Author: bripike

Teaching Lessons: Compromise

There are times in teaching where it is important to hold a hard line. When you are enrolled in one my courses you are learning about fiction and poetry and nonfiction. You are also learning about grammar and sentence structure and style. In addition to all the academic material, you are also learning organization, responsibility and accountability. You will come to class prepared. You will participate. You will complete the in-class and out of class assignments. You chose to be here, so it is up to you to make it work. I will do everything in my power to help you succeed, but at the end of the day, you have to do the work. And it is hard work.

That being said, sometimes compromise is necessary. This morning I opened my email to find a message from a student who has not attended class since October 1st. Before October 1st, her attendance had also not been the best. When she was in class, she participated and completed her work, but upon reviewing my attendance records I found that out of the 17 class sessions we’ve had so far, she’s attended 8. In her email she provided an in depth explanation of her absences, but assured me that she would not allow these setbacks to keep her from achieving what she set out to do. 
Well, here’s the bad news, that’s already happened. 
I am sympathetic to all of her problems (too numerous and personal to detail in this post), but at the end of the day it is your responsibility to do the work and you’re not doing it. That being said, I’m constantly looking for ways to work around a students issues. If there is a way to make it work for them, I’d much rather at least try to solve the problem. In response to this student, I shared her situation with my chair and asked for her advice. We both agreed that she had missed far too much work to pass the class she was currently enrolled in, but we decided she could enroll (late) in the 8 week section of creative writing that I just started teaching (this week) online. I emailed the student and explained the situation to her, so we’ll see what she decides to do.
I feel good about this plan because it provides the student with another option that will hopefully allow her the end result that she wants. It also allows the student to make a choice that is right for her, so the responsibility is still in her hands. I’ll admit that sometimes I am forced to make decisions for my students when they are unable or unwilling to do it, but I’d rather they make the choices themselves because that’s how the real world works. 
I am hopeful that no matter what this student decides in respect to my course, that she is successful in her future endeavors and that she is able to overcome the obstacles that currently plague her. 

Revise, Revise and Revise…

I’ve been working on revising several poems that I drafted about a year ago. This is pretty typical for me. I think of an idea, I write a first draft, sometime a second or third and then I let it sit for “awhile.” Sometimes it’s just a few days, sometimes a few weeks or months and sometimes it’s a year. The good news is that I have a lot of ideas. The bad news is that finished drafts can be slow in coming to fruition. 

I am reminded of my slowness by three of my poems  that appeared today in Rust + Moth. I wrote all three of these poems while I was a graduate student at the University of North Texas. They were drafted and revised and eventually included in my thesis. I finished that program in December 2005. I returned to one of the poems, “Song,” while enrolled in my MFA program at Murray State University. I think this was one of the first poems I brought to workshop (maybe?), so it was sometime in 2007-2008. This month, October 2013, these three poems finally found a home.
Rust + Moth Autumn 2013 
When I think back to the time that I was writing these poems, it was a turbulent period for me. I had graduated from Allegheny College, packed a U-Haul and moved down to Texas to enroll in a graduate program. I didn’t know anything about Texas. I didn’t know anyone in Texas. By the middle of my first semester of graduate school, I was also convinced I didn’t know anything about poetry, literature or being a scholar. In fact, I was pretty sure that it was only a matter of time before I called it quits and went home. However, I’m a stubborn soul (I think it might be that “Yankee” in me that everyone in Texas kept referring to whenever I opened my mouth) and I refused to give up. I knew I was homesick and I also knew that I had to suck it up and move on. I met my friends Natalie and Sam and Michael and Crystal and Terry. I soon realized that half the people I was in class with (people just mentioned excluded) didn’t really know what they were doing either, so we were all in the same boat and that made it less lonely. I started exploring my surroundings more and I found that I liked Denton. I remember walking across campus one night and pausing beneath a tree and hearing a chorus of birds. It was comforting and it was beautiful, so I went home and and wrote the first draft of “Song.” I remember reading Anna Akhmatova in workshop and being so intrigued by her work, and “Stargazer” came as a result of that interest.  Finally, sitting out on the stone steps during a break from class, surrounded by cigarette smoke, I looked up to see huge seed pods hanging from the trees. Obviously, the ideas in all three poems evolved and deepened from the first image, but I feel a certain a sense of completion to know that they are finished and out in the world for other people to read. 

