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...
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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