVIENS!" She halts, bewildered, and the class dissolves in laughter. Meanwhile, the students in the hall get a sneak preview of my new advertising campaign for the French program.
  2. My favorite lesson of the whole year happens to be the day of my annual observation. I guide the class in the rhythmic tapping of iambic pentameter, the beating of the heart through the poet's words. Da-DUM. Da-DUM. Da-DUM. Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince! Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark. Titania waked and straightway loved an ass. Hyperbole, metaphor, double entendre. Richly-laden lines twist over and around them until their own are pouring forth: Australia is a lovely place to be.  My doggie loves to play and roll in snow. Morning coffee suddenly sounds poetic, and sunburned afternoons call to them from future summers. When the bell rings, my department chair apologizes for staying through the whole period: "I just didn't want to leave."
  3. Midway through a quiz, a student decides to reword a sentence and spends a good three minutes crossing it out. Her laborious scraping of pen on paper is finally interrupted with the clean smack of a whiteout pen on her desk, delivered with silent reproach by her neighbor who doesn't even look up from her own work. I can't help but laugh: that girl will make a great mom someday.
  4. During a "free" period as I'm hustling through the next batch of papers, I comment on one: "When I die, I want you to write my obituary." I am completely serious. If she can make a paper about Salinger sound as fresh and hopeful as he wasn't, I imagine she could do a lot for my posthumous public image. 
  5. Two separate parents, within a week of each other, thanked me for being hard on their children. "This is part of growing up," one said. "She needs to take responsibility for her actions," said another. My faith in modern parenting ceased its precipitous freefall and actually took a few halting, hopeful steps back toward the light.
  6. In the stairwell, as students jostle each other to get to break and I attempt to keep out of the way, I spot one who is particularly pained by the tangle of backpacks and ponytails. "This is SO not ideal," she huffs. I suppress a smile, but as I consider her words over the next few days, I realize it's a perfect thesis statement for my life. Maybe for yours, too.

Greatest Hits of Exam Week

In no particular order:

  • Odysseus had his men tie him to the mast so he could hear the beautiful song of the Syrians.
  • Jason's family may have tried to kill their own children, but Antigone's family was just weird.
  • The Cyclops said he would eat Odysseus last, after all the others. That was the polite thing to do in those days (not eat people but show them hospitality.)
  • All that suffering took a big token out of Thomas More.
  • Theseus saved all the Athenians from the Minotaur. Kind of like the Hunger Games.

Six Ways of Looking at "Hiatus"

Extra-credit question on a recent cumulative vocabulary test: use "hiatus" in a sentence. Here are my favorites (you have to give them credit for trying, right?)

  1. They built a strong hiatus around the criminal to protect him.
  2. The new student had a certain hiatus about her.
  3. The murderer's hiatus crime stunned all of the citizens because it was so brutal.
  4. She said that, but I know she hiatus me.
  5. The student gave a hiatus excuse for why she was late for class.
  6. Her awful hiatus was affecting the whole town!

Wrong answers are always so much more fun than right ones.

Fin

It's been such a tumultuous year for this poor blog that I won't bother apologizing for mere weeks of silence.  At the end of the quarter it seems like all I do is grade. But sometimes grading is fun.

Take, for instance, this assortment of annotations from the last page of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: 

  • Dorian = dead. (I found this exact note in multiple books.)
  • Suicide?! 
  • He kills the painting and becomes who he was meant to be. 
  • oh snap. 
  • Picture perfect!  (This is actually a relatively advanced pun -- summary here.)
  • WOW
  • What? How? 
  • Totally Gothic. 
  • The End. 

The theory is that if I can get them to speak to literature, literature might just answer back. Regardless, as they fight their way through with such charming incredulity and sarcasm, I do enjoy being a fly on the wall.

Nuggets of Literary History

Here are some facts you might not have known about E. M. Forster:

  • His works were very climaxational.
  • He didn't finish many of his stories because he was gay.
  • He continued writing until he died.

And about Nathaniel Hawthorne:​

  • He spent most of his years as a recluse, but later came out of his home and fell in love with his future wife Sophia.
  • In his story "The Artist of the Beautiful," Owen loves Annie, but sadly Annie ends up marring someone else.

​

The Unexpected Answer

This is one of my favorite things about classroom teaching. Sometimes students just miss the boat.

Teacher: So "equivocate" can be split into two Latin roots: "vocare," or "speak," and "equi," meaning --
Student: OH! Water!
And sometimes I miss it.
Teacher: In the first scene, we find Oberon and Titania engaged in a power struggle with disastrous consequences, bickering endlessly over trivialities. What does this behavior remind you of?
Student: High school!
(I had meant for her to say, "Greek Mythology," but had to admit I liked her answer better.)

I Speak American

"Why are there two words for 'friend,' ami and copain?"​

It's Friday, and I'm feeling ornery. "I don't know. Why do the Alaskans have eight different words for snow?"​

"They have eight different words for snow? What are they?"​

"I don't know. I don't speak Aleut."​

"People in Alaska DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH?!" A general outcry, which quickly disintegrates into multiple animated dialogues. "So Eskimos aren't American?" "I thought that was illegal!" "What about Sarah Palin?"

This is beyond the scope of my job description, I think as I draw a crude map of North America on the board and prepare to explain the relative size of Alaska, our reasons for acquiring it and a history of the people who lived there long before our ancestors made the treacherous journey across the Atlantic.​ 

But here I go anyway.​

The Picture of Adolescence

When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

I pause. "What's strange about the things Basil says here?"​

An uncomfortable silence. Finally, one student clears her throat.

"Uh . . . he's talking about another dude."​

They're not sure what to make of the slightly-more-than-bromances that fill the story with tearful sighs and long, brooding stares. And they've had enough of the drama. "Look," says one. "Here, 'He flung himself down on the couch . . . ' and before, 'She flung herself on her knees, sobbing . . .' Why are these people always flinging themselves everywhere?"

But they also say brilliant things: When Lord Henry walks with Dorian in the garden and plants the seed of vanity in his soul, it's like he's Satan speaking to Adam in the Garden of Eden, ruining him through temptation. Dorian is afraid to present himself to the world as he really is, the same way that we need to confess our sins before approaching God in Communion. There is something beautiful in the brokenness that Sibyl leaves behind in her suicide -- she had one glorious moment of unadulterated understanding just before her constructed reality implodes on itself.

​I listen, laugh, shake my head in awe. I don't say very much. I don't have to.