Teaching ‘Revolutionary Road,’ Part II: One Little Victory
Last night, 10:08 p.m. The Young Professor’s nose is buried in her copy of Revolutionary Road, re-reading the assigned pages for tomorrow’s class. She’s thinking: I hate this novel. She’s thinking: I can’t concentrate. She’s thinking: I am so fucked. “Earlier today I was feeling sick, and fantasizing about not going to class tomorrow,” she […]
Teaching ‘Revolutionary Road,’ Part I
I’ll have to write this fast; I’m a girl in a hurry this week, with lots going on in other areas of my life. But I wanted to record something about our first attempt, as a class, to read a whole book. There is one novel-reading built into the somewhat schizo syllabus of English Composition […]
Personality Test Fun on a Saturday
I am obsessed with personality tests, particularly the MBTI. It’s a guilty pleasure but one that I’ll cop to. I just took a version of the test that produced the lovely badge you now see at the bottom of this page. In so doing, I stumbled across a kind of hilarious page describing the different […]
Petty Minds
Do the collapse! After class, I have a standard routine. I think most teachers do. One of my professors in graduate school used to refer to it as “my collapse,” as in: “after class, I go to my office and do my collapse.” I think there’s something about teaching, the kind of energy and attention […]
New Resource!
Tomorrow, my students are turning in the final drafts of the research essays they’ve been working on. They won’t have done any reading, so we essentially have a free day. I think I’m going to start out by having them critique some sentences I’ve pulled from drafts of their essays (after I explain that I’m […]
On Assigning “Creative” Writing in a Composition Class
Recently, I assigned my students a guided free-writing to do in class. One of the prompts was ‘write a letter to yourself, ten years from now.’ For me, it led to some thoughts on self-disclosure, and our relationship to it as writing teachers. Here’