Reading Recommendations

I read a lot during the academic year. I read the assigned reading my creative writing and world lit classes read. I read essays, poems, short stories and plays that my students write. I read and comment and read and comment and read and comment some more. This is all to say that I don’t read much outside of my classes during the months of September through April. I do read individual poems that pop in my inbox or online and I may read a handful of short stories. If I’m really lucky, I may get in a novel or two over winter and/or spring break, but that’s about it. Most of the brain I have left after reading and commenting, I try to reserve for writing and revising my poems. Sometimes there isn’t much brain even for that task.

But guess what? It’s summer!

This means that I’ve been reading voraciously for the past few weeks and it’s like a breath of fresh air. While I am teaching summer school, it doesn’t start until June 9th and my summer classes are usually much smaller, which means the whole reading and commenting machine is far less consuming.

So what have I been reading?

A Life in Men by Gina Frangello

This is a brilliant book. I was hooked after the first chapter and by page 50 I was saying things like this to my husband, “You will not believe what has happened in this book! And I’m only on page 50!” Then I would proceed to outline the entire plot thus far complete with color commentary from yours truly. His reaction was underwhelming, but you should read this book. From the opening:

Pretend I’m not already dead. That isn’t important anyway. It’s just that, from here, I can see everything. There we are, see? Or should I say, There they are? Two girls sitting at a cafe off Taxi Square, eating anchovies lined up in a small puddle of oil on a white plate.

I’m on page 245 and I’m completely enraptured with the characters.

Tree Language by Marion McCready

I blogged about Marion McCready’s poems in an earlier post. I’ve been waiting for her book, Tree Language, since I read her poems in Poetry. This collection is beautifully lyric but also brooding and dark. I like poems that reimagine what we may typically see as beautiful and transfer those objects into something sinister. One of my favorite poems in the book, “Daffodil horns”, accomplishes this task:

star-splayed

mouths from the yellow bellies

of starfish flat and helpless

mouths unshuttable though mute

unstoppable culled from our garden

these lampshade-and-bulb trespasses

periscope from the bottom of a foreign vase

though we listen we do not hear

though we see we do not understand

and the daffodils they spread like cancer

Motherland Fatherland Homosexuals by Patricia Lockwood

I found Patricia Lockwood’s blog several years ago when I was working on a blog project for my MFA. This was before her first book and well before the publication of her poems in Poetry and The New Yorker. She’s blown up on the literary scene as of late with profiles in prestigious magazines and I believe someone called her “Poet laureate of the twitterverse.” I think it’s excellent. I liked her when I first stumbled across her blog and I like her now in her most recent poetry collection. Admittedly, Lockwood probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s probably just because she makes people feel stupid. She’s brilliant. She’s shocking. She pushes her audience. Hard. And isn’t that one of the reasons to read poetry? My favorite poem in this book is “List of Cross Dressing Soldiers:”

Someone thought long and hard how to best/make my brother blend into the sand. He came/back and he was heaped up himself like a dune,/he was twice the size of me, his sight glittered/deeper in the family head, he hid among himself,/and slid, and stormed, and looked the same as the next one, and was hot gold and some-/where else.

The Way Out by Lisa Sewell

I just started this collection and have not finished reading it yet, but the poems wound me. They’re carefully rendered in their composition and at the same time they are so raw in emotion. The opening poem, “Chorale,” I read three times:

Clearly I’m the volitional subject and though not violent

I am haunted. The lost, the never felts and unhinged voices

sing through me these insomniac nights of my own exile,

not theirs, like streaks that bank the rocks

and dirt slopes of disappointment. I thought was day

and every continuous week free, meant precious,

worth guarding. I’ve imagined their sleep, weight

on mattresses in rooms that don’t’ exist and who would protect,

who aid and abet them—but never the texture of their hair

or skin, eye color, limb. Their songs, like chalk

along asphalt, mark the boundaries of inclusion, the games

I won’t play, redrawing the line I stepped over one morning

one July. Blame the selfish gene, the animal planet

I was born to, the twist in my nature that stilled

each voice, and kept them in check, coveted, leashed,

a muffled chorus that accompanies me

along these bland vistas. Imagine, If I had freed

just one and let it carry across the water or alight

among the hawthorn’s strict branches. Imagine gestation

an then I’m someone’s mother, loved, hated or ignored.

