Sigh... The first-year Introduction to American Culture and Literature class was going OK, more or less, I think, despite starting things off with a quiz, but then in the last ten minutes I did what I usually regret doing: tried to push a too difficult concept too quickly into too little time at the end of a class, confusing the students when the concept isn't really necessary to tell them about anyway!
I tried at the end of class to tell them about the apparent contradiction between the message of Thoreau's poem "The Summer Rain" (nature is better than human creations) and the form or pattern of his poem (ABAB end rhyme scheme and ten syllable lines of iambic pentameter rhythm), especially when compared to Walt Whitman's free verse. Yikes! What WAS i thinking!?! The poor kids... A-a-and that's not all! Earlier in the class I also introduced them to Johanna Spyri's Heidi, because most of them are somewhat familiar with the Japanese animation version, so I could give them a popular example of the same idea Thoreau is expressing about nature... which was fine, but then I couldn't resist complicating things by telling them that I preferred the Japanese animation adaptation because in it nature is really the best thing to follow, whereas in the book the Bible and nature are equally the best things to follow (and maybe the Bible and church are more important...).... So as happens too often, after the class I felt regret, guilt, shame, loss, etc.... Unnecessary complication is my weak point I should try harder to resist.
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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May 2024
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