Teaching Lessons: Always Be Willing to Try Something New

When I got my first job as an adjunct at the community college where I am now full time faculty member, I was not at all prepared. I learned to be flexible and “roll with it” fairly quickly, but the learning curve was steep to say the least. One important lesson I learned very early on was not to be afraid of new ideas, technology, or formats when it came to teaching. In the year and half I spent as an adjunct (2007/2008) these are some of the “new things” I tried:

  • Blackboard
  • 8 week courses
  • 12 week courses
  • Guest speakers
  • Student Presentations
  • Group Presentations
  • Computer Labs
  • Power Point Presentations
  • Using media in class (video & audio)
  • Using supplemental material outside of the required textbook
  • Using film
  • Becoming a faculty advisor for a student creative writing group
  • Subbing for other English courses/instructors 
  • Incorporating creative writing techniques into my comp courses
  • Copy editing the student lit mag, New Voices 
  • Mentoring new adjuncts 
During this time I was strictly teaching English Composition courses, so in terms of course content I also tried some of the following ideas:
  • Using short stories for the in class essay assignment. Among my favorites were The Lottery, The Yellow Wallpaper and A Good Man is Hard to Find. 
  • Using Annie Dillard’s opening paragraph from A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to introduce the narrative essay assignment.
  • Using movie/music reviews from The New Yorker to introduce the evaluation essay assignment.
  • Requiring students to pick a local non profit as the subject for their evaluation essay.
  • Requiring students to interview a faculty member to practice interview skills for evaluation essay. 
  • Requiring students to prepare a 5 minute informative presentation over their research paper topic. This included a brief power point presentation, so they could learn what and what not to do. 
  • Using current periodicals such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Nature, The Christian Science Monitor, etc to find topics for their research paper. 
  • Creating an evaluation guide for online sources (still fairly new territory at the time)
  • Creating APA Guides and worksheets
  • Developing an annotated bibliography assignment
    A Good Man is Hard to Find by Giselle Potter 
Once I was hired on full time, my course load began to look less like a composition hell and more like that of a normal instructor. In other words, I eventually got to diversify a bit in to creative writing courses (my true love), research writing courses and lit classes. In addition to trying new things related directly to teaching, I also go to dabble in the following:
  • Committee work
  • Online classes
  • Academic panels and/or presentations 
  • Participating in some professional development activities (cooking class & faculty book club)
  • Advising for Phi Theta Kappa
  • Working with the Honors College
  • Re-writing English 111 (comp)
  • Attending conferences 
  • Organizing events for National Poetry Month
  • Co-advising for our student lit mag, New Voices 
  • Continuing to advise for our creative writing group, The Blank Page 
Admittedly, I have enjoyed some these new things more than others. For example, I love working with my colleagues on academic projects like the panel I put together for Black History Month or the work I do with New Voices. On the other hand, I’m not as keen on committee work or re-writing course curriculum.

This entire post is sparked by yet another new endeavor I am embarking on this spring. I will be teaching a section of Honors World Lit I on a new platform. This new project is allowing me to design a course using brand new technology, which means I have to learn said technology. Today, I had a meeting with course designer who is my partner in crime on this project, and I left the meeting feeling a tad overwhelmed but mostly I felt excited to start something new.

The face of education is constantly changing, and as a result, the role of the professor in the classroom is also changing. However, I would argue that instead of becoming less important, as some people seem to fear is the case, I think we are becoming more important. That being said, we need to be willing to stretch and learn along with our students. 

Poetry About Loss

The Academy of American Poets defines the elegy as follows:

The elegy began as an ancient Greek metrical form and is traditionally written in response to the death of a person or group. Though similar in function, the elegy is distinct from the epitaph, ode, and eulogy: the epitaph is very brief; the ode solely exalts; and the eulogy is most often written in formal prose. The elements of a traditional elegy mirror three stages of loss. First, there is a lament, where the speaker expresses grief and sorrow, then praise and admiration of the idealized dead, and finally consolation and solace.  

I’ve never written a formal elegy but I think it is definitely something some of my poems work towards. I began writing poetry, consistently, after the death of my aunt and her death, as a subject, followed me through the rest of my undergraduate coursework and into my graduate studies in Texas. It never occurred to me to sit down and try and write a formal elegy because the ideas for the poems just seem to keep coming and coming. I was in mourning and the writing was how I got through it. It was a long process and I still return to her sometimes, although in later poems it seems to be more of a celebration. 
Weeping Woman, Pablo Picasso 1937

I know that many poets use words to work through loss and difficult times. Confessionalism, which I discovered through the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, emerged from the idea of writing as a coping mechanism. Of course the poems of Plath and Sexton are more than just therapy, but I guess I never really realized how much I used my poetry to process loss until fairly recently. I’ve written about the loss of family, animals, and even bigger losses like Costa Concordia. 