If I have been mistaken, giving up life and more life

to safeguard mine, this humming din,

this ghost song of my own and another’s making

must be the all I have left.

In writing this post, I’m aware that all of these authors are female, which I didn’t plan but so it goes. I would encourage everyone to check out all four of these writers. They’re all very different from one another in style and subject but they’re also very talented and they offer up a unique view of the world, which is what good writing should attempt to do.

A Writer’s Workspace: Where Do You Work?

There’s a recent trend in the literary blogosphere toward examining the workspace of writers. I wrote this piece in response to a project CutBank started on their blog called “The Woodshop.” I submitted but no dice, so I thought I’d post it here. Take a look at the other workspaces on CutBank’s site. Interesting stuff.

Where do you do your work?

I work in the large closet of my guest bedroom. It has a sloped ceiling, white walls, and bare wood floors painted black. All the paint in the room is chipped. The previous owners used this closet as a play area for their two young daughters, so there are remnants of wax crayon on the walls. They also installed a large piece of particleboard that shelved toys and a small TV. This board now serves as my desk.

What do you keep on your desk?

A framed photograph of Elizabeth Bishop sits on my desk. She is my touchstone, and I often pull out her collected works when I am stuck on a poem. I also have an apothecary jar full of “found” objects. My husband calls it my “curiosity jar” and its contents are comprised of seedpods, various bird feathers, stones, leaves and a sun-bleached jaw bone of some unidentified animal found discarded by the side of the road. There is a wireless printer, a ceramic vase full of gel pens and Black Warrior pencils, and often a glass jar full of whatever flowers I’ve collected from my garden. Right now? Zinnias.

What’s your view like?

Directly above my desk, I see nothing but an empty, white, sloping wall. However, to the right there is a small latched window and while I work, I keep that window open, no matter the season. I like the fresh air.

What do you eat/drink while working?

I prefer hot drinks while writing. Even in summer, there is hot tea or coffee in my cup. If it is tea, it always something fruity: lemon, peach, pomegranate or blueberry. I steep the tea bag for several minutes watching the water turn pink, green or deep purple. If it is coffee, it is brewed from my favorite beans from the local food co-op.

Do you have any superstitions about your writing?

I always write out my first drafts by hand. I like the physical motion of writing. There is something familiar and comforting in the action. I am also slightly wary of technology.

Share a recent line/sentence written in this space.

In a letter I wrote to Virginia Woolf after re-reading A Room of One’s Own: “Love even in despair. You taught me that.”

Trigger Warnings in the Creative Writing Classroom

This past week several articles have circulated the internet regarding “trigger warnings.” The most prevalent is Jennifer Medina’s piece, Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm, which appeared in the New York Times. Not soon after that article ran, a response came in David L. Ulin’s post A Warning about Trigger Warning, which appeared on the LA Times website.

This issue interests me because I am an educator but also because I have a lot of students who have suffered a variety of traumatic incidents and they often write about those incidents in my class. When we begin to delve into the genre of creative nonfiction, typically the floodgates open and I receive essays and memoirs that concern but are not limited to sexual abuse, domestic violence, post traumatic stress syndrome, drug abuse and homelessness. More often than not, my class is the first time they have disclosed any of these traumas in any kind of detail, and while it usually appears first in the written word, it will usually become (if the student chooses to) more of a public event when the piece of writing moves into the workshop space.

The reason I find this to be an interesting piece of the argument is that most of the blog posts and articles that I’ve read have put trigger warnings in the context of literature texts that would appear on a syllabus. The most common examples I’ve seen are The Great Gatsby (issues of violence; alcoholism; misogyny) and The Merchant of Venice (anti-semitism). However, no one is talking about this issue as it pertains to writing courses (or at least I have yet to see anyone talk about it) and I think it brings up some interesting questions.

For example, should my veteran student from Afghanistan be asked to put a trigger warning on his personal essay about sniper shooting? Should my female student be asked to include a warning at the beginning of a poem she wrote about a sexual assault? Should my other student be asked to include a warning at the beginning of a short story that graphically details a character struggling with addiction? Also, should I ask these students to put trigger warnings on their work so I will be prepared to read this material?

