Flurry

Bad news again: I went to campus yesterday, looked through all my files--and truly saved absolutely bubkis when I taught Modern Poetry in 2005, so I'm reinventing that wheel, dammit. I may have to make peace with either giving the students a schedule of assignments late or doing what I did last time and just winging it week by week. I'm not entirely happy with the latter option: as good as I am at classroom improv, with my schedule as overpacked as it is these days, simply remembering that I have to come up with a bunch of poems for the next week in time to get them to the students to read may be asking too much of myself. In my dream world, I'll somehow manage to get some kind of assignment schedule--even a tentative one--pulled together before Wednesday at least, and will be able to get a photocopied reader made by, say, week 3? Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, I've searched for other people's syllabi for similar courses on line; I've even (to my chagrin) done a little Wikipedia refresher on the generally accepted dates when Modernism was a genre/cultural movement. I am not, however, going to stick strictly to narrowly defined Modernist poets: I'll range a little further afield (and set up the roots of modernism in poems such as Arnold's "Dover Beach"), but it did help to get a sense of thematic blocks I can use. And I've made note of about 20-some-odd poems I could (or definitely want to) include.

However, as I was wading through all the various Norton anthologies I have in my office, I got to the point where I couldn't absorb any more poems even well enough to go "I think that will work." As it is, a number of the poems I think I'll assign are ones I don't actually know, so I'll be working out my own analysis along with the students. I won't feel that way with "Prufrock," which I've known since I was a teenager, nor with the Jeffers poems I want to assign, as I use them also in Nature in Lit, but I'm including some poets and poems simply because on a first read they seem to fit thematically. Still, I think the students might find it cool to go through the process with me instead of feeling like I'm on some pinnacle of expertise and know the "answer" that they can't find.

I did reconfigure 101 a bit: I now will have to rework the first essay assignment (which I don't think will be unduly difficult) as well as a few other assignments along the way. But I'm happier with the first set of readings, which will allow students to draw and expand on their comfortable habits of being able to "relate"--from which I will (I hope gently or, barring that, forcefully) move them into a more analytical stance. I am resurrecting a midterm idea: students read a Muir essay opposing Hetch Hetchy dam and then an essay by Madison Marsden supporting the dam--and in their in-class essay, they have to take a stand about who makes the more compelling argument. I think I'm then going to have them build from that (using another of our readings plus a soupcon of research) to discuss a particular dam of their choosing (perhaps even one in NY) and argue for or against its dismantling. I like the idea of the midterm acting not just as a stand-alone piece of writing but as a springboard into a longer and more formal assignment. We'll see how that flies.

And yesterday I went through byzantine torture trying to figure out how to space paper assignments for 102 so the students would have enough time to do all the readings their papers are based on and still have the breaks free of paper grading for me. (In the past I've had papers to grade over either--or both--spring breaks, and I loathe that. It always means I spend the last two days before classes resume driving myself insane--because I can't bring myself to grade a few each day of the break: I want to play, dammit!) It meant I had to ditch a thematic block of poems--but I hardly ever get a chance to adequately go over those anyway, so I figured it wasn't much of a loss. I will allow the ambitious students to write papers on those poems anyway, if they feel confident enough of their analysis without class discussion. I did that last spring (though we at least talked briefly about one of the poems in that block in class), and one student took me up on the challenge--and wrote quite a lovely paper.

Today I took a break from it all to go play in Manhattan with Szilvia. We had lunch and had intended to go to a movie, but we misjudged times repeatedly, so ended up just browsing around Barnes and Noble together, talking about books, looking at beautiful photos, laughing at things that struck us funny. (You'd have had to be there.) Then I raced back through Queens for a dance class, which was also good playtime. And the whole day, I herds of mastodons were galloping in my stomach and periodically I felt as if my pulse was racing and that I couldn't quite breathe--because, of course, I "should" have been working. I know the brain break was good today (I could hardly compute blurbs on the back of book jackets, so it's beyond me how I think I'd have been able to do any substantive work), but I wish I could just relax into the brain break/day off instead of driving myself up a tree.

Tomorrow I intend to be on campus most of the day. I think I'll get 101 and 102 completely nailed down and get preliminary photocopies made on those, then turn my attention back to 265. As I said above, if I don't have a schedule of assignments completed right away, they'll be able to deal with it. The students in a lit elective are more likely to be willing to experiment and wander, as long as they feel confident I know what I'm talking about (and I do--at least well enough for a sophomore-level class). But Saturday and Sunday, no work on classes unless/until the promo folder is done. The weekend is reserved for that. But that means no dance until Sunday afternoon (if then: I may have to bail even on that, though it's one of my two favorite classes), and no ride this week (though I don't feel too broken up about that as it's going to be pretty damned cold again). Today's experience made it very clear that I'm not going to be able to enjoy much until I feel more secure in being ready to start the semester--and submit the promo folder on the 25th.

I'll probably need to blog, though, as decompression time. This reframing truly helps me a lot--and reduces stress significantly. Perhaps not as much as the glass of scotch I'm about to have, but still....

Where the hell does time go? If anyone ever invents a time stretcher, I'll be the first in line to buy one, at any cost.