Well, that was a bit painful...

I'm afraid I lost two of the three new students in 265--plus a fair proportion of the ones who were on my roster from the beginning. I bet they were daunted by the amount of work and fled. Too bad, as I could have used a few more smart and motivated students in the class today: the smart to lunk ratio is starting to tip the wrong way, unless some of the missing brighter lights come back.

I gave the students in 265 five poems to read and respond to, and I grant you, there is a lot going on in the poems. However, I had hoped for better attempts at comprehension than I got. (Note the word "attempts." I wasn't even asking for actual comprehension, just the attempt.) Somehow, because the first two poems were about immigration issues, and because in "Dover Beach," Matthew Arnold mentions England and France, they thought it was an immigration poem, too. Or a poem about war. (They know the word "armies.") One student picked up on the issue of Faith/religion--but the rest were either way off base or so worried about "getting it" that they froze. Somehow, they didn't notice that the response form never once asks them what the poem is about. Never. I ask them to notice images, to notice figurative language, to notice sounds and rhythms; I ask them whether they think the poem is expressing a thought or simply an image--but nothing else. (I should probably bring in the Billy Collins poem "Introduction to Poetry," in which he ends with his despair that students only want to torture a confession out of poetry....)

So, faced with their petrified silence, I did most of the heavy lifting today, taking them through the poem image by image--and then I gave them the cultural milieu in which the poem was written and talked about the crisis of faith, the sense of emptiness and confusion left in the wake of the loss of faith--in response to which, one student said that Arnold was just "overthinking" things and that life just "is what it is," that we should only pay attention to "facts" and why make such a fuss over something we can't change? After all, Arnold chose to not believe any more; he could have still believed if he wanted to, so why does he have to go on about it like that? I had quite an exchange with that student (which I let go on because I think he was talking for a lot of them, and I wanted them to understand the issues at stake)--and then one student said, "I thought this class was modern poetry." So I explained that the cultural shift into the modern era was beginning with writers like Arnold--and that if they didn't get the importance of the ideas in his poem, they wouldn't get anything else that arose from those ideas. "So all the poems we're going to read are going to be about religion?" she asked. Oh, arrrrrrghghg. I shudder to think what's going to happen on Wednesday when we discuss Yeats' "Second Coming"--never mind the other poems that express the same sort of cultural malaise. And then I think ahead to them reading "Prufrock," and my toenails turn over. I'm going to be totally bald by the end of the semester if this goes on. But it does show me that I'm going to have to slow way the hell down in terms of what I think we're going to accomplish in class. Paul and I have often discussed the fact that there is a place for giving reading assignments that we don't go over in class--it doesn't hurt them to read beyond the class discussion and to flounder around on their own--so I may still assign the number of poems I originally intended: I'll just know we're probably not going to get very far in class.

By the way, I did find a source that revealed to me a little more of what I taught in 2005 than just "reading due." On the grade sheets I put together at the end of the semester, next to assignment dates, I at least gave poets' names, if not the actual poems. I'll no doubt be raiding from that as I go along. But today's experience makes me think that it might be best if I don't put together even a tentative schedule of assignments for them: I think I'm going to need the wiggle room from week to week.

Man howdy do I hope I can bring them along and get them reading and thinking more deeply. Maybe I'm seeing the past through a rosy haze of misremembrance, but it seems to me that in 2005 the students were more able to handle difficult material. They still struggled, of course--they should--but they weren't as close to completely drowning as the students I have now. I keep thinking about what Cathy said once, regarding the fact that we're getting the products of No Child Left Behind (also known as No Child Left Uneducated or All Minds Left Behind). Now that all our assessment initiatives focus on critical thinking across the disciplines (a catch phrase one cannot escape--and I grant you, among the most crucial aspects of a college education), it's relatively ironic that we're getting more and more students who have not been trained at all how to think critically. (It's too hard to measure quantifiably on a test.)

But today's 102 went better. We didn't actually discuss the story much, but they asked a lot of very good questions about the journal form and got clarifications that will help them. Wednesday will demonstrate how well they read the story: I did set them up to expect flashbacks and flash-forwards, and I overheard one group trying to sort out the sequence of events, so I'm guardedly optimistic. (Very guardedly. Steel bank vault guarded.)

Of the work I intended to do over the weekend, I did get the response sheets marked and back to the poetry students; I didn't get the self-evaluations done for the 102s. I was going to try to get them done for tomorrow's class first and then turn my attention to Wednesday's--but then I realized that tomorrow I'm not going to have time to breathe, never mind do much marking: it will be a typical Tuesday, meeting-meeting-class-class-blog-dance-fall over. That leaves no time to get the M/W batch done before Wednesday--unless I start them now and finish up tomorrow before MMCCBDFO (see above). I will, however, have time on Wednesday after class and on Thursday before class to do the T/Th batch, so the priorities shift accordingly.

I also have one more promo folder to look at before tomorrow's P&B, so I'd better do that now. Shouldn't take long, as it was very clear and well-done in its first incarnation. But it does need doing. And yes, dammit, I forgot again about the visit to human resources to look at personnel files. I think I need to tattoo that to my forehead so I'll remember. It's the "brain too full" syndrome: can't find what one is looking for any more than one can find that little doohickey in a packed-full closet.

Not sure if I've got the energy to dance tonight, but I have my shoes with me, just in case. I'll see how I feel after cranking through a little more work....