Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Driven to the ridiculous

Dee-lightful couple! Charming woman! Gifted lad! Remarkable talent! Graceful outlines! Perfect evening! Great success! Interesting case! Glorious night! Exquisite scenery! Capital dinner! Stimulating conversation! Restful outing! Good wine! Happy ending! Touching gratitude! Lucky Ridgeon --

Thus spake the colorful character Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington in The Doctor's Dilemma, after an evening dinner party on a terrace in London in 1906.

We explored the idea of satire and burlesque today, talking about the effect of seeing rather ridiculous things on stage, like this rotund character, chummily nicknamed BB, making seventeen saccharine exclamations in a row, the golden contents of his port glass growing more agitated with each evaluation.

Sometimes I think I am my own brand of ridiculous after a class that has gone well. Great class! Good comments! Phenomenal pairwork! Meaningful contributions! Critical listening! Masterful analysis! Respectful dialogue! Fruitful discord! Salient takeaways! Lucky Mimi --

Mind, this is not me after every class, but I did feel mighty bouncy after three of my four classes today.

Hesitations lingered after my HL literature class, where I tried a new exercise with writing, and am cautiously hopeful about the results. We followed a Bard Writing Institute method for developing ideas that are dealt with in a certain text. It's structured, but it also gives the students a wide breadth for diversity of thought, which these guys are not used to in writing. They usually respond to a specific prompt. Even if that prompt allows for diversity of interpretation, it provides a sense of structure and theme.

My concern is that the students walked out thinking "Why did we do that?" I'm trying to decide how much to try to justify class activities. Hopefully as they write their essays and use their in-class preparation they'll realize that they have done much of the intellectual heavy lifting involved in writing a paper. Students think that writing an English paper should be easy if you speak English. On the contrary, the more capable you are in English, the harder good writing gets! Would that be encouraging or discouraging to hear?


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