It is true that my syllabus for my creative writing courses contains some reading that could be “triggers.” The first story that pops to mind is Incarnations of Burned Children by David Foster Wallace, but there are others. I don’t put warnings on my syllabus. I never have. I don’t ask students to put warnings on their work. I always begin the semester by emphasizing to students that there will be work that they will read that they will not like (for whatever reason) but a just because they have a negative response to it, doesn’t mean that they can’t learn or take something valuable away from that piece of writing.

I would also say that if a student is brave enough to share a deeply traumatizing event with a class through a piece of writing, they should be encouraged and applauded for their courage. At the same time, we as members of the classroom community, have the duty to read and respond thoughtfully about the work they have put out into the public space.

I agree with Meredith Raimondo, associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Oberlin College, who was quoted in Medina’s article as saying ““I quite object to the argument of ‘Kids today need to toughen up,’ ” This is insensitive and more to the point, it doesn’t solve the problem. There are students entering our educational institutions that have experienced extreme trauma, and we have to figure out how to best serve them in the classroom. However, I wonder if placing warning labels over literature and possibly other student writing is giving them enough intellectual credit.

My students are often troubled by Wallace’s portrayal of the family in Incarnations of Burned Children, but while they acknowledge that the story is disturbing, they also understand why it is important not only because of its content but also because of its structure and style. They also begin to learn that being disturbed and uncomfortable can lead to greater learning and avoiding these pieces of writing because they have been “warned” may do more harm than good. I would even go further to say that many times when a student finds a piece of work that breaks into their own personal trauma, they often find an ally. Not an obstacle. They find a poem or an essay or a short story that speaks to their struggle, and in that way they begin to find their own voice and in that voice, sometimes they begin to heal.

So What Do You Do?

Last week I came across this article: Dispelling the Myth: Why All Writers Should Defend Their Craft by Lisa Marie Basile who is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. You will notice, if you clicked around on my blog, that I have a link to Luna Luna under writing blogs I follow, so I was interested the article right away.

Ms. Basile wrote a eloquent, intelligent article about why writers should embrace and celebrate their craft and work. Why they should not feel ashamed or guilty about being a “writer.” Why they should talk about their writing with other people who are not writers. Why they should hold their heads up high and talk with confidence about why they do what they do and how they do it.

My response to her declarations? Yes! Absolutely. Right on!

And then I found myself remembering all the times I had stood in mixed company at a dinner party or luncheon or volunteer meeting and when the inevitable question arose “so what do you do?” my answer would simply be “I teach creative writing at a community college.” The fact that I actively write poetry. That I’ve recently had poems picked up for publication. That I’m putting together a chapbook. That I received an MFA in poetry (for god sake). None of these things tumble out after the simple response of “I teach.”

Why?

I think some of it is what Ms. Basile addresses in her article. I know the stereotypes all to well. I teach an intro level creative writing course. I know what my students think of poetry and the people who write it. I spend most of my time trying to take those neat little stereotypes and tear them apart, but I’m still vulnerable to them.

I think the other issue for me is perhaps a more specific one, but I often find myself defending the profession of teaching and more specifically of teaching at a community college. This is a whole other post in itself, but when I find myself in these conversations, I often think to myself “well, if these people don’t think teaching is valuable occupation, wait till they hear I’m a poet.” In other words, there is only so much punishment I can bear in one conversation. It’s exhausting.

This idea is best illustrated by a conversation I had with my husband’s current boss when I first met him about a year ago. He’s a lovely man and a fellow lover of poetry, so his response was especially disheartening/irritating. After making small talk for a few minutes, he says to me “RJ tells me you teach at (insert my community college). What’s your specific area of focus?” When I responded with creative writing with a concentration in poetry, he replied “So when are you going to law school?”

Are you kidding me?

Now, the point of this post is not to throw a pity party for myself or to get other people to throw it for me, but these were thoughts that coursed through my head while reading Ms. Basile’s article. But after all those thoughts shuffled out of my brain, I thought to myself, you know what? This is BS.

So from now on, when people ask me what I do? I’m a poet and and teach creative writing.

