I have taken to thinking of my days as lessons. In the classroom, each lesson begins with reading. When I have the lesson properly planned out, it ends with writing of some kind. Reading and writing bookend the more active and interactive work that goes on.
Part of me thinks, if this is a beneficial structure for class, why not adopt it in life? And indeed I do write in the mornings, and read at night. On weekends, I am lucky enough to be able to read and write in the mornings, and read and write at nights. It's the life.
The other aspect of lessons is that, after something large or substantive, like a hands-on activity, video making, discussion, or video viewing, I think it's important to allow students to write down their thoughts, as a way of processing what they've just experienced.
I want to practice that practice right now, after having finished The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. I liked the ending. An academic conference in the future, at which two professors discuss their research into the authenticity of the document known to the audience as The Handmaid's Tale. How easily all our troubles and dramas will be glossed by a future academic conference. The intensity of my emotion, the realness of my experience, cannot hope to be re-felt, re-captured, by future generations, caught up as they will be in their own time and narratives.
The most horrifying part of the book seemed to be that old women are sent to the "colonies" to clean up toxic waste, offered no protection, and so die after a short time on the job. This injustice against older women revealed to me how strongly I respect and admire women of that age. I am much angrier at the injustices against them than against the Wives and Handmaids and Marthas.
The book also says interesting things about covert activity, and how human nature will not be contained. Everyone in the story has something that he or she is hiding, and even though the consequences are dire, they do the hidden activity anyway. Life along the oh-so straight and narrow just isn't really an option, it seems. And some of us will die for the risks we take to experience just a little bit of life.
Atwood says in an essay in the New York Times that she leaves the narrator unnamed because so many people have passed through history, storytellers who have left us their tales, unnamed and unacknowledged. They have been heroes, and we will never know who they are. Most of them, in fact, their stories will never be told. Offred was one of them. We are the lucky audience of readers, one day to become writers, who benefit from the fact that they, who like Offred maybe didn't want to tell their stories, did.
Part of me thinks, if this is a beneficial structure for class, why not adopt it in life? And indeed I do write in the mornings, and read at night. On weekends, I am lucky enough to be able to read and write in the mornings, and read and write at nights. It's the life.
The other aspect of lessons is that, after something large or substantive, like a hands-on activity, video making, discussion, or video viewing, I think it's important to allow students to write down their thoughts, as a way of processing what they've just experienced.
I want to practice that practice right now, after having finished The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. I liked the ending. An academic conference in the future, at which two professors discuss their research into the authenticity of the document known to the audience as The Handmaid's Tale. How easily all our troubles and dramas will be glossed by a future academic conference. The intensity of my emotion, the realness of my experience, cannot hope to be re-felt, re-captured, by future generations, caught up as they will be in their own time and narratives.
The most horrifying part of the book seemed to be that old women are sent to the "colonies" to clean up toxic waste, offered no protection, and so die after a short time on the job. This injustice against older women revealed to me how strongly I respect and admire women of that age. I am much angrier at the injustices against them than against the Wives and Handmaids and Marthas.
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| Margaret Atwood |
Atwood says in an essay in the New York Times that she leaves the narrator unnamed because so many people have passed through history, storytellers who have left us their tales, unnamed and unacknowledged. They have been heroes, and we will never know who they are. Most of them, in fact, their stories will never be told. Offred was one of them. We are the lucky audience of readers, one day to become writers, who benefit from the fact that they, who like Offred maybe didn't want to tell their stories, did.
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