"It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee." Hey, that sure is a great poem to read out loud with 90 young people! Edgar Allan Poe could sure write beautiful, rhythmic, rhyming, creepy poetry. It's neat how it starts out like a fairy tale and then becomes progressively darker, sadder, angrier, and weirder, till it ends with the speaker of the poem lying down by the side of Annabel Lee every night in her tomb (I hope he doesn't mean literally beside her bones...). After introducing the poem, explaining what happens in it and so on, and covering a bit about its rhyme and rhythm patterns, I read it out loud for the class (showing off by doing it by heart without the book:-), and then had them repeat the lines after me, and then had us all read it together. And by the last reading, I think many of the students were keeping up and reading loudly and getting into it. And we finished by listening to a dramatic reading of the poem (with creepy animation of creepy Poe and Annabel Lee dolls) on Youtube by Rogue (the singer of the Cruxshadows or something...), and to the beginning of a sweet melody song some girl and her sister performed on Youtube of it. I never have enough time in class to comfortably and coherently and clearly tell the students about the topic or poet or poem etc. we're covering... but I hope they get excited or interested in some things we're doing! Next week: Emily Dickinson's "A Bird came down the Walk."
0 Comments
Last Saturday evening I attended our Humanities Welcome Party for new faculty members. It was held downtown near Hakata Station in the Centraza Hotel. Our faculty has about 130 members, but I bet only about half attended the party. We were welcoming NINE new teachers, three in the English Department. We were also saying farewell (two months prematurely) to two teachers who will be going away on sabbaticals, one of whom is our own department's dynamic force Catherine Matsuo, who'll be studying Bakhtine in her home country Northern Ireland for a year, from late August.
It was a good party, with a full course French meal with Japanese accents, etc., and some good people to talk with (like my English Department super colleague Mariko Hiwatashi, who was also the emcee for the whole party and one of the organizers and kept the eleven speeches moving briskly along at about 90 seconds per person). . . But it made me realize how few of my Humanities Faculty colleagues I know. Even though at our table of about seven people I knew everyone, at other tables there were many I didn't know, and each year as old colleagues retire and new ones start, the number I know decreases. . . Take last night's event: although of course I know the names and have spoken with all three of our new English Dept. teachers, I can't remember the names and faces of the other eight new teachers from other departments. . . Our Humanities Faculty is too big. And yet, as Catherine said in her inspiring mini-speech packing a big punch, "We must really fight for the humanities, because they are more important than ever today." Cause in this brave new world of fake news and rampant scientific and technological change, being able to think critically and to feel empathically and to communicate accurately, honestly, and effectively are more vital than ever! I suppose I kind of do that in my classes (especially the Introduction to American Culture and Literature and American Culture and Seminar classes), simply by trying to get students to enjoy and learn from what we do together, but . . . I bet I could fight for the humanities a bit more overtly if I tried. A funny thing happened in my fourth-year seminar. We were discussing Holly Black's young adult vampire romance suspense novel The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (2014), which has been difficult for the students because Black uses plenty of slang (e.g., "asshole") and plenty of idioms (e.g., "she swallowed past the lump in her throat") and a tricky plot (with the main story's progression interrupted by flashback and back story chapters) and some elliptical story-telling where you have to use your imagination to figure out what she leaves out, as when this charismatic and mysterious vampire boy is going to let a teen boy with the Cold vampire infection drink some of his blood, and instead of narrating that in direct words, Black just has the vampire roll up his t-shirt sleeve and say "I won't let him feed on the living, but there's no reason he can't drink from the dead" and ends the chapter. Etc.