Boom

Love is feathered like a bird

My interest in tattoos began in college when my fellow peers started showing up with various images and/or text etched into their skin. Admittedly some of the tattoos fell into the cool/interesting/quirky category (a typewriter on the back on a calf , a song lyric winding around an ankle or flower blooming over the bicep) and some of them fell into the “what the hell?” category (Chinese characters or anything involving a rose). I began to seriously consider getting my own ink towards the end of my senior year in college, but the road toward my own tattoo had some detours.

Tattoos cost money and I was a student for about 7 1/2 years straight (BA, MA & MFA), so that proved to be a bit of a challenge during my 20’s. The bigger challenge was deciding what tattoo I was going to get and where. As I do with most of my major life decisions, I turned to my younger sister for advice. She produced a detailed rendition of a goldfish, complete with hundreds of scales, that her friend had sketched out for her. We thought it was a cool picture but at the end of the day, we didn’t like it enough to follow through. In the following years I considered the image of sweet peas. These were to commemorate my aunt who passed away from ovarian cancer. They were her favorite flower. Then I thought about the greek muses and the idea of lyric poetry. My favorite response to this idea came from my mother, who when I presented the idea/image to her said, “I think that would make beautiful stationery.” While this didn’t deter my desire to get a tattoo, it did convince me this wasn’t my best idea.

Eventually two things happened to inspire me: my sister got her own tattoo. A music note tucked neatly behind her ear. And I discovered the website The Word Made Flesh. Why it didn’t occur to me to think about “literary” tattoos in the first place I don’t know, but the images on this site made me realize that the only tattoo that made sense for me was something to do with poetry. This focused the whole brainstorming process quite a bit because once I realized a line of poetry was the way to go, there was really only one poet that I could look to: Elizabeth Bishop.

Bishop is my touchstone. She’s the first poet I discovered in college that I really love. I’ve read all her poetry. I’ve read her letters. I’ve read her essays. I’ve looked at her paintings. I read the fictional story based on her love affair with Lota de Macedo Soares. I’ve heard it rumored they might be making a movie based on that book (The More I Owe You) and I’ll be one of the first in line if that happens. If you follow my blog, you know I write about her a lot. I love her.

This is all to say, that when I was thinking about lines of poetry that would be permanently pierced into my skin, it didn’t take long to locate a line from Bishop. The line is chose is from her poem “Three Valentines” and reads “…love is feathered like a bird.” “Three Valentines” is from Bishop’s uncollected poems and it is written in three sections, hence the three valentines. The entire first stanza where this line appears reads:

Love is feathered like a bird/To keep him warm,/To keep him safe from harm,/And by what winds or drafts his nest is stirred/They chill not Love./Warm lives he:/No warmth gives off,/Or none to me.

As for my tattoo, it contains that line of poetry and five birds: one for my husband, one for my sister, one for parents, one for my grandparents and one for my aunt (the one I mentioned above). It begins on my left shoulder, continuing towards the middle of my back. I love it.

Taken about an hour after my appointment.

The actual act of being tattooed isn’t as interesting as the tattoos themselves. I went to a reputable studio here in Indy, Metamorphosis and scheduled an appointment. The appointment wound up coming a few days after my 33rd birthday, and the whole process from start to finish took about 20 minutes. It didn’t hurt that much. The tattoo wasn’t very red or irritated nor was the skin surrounding it. I followed the aftercare instructions and it healed well.

Will I get another one?

Never say never but for now, I am more than happy to have a piece of Miss. Bishop permanently pressed to my left shoulder.

Borrowing From PCHH: Things That Are Making Me Happy (Poetry Edition)

I love podcasts and one of my favorite podcasts I discovered through my friend and colleague (Thanks, Janet!). It is called Pop Culture Happy Hour (PCHH) and it’s an NPR podcast about all things pop culture. At the end of every podcast, the lovely host, Linda Holmes, asks the panel “What is making you happy this week?” The answers are always varied and interesting. I decided to take a cue from them and give you “Things That Making Me Happy” (Poetry Edition).

1. Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself by Allen Crawford. If you love Whitman, you must buy this book. If you love books, you must buy this book. If you love beautiful art, you must buy this book. If you love Tin House, then you must buy this book. In short? You must buy this book. As I said in my Facebook post, “look at all the beautiful! I could take a picture of every page!” Seriously. I’ve shown this book to everyone I know. I’ve tweeted about it. I’ve posted on FB. Now I am blogging about it. Buy this book. Right now.

