1. I decided to take the Pandora plunge and my mind is swimming with the pleasures of Patti Smith, Van Halen, Gun N Roses, Lou Reed, Harry Chapin, Leon Russell, Sleater-Kinney, The Talking Heads, Jim Croce, The Allman Brothers, Iggy Pop, John Denver, The Clash, The Kinks, Harry Nilsson. If it's not one obsession it's another.
2. I scrambled up a nice yam, Walla Walla sweet onion, mushroom, egg, four grated cheese, and salsa skillet dish with a side of buttery English Muffins for breakfast and sprang into action this morning, making my way through many of the gorgeous final essays my WR 121 students have written and are still turning in.
Breaking Free of the Five Paragraph Essay3. I've taken a sneak peak at my students' final retrospective papers they wrote Monday and Tuesday. I had them imagine that an Uncle Dan and Aunt Jill had just won 133 million dollars playing Powerball and that Dan and Jill offered to pay for their entire education in exchange for a letter telling them what they'd learned in WR 121. I'm saddened, but not surprised, at how many of my students have in earlier writing classes been forced to write essays following strict formats and structures. The most ubiquitous is the five paragraph essay. I eschew these forms. That's putting it politely. Time and time and time and time and time again different students have experienced liberation and inspiration this quarter in not having to fit their thinking to a form, but have been asked to create structure and coherence on their own, in a way that best serves their rhetorical purposes. It's been an ecstatic experience to read how many students have had felt a new or a resurrected love writing simply because they were in charge of how to make their essays work, not under the iron repression of an abstract form.
Bonus beautiful thing: Many of my students had never read books as a way of understanding the common threads of human experience that run through all good stories. Many have expressed delight that even though they had never fought in Viet Nam, were never buffalo ranchers, and had never taken a Japanese flag taken as booty in war back to a family in Japan, that because we looked at these books in terms of loss, survival, reconciliation, my students were able to emotionally and intellectually connect with writers who wrote about surface experiences foreign to almost each and every of them. Few things make me happier than when students from 17-55 years of age have this experience for the first time and realize that the best academic study is not about something outside of themselves and distant. It's about the inner life human beings have in common.
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