A quiet morning - Thursday 8/25

It's been a while since I posted. Sorry about that.

This semester is shaping up to be fairly interesting. I have several sections of my Honors Program seminars. I'll write more on those a little later on, once I have a better sense of how they are going. Right now, I'll just say that they are going well, and they have given me a few surprises.

My composition class (it's a Comp I section - the first semester of college writing) is relatively subdued. It is an afternoon class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that may account for the quietness thus far. Then again, it may be that it is still a little early for them to start opening up in class. I have given them their first writing assignment. They will be writing a literacy narrative. Basically, that means they will be writing an account of an event that was significant in their development of communication skills. The significance doesn't have to be positive, and that may prove to be fairly revealing. The introductory writing assignment (to get a baseline feel for what skills they bring with them) has shown that there may be some interesting writing to read this semester - in amongst the fairly common freshman writing that I normally get.

My other class, and in many ways my favorite class, is a section of British Literature I. The earliest 1000 years of British Literature offer a wide variety of literature and historical, social, and religious contexts. Of course, I start with Beowulf. I love to see their eyes when they begin to understand that there is so much more to this work of literature than the selections they read and talked about in high school. You see, most of them (though not all of them) have been dealing with literature in what I call "book report" style. That is, they have been reading and talking about what the material says on the surface - that is, what "happens." When we take that further, and I show them how to analyze a work of literature, and to make an effort to understand the context of that work of literature, they start to either get lost or get excited. The "why" of things can be difficult to figure out. That's especially true when so many of our students have lost that little voice in the back of their minds that always asks "why." I call that the inner two-year old. I'm not sure why our education system stifles the natural urge to ask questions, but it does - regrettably, often to the point that students have forgotten how to ask questions and just accept everything a face value. What a sad commentary on who we are as a culture and a society.

Well, I'll post more when I get a chance. I suspect that I will be posting a little more often, especially with regard to the literature class. I may even post audio snippets from my class discussions from time to time.