One of my favorite illustrations from Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself by Allen Crawford

2. Twitter. This is in reference to my rediscovered love for networking with poets and lit journals on Twitter. There is so much interesting, inspiring and downright cool stuff going on in the poetry/literary world and I think Twitter is a fine forum to take in all that coolness. Come find me @BriPike

3. Poetry Online. I love that when I open up my email in the morning I have poems waiting from The Academy of American Poetry, Poetry Daily & Linebreak. Access to new poets and the ability to revisit established poets is one of my favorite things about the point where poetry and the internet converge.

4. My recent order of Marion McCready’s Tree Language. I’ve been looking forward to this book since I read some of her work in Poetry. Can’t wait for it to get here.

5. A new round of submissions out for the summer and a chance to spend some time on New Pages and read their excellent lit mag reviews.

Something Old, Something New

After my post about Plath last week, I continued to think about her and I as I was working my way back through Ariel, I came across this poem:

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The Child’s Bath, Mary Cassatt 1893

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Too its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows are safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Over the past twelve months (or so) four women I know have had four babies, all of them boys, even though the gender of the child has no bearing on this poem one way or the other. I like the poem because it feels gritty and real. Not the sunshine and rainbows version of motherhood that often comes off, to me at least, as sterile and dishonest. You can love your children and still be frustrated and exhausted by them, or at least I would think that to be the case.

I’ve also been reading two book by Adrian Matejka, The Devil’s Garden & Mixology. I just finished The Devil’s Garden and I was surprised to find that Matejka teaches at Indiana University (just down the road about an hour in Bloomington) and he was a Cave Canem fellow. This last fact is interesting because I greatly admire another Cave Canem fellow, Gary Jackson, and his first book Missing You in Metropolis. I came across Adrian Matejka’s work in the January issue of Poetry and was particularly taken with this poem:

Gymnopedies No. 1

That was the week
it didn’t stop snowing.

That was the week
five fingered trees fell

on houses and power lines
broke like somebody waiting

for payday in a snowstorm.
That snow week, my daughter

& I trudged over the broken branches
fidgeting through snow

like hungry fingers through
an empty pocket.

Over the termite-hollowed stump
as squat as a flat tire.

Over the hollow
the fox dives into
when we open the back door at night.

That was the week of snow
& it glittered like every
Christmas card we could
remember while my daughter

poked around for the best place
to stand a snowman. One

with a pinecone nose.
One with thumb-pressed

eyes to see the whole
picture once things warm up.

I had to look up “Gymnopedies,” which are three piano compositions written by the French composer, Erik Satie. I love the imagery in this poem and the way it closed in the final stanza, so I found two of his books and dove in. Some of my favorite poems from The Devil’s Garden: “Crap Shoot,” The Meaning of Rpms,” ” Her Gardens,” “Pigment,” “Eight Positions Mistaken as Love,” “Understanding Al Green” & “Insect Precipitate.”

I also came across this beautiful poem by Marion McCready, whose first book, Tree Language, is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing.

Wild Poppies

And how do you survive? Your long throat,
your red -rag-to-a-bull head?

You rise heavy in the night, stars drinking
from your poppy neck.

Your henna silks serenade me
under the breath of the Pyrenees.

You move like an opera,
open like a sea of anemones.

You are the earth’s first blood,
How the birds love you,

I envy your lipstick dress.
You are as urgent as airmail, animal red,

Ash Wednesday crosses tattooed on your head.
Your butterfly breath

releases your scent, your secrets,
bees blackening your mouth

as your dirty red laundry
all hangs out.

These poems make me want to write. Excellent.

Poppies, Near Argenteuil, Claude Monet

Flowers in Winter

Aphrodite Amaryllis.

Rediscovering Sylvia Among the Tulips

In the January 2014 issue of Poetry there is a poem entitled “Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath” by Sina Queyras I don’t know why the poem hit me so hard. It might be because Plath died at the age of thirty and this March I’ll be thirty-three. It might be because by the time she died she had two children, a book of poems and was embroiled in a tumultuous marriage with Ted Hughes. It might be because as I read Sina Queyras’s beautiful poem I was immediately, shockingly sad. The sadness was heavy. It pressed on my chest as I sat at my desk in my office at school. It pressed so hard that I felt my eyes water for a woman who has been dead for over fifty years.