In fact, one of my favorite poems by my favorite poet, Elizabeth Bishop, is about loss. I use this poem as an example of revision in my creative writing class. The poem, “One Art”, shows a tremendous change from the first draft to the final draft, and our textbook, Imaginative Writing by Janet Burroway, includes both drafts, so students can see the journey the poem took. Admittedly, this poem is a villanelle and not necessarily in the traditional form of an elegy, but the list that Bishop crafts in her poem definitely lament and grieve but she does not find solace at the end:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
 I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident 
the art of losing’s not too hard to master 
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. 

This particular class enjoyed the poem quite a bit and we had a good discussion about the revision process the poem went through. More about this poem and the revisions it went through can be found in Ellen Bryant Voigt’s excellent book of essays entitled The Flexible Lyric. 

Writing about loss can be problematic in the way that all subjects that a poet returns to over and over again can be problematic. I definitely felt like I was in a rut for a certain period of time, but I also feel like I had to write those poems (successful and unsuccessful) just to work them out of my system. I remember being so relieved after reading some poetry by Anna Akhmatova in a graduate class and being inspired to write my poem “Vigil.” It was felt like the beginning of a departure into something new, and at that point, I was ready. 



A Day Spent At Home Writing

I’ve spent the entire day at home revising poems, reading poetry and occasionally asking my fuzzy pup, Kweli, if he thinks a certain line or word sounds right. He has very discerning taste. My two Zebra Finches, Humphrey & Pip, just chirp at me whenever I speak to them.

What a lovely day it has been to stay in my house and work. Actually, this week overall has been pretty great. Two fellow poets from Murray had work published this week: Karissa Knox Sorrell & Pamela Johnson Parker. These are wonderful poems and you should read them.

Creative Writing Exercises: Teaching from Image

In addition to my regular course load at my community college, I am a faculty advisor for our student run creative writing group, The Blank Page. I started the group when I was still an adjunct and students approached me looking for another venue in which they could share and improve upon their own work.

At today’s meeting I brought a series of images that I discovered via a link on the Paris Review’s Facebook page. The link contained images of haunted houses from Corrine Botz’s photography exhibition. Botz writes on her blog:

Haunted Houses provides a unique way of understanding our relationship to the spaces we inhabit, and reflects romantic and dystopian notions of the domestic realm. The notion of hauntedness activates and highlights the home, revealing the hidden narratives and possibilities of everyday life.

Botz went about taking photographs and collecting oral recitations of the ghost stories that go along with some of the photographs. You can listen to the stories here. The photographs are gorgeous and the stories are very interesting. I was even more intrigued by this project when I learned that one of the locations and stories took place in Girard, PA which is about ten minutes from Fairview, PA where my parents still live. This is the photograph from Girard:

“Farmhouse, Girard, Pennsylvania” from the series Haunted Houses, 2010

Anyway. When I looked through the pictures, I thought they would make great prompts for my Blank Page students, so this afternoon we spent about half an hour free writing over selected images from Botz’s project. After we had finished writing, we debriefed a bit and the student response seemed positive. The general consensus seemed to be that the images provided specific details that the students could latch onto and use as a starting place for a poem or piece of prose. I’ve done this exercise for units on character, setting and story and I think Botz’s photographs are perfect inspirations for writers.

Also received word last night that three of my poems will be appearing in Rust + Moth.

Rejection Letters: Taking Notes on a Poem

When I was deeply immersed in my first graduate program working on my MA in creative writing, I became aware of the concept of “good” rejection letters and “bad” rejection letters. These letters (now mostly emails) were associated with the literary journals we were sending our poems out to at the time. “Good” rejection letters contained notes from the editor or readers. These notes could be just a few words of encouragement or a request to “try us again,” but the most coveted of notes contained actual comments about the poem or poems you’d sent in. Admittedly, I’ve had more of the first type of “good” rejection letter, but in the past year or two I’ve received a few notes about my actual poems. Of course this puts me in the somewhat awkward position of trying to decide whether I’m going to apply these notes or not. Case in point, I received some notes on a poem last winter that basically stated that the tone of the poem seem muddled. This particular poem had been through an extensive revision process both in and out of workshop, and I wasn’t really sure there was much more I could do to make the tone clear. I thought about it for a few months and then decided to leave it be. This poem has recently been accepted for publication.

I feel that this example of the good/bad rejection letter really just opens the conversation up to the question of when to accept to critique and when to trust your gut. I know this is a constant point of conversation in my creative writing classes, especially because many of my students are brand new to the concept of workshop. I always tell them to take what is useful and constructive and leave the rest. The worst thing that ever comes from a suggestion is that you try something that doesn’t work. At least you know you tried, and in trying, you learned something.

In other news, I learned my poem, “Vigil,” will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Grey Sparrow Journal. All good things.