So it's a challenging read. So in our class yesterday, a diligent and bright student (and, unusually for our university, a mother of two daughters), thought that Black's protagonist had gone home to take a shower or something. This took me aback, because really the main character, 17-year-old Tana, has driven with the vampire and the other boy away from their homes, and they've stopped at a gas station and 24-hour mart, and she's gone into the places restroom to rest and recover from a trauma and to wash off her arms and face etc. etc. So I asked the student why she thought Tana had gone home, and she said, "Because she is in the bathroom." Then it dawned on me: Japanese bathrooms are separate from their toilet rooms (they never put the bathtub by the toilet in the same room!); Japanese people say, "I have to go to the toilet," not "I have to go to the bathroom"; and Tana in the story has been said to have entered the bathroom... So I laughed and explained that Americans often say "bathroom" when they mean "toilet" (after all, in American houses the bathtub and toilet are in the same room), so that even if some friends go to the cinema, before the movie starts one might say to the other, "I have to go the bathroom" and get up and go to the restroom/toilet. Etc. It's all another example of culture differences hindering communication... I won't go into what happened when another bright student, one who'd spent a year in Canada recently and who had read The Hobbit in English on her own initiative, etc., asked what "she felt about ready to jump out of her own skin" means, asking, "Does it mean that she took off her clothes?" Heh, heh, heh. So I had to explain about jumping out of one's own skin........ I do like the book, really, and I hope the students are mostly finding it interesting (even though it's very difficult). As it is every week this year so far, the first year Introduction to American Culture & Literature class was great fun yesterday--I covered rhyme (full and near rhymes, end rhyme pattern and internal rhyme, etc.) and introduced consonance and assonance and read examples with them together from the screen... We did many "Hey Diddle Diddle"s, looking at different illustrations of it and pointing to the cat, cow, dog, dish and spoon and appropriate points, which was fun. Also "Baa Baa Black Sheep." Also a little of Katy Perry's "Saturday Night" (I love the "Barbie's on the barbecue" line for its consonance and outre image), Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (I love the entertain us, dangerous, contagious rhymes, and also of course the "Hello, hello, hello--how low" part), and Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" (I love the "giving whatcha getting" line), having my ace TA Sheryl pause the song when a new screen of lyrics are up so I could point out the rhymes and consonance etc.... I got a big too excited to hear Nirvana on the classroom PA system, loud, and contagious!
One great thing of new technology is being able to use catchy helpful things in class, like having a Weebly website for class with pages about our topics and a blog for comments and questions etc. And to be able to show video easily here and there. The downside is that it takes more time to do things I used to do in less, so that, for instance, in yesterday's class, I had so much fun using the music videos and lyrics to demonstrate rhyme that I ran out of time that was needed to fully cover consonance and assonance, not to mention RHYTHM! Which means that to start next week's class I'll need to cover those things and then squeeze in the introduction to Romanticism without enough time for it... Sigh... Actually, that has ever been my failing as a teacher: I never use time well. I usually go too carefully and too slow too early and then end up rushing through things at the end... ANYWAY, it was a fun class, as always. In my third year student American Culture class I covered "The Star-Spangled Banner" (flag and song), including Beyonce and Jimi Hendrix' versions, and a boy asked a great question: Why do countries have flags? We could speculate on that a bit, and it led to another question: Why do countries have anthems? In my fourth year seminar, we started The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (2014) by Holly Black, which is very difficult for the poor job-hunting students, indeed. But I do like it a lot, and hope they will try hard and read it and get something from it. (Black has a great simile of when 17-year-old Tana wakes up after a wild party to find the house's interior spattered with her classmates' blood like a Jackson Pollock painting, so I could show them on my trusty iPad one of his paintings and demonstrate for them how he did them...) And just the process of explaining a scene about the mystery vampire boy Gavriel led me to focus on a metaphor or description I hadn't noticed when I read the book last year: "It was the first time he'd used her name, and the sound of it in his mouth, said with his odd accent, made it unfamiliar." The idea of having the sound of your name in another person's mouth is taken for granted but cool and intimate when you think about it... My graduate school class is maybe maybe going OK, but the students are having trouble with Le Guin's third Earthsea book, The Farthest Shore... Though I think it is making them think about life and death and such, which is not a bad thing. Right--we're nearly half way through the semester already! More later... |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
Categories |