I have always found Plath’s story heartbreaking. Partially it is because we will never know the poems she could have written. Also, as a thirty some year old woman who is thinking about starting a family and who is also a poet and a professor, I find myself empathizing with her loneliness and her isolation. It is upsetting that that she couldn’t overcome her illness and I suppose now I find myself identifying with her more as a woman rather than an enigma. She was not just this brilliant, tragic poet. She was, as it turns out, a woman made of blood and bone.

Sylvia Plath with her two children, Nicolas and Frieda, in 1963.

Immediately upon finishing this elegy I went back and read the poem “Tulips.” and was reminded of how gorgeous and devastating that poem truly is. There is such isolation: “There smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. Even love hurts. What must it be like to live this way? That flowers give you pain and that health is a far away place you know you cannot reach. At the same time, the poem is so beautiful and carefully rendered. So precise in it’s language. That such beauty can come from such pain is hopeful. I just wish it could have kept her alive.

After reading “Tulips,” I wanted to revisit more of Plath’s work, so I pulled out my copy of Ariel. My copy is the restored version which contains a foreword by Plath’s daughter, Frieda. This edition also contains notes and drafts that Plath left behind after her death. I had forgotten, until I opened the book, that it was a gift from a friend. At the time I was given this edition of Ariel, my friend was studying Philosophy and I was studying English at Allegheny College. My friend had a flare for the dramatic and included two quotes at the front of the book: “All, everything that I understand, I only understand because I love” ~Leo Tolstoy & “One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love.”~Sophocles.

Still life with flowers by Paul Cezanne.

Unfortunately, my friend and I are no longer in contact. I don’t know why.

And yet as I read his inscription, I am briefly sad about our lost friendship but the sadness is quickly replaced by anger. These quotes have no business in this book. Love couldn’t free Plath. Love fought bravely, but in the end her disease was stronger. This is especially arresting given that Ariel is dedicated to Plath’s two children, Nicholas & Frieda, and Nicholas Hughes committed suicide in 2009. It is difficult because love gave us so many of Plath’s wonderful poems but so did despair.

I feel like there’s probably a poem in here somewhere. Maybe several poems.

Teaching Lessons: Teaching World Lit to Fourteen Faces

This semester I am teaching a world literature class for our brand new honors program. I’ve taught the course face to face twice but this semester brings a new format to the table. The company that my community college is currently contracted with uses the concept of a flipped classroom where most of the work done online and supplemental instruction is done in once or twice a week synchronous sessions in Adobe Connect. I spent the last semester developing the course with a course designer which involved taking my course content and translating it into this new format.

This is brand new venture for me and I’ll be posting more about it as the course progresses. There are some positives and negatives about this new format but right now I’m just trying to take in the new experience and see what I can learn from it. I’m not convinced that this new format is the “wave of the future in education” but I think there are some valuable things that can be learned from using the technology for both students and professors, but I’ll be writing about those thoughts at a later date.

For now I’m still digesting meeting with students once a week in a session that essentially entails me talking to a screen of fourteen faces. Think the Brady Bunch screen and you begin to get the idea. This screen shot demonstrates what I see:

Every Wednesday afternoon I sit in my dining room and talk about world literature with my class of fourteen for about an hour and twenty minutes. It is a somewhat odd experience to be sitting in your house teaching a course, but so far I’ve enjoyed the experience. Granted, I’ve only met with my students for two sessions, but they seem comfortable with the technology and today’s discussion about Gilgamesh went much like discussions I’ve had in my traditional face to face classes. I am also lucky in the respect that many of these students took classes in this format last semester, so the technology is familiar to them at this point.

What I like the most about this format and online education in general is that I have students who are taking this class in Fort Wayne, Muncie & Lafayette in addition to Indianapolis. They may not have access to the course otherwise, especially if it were in a face to face format because their campus may not have offered it or their schedules may not have permitted it even if it was offered.

I still prefer teaching a face to face class, but I’m always open to trying something new and I think that this experience will ultimately be valuable.