What we're doing in class, and what I'm procrastinating about-- yeah, I need a day to catch up. Or a week.

Well, how about that? I had all of my students in both classes today-- probably for the first time in over a month. I won't get too used to it, as it's cold/flu/ick season, and there's another college tour field trip on Thursday that's taking a few of my juniors again. But we did stuff today! And I don't have to repeat myself! Huzzah!

The juniors are working on a quick dip into APA documentation/citation with a very short lit review due on Friday. I am not going to spend inordinate amounts of time on this; I honestly do not care what their topics of inquiry are, because we are just working on the formatting and citing stuff. It's enough to get their feet wet and to demonstrate the difference from MLA, which is the primary method used in school. Which makes no sense at all to me, really, since it's only English that needs MLA-- but I digress. I'm just happy they can see that there's different methods out there, and each is particularly useful for different subject matter and research focuses. 

So...what next? They will begin literary criticism of memoirs. I've chosen Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Lucky for them and for me, Spark Notes has a nice little compendium of the themes/motifs for each of the texts. They'll be choosing one of the books, and one of the themes/motifs to work on for a lit-crit paper. These kids have done some analysis of literature with me last year (except for the new girl who has done next to nothing of the sort at her previous school-- who knows what the hell goes on in New York? --yes, say that like they do in the film 1776--). This will be a welcome change/relief from all the straightforward analysis and so forth that we've been engaged with for both the College Comp focus and the AP Lang focus. Still working on the AP angles, but at least it's not documents and nonfiction prose so much-- memoir is at least entertaining sometimes.

And ahhh the kids in Brit Lit! We are immersed in Romantic Poets this week-- today was Coleridge's turn, and they are having a good time illustrating any image they would like from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." We read it aloud, discussed it, marveled at the absolute weirdness of it all, and then I let 'em loose with crayons and markers. They are doing well identifying the romantic elements in the poems, we've already embarked on a simple form of poetic analysis previously, and when we get to the end of the Romantics, they'll choose one poem to write their paper about. Not bad. In the meantime, though, we are having a ball rollicking through the melancholy, the supernatural, the whole "muchness" of the poems. It's not been easy; these poor kids had a terrible freshman year in English, so we've had to buckle down a lot. Giving them the option to illustrate helps them revisit the poem and interpret it visually-- a lot less pressure, and it gets the job done.

So what am I doing with my own "to-do" list? Not a helluva lot, but I have plans to get down into the poetry collection I have to write about, with the goal to have the review done by Thanksgiving. There, I've said it-- and you can hold me accountable for that. I'm letting my long poem dwell for a bit. I like it, and I have ideas for it, but I don't want to force it into any shape yet. So, I'll wait 'til it summons me. 

And I still have some outdoor lights to get done... it's supposed to warm up to 40 over the next few days with no rain/snow. I'm hoping to get that all done, too. Who has time to work? 

OK, have a good day. Hold onto the people you love fiercely. The world's a pretty unsettled place, and we need to create safe havens in our own circles. 

C