Category: Teaching
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Honoring Stories, Honoring Our Humanity: Thinking About Close Reading
Oh, dreaded high school English class. Where Mrs. ——— beats social truths out of poems and stories, and clenches the narratives in her fists to wring out all meaning. We are a species driven to find it. We poke lines of poems until their bruised, we prod paragraphs until their quaking, drenched in sweat, and Read more
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When Our Forests Stop Breathing
A student in my college writing class this semester turned his essay exploring how wolves are essential to maintaining balance in ecosystems into a fairy tale. The prompt, as part of the class’s final portfolio, was to remix something written in the class from one format to another format, thus exploring how the message both Read more
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Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Revision as Receptivity for Depth and Change
Revision: “making a subsequent draft better than a previous one.” But what does “better” mean when I’m trying to ground myself in “writing as a way of being” or “writing for writing’s sake” and not writing with an end-goal, a linear, teleological purpose? How do I adopt a purposeless purposefulness? The more I have written Read more
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From Johnson to Leopold: Dull Certainty to Humble Wonder
This semester my writing students and I have been exploring in a class I’ve called “Representations of Nature.” Part of our task has been to study how writers past and present have represented their relationship with or cultural perspective of nature via essays, poetry, almanacs, and fiction. Along the way we have our own weekly Read more
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We Still Read (Medieval Poetry): Gawain’s Failure as Success
Last year I assigned my college composition class to read the medieval Romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (“GGK”). I had spent time studying it over the past year, and, with the help of the book Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I couched the reading of it within the Read more