I'm going to take my first break from Three Beautiful Things because the weekend is a blur to me. I graded WR 121 essays almost non-stop the whole weekend and it was a riveting and moving experience. My students wrote about loss or survival or reconciliation and read papers exploring the impact of disappearing dads, the death of grandparents, alcoholic mothers, long friendships with dogs ending in death, families torn apart by drug abuse, adultery, the pain of abortion, broken families finding their way back to wholeness, a soldier's friend killed in Iraq, heroin addiction, homelessness, feeling the loneliness of being an outsider in one's own family, and other experiences.
Reading my students' experiences is painful.
I admire them.
To a person, my seventy or so writing students have suffered and in these essays they opened themselves to the arduous task of making meaning of some kind out of the loss they have suffered or out of the reconciliations that were tentatively worked out or out of the demands of not really living, but surviving.
I do not teach the so-called Entitlement Generation.
Reading these sets of essays kept me from writing and opened me to a beauty in the hearts and minds and souls of my students that rendered me incapable of listing this beauty in a 1-2-3 fashion.
Tonight, however, Three Beautiful Things will return in its traditional format. Stay tuned.
2 comments:
Sounds a lot like therapy.
I don't do Entitlement Generation either.
I don't teach the Entitlement Generation either. My writers just aren't at a place to be ready to tell some of their stories from the heart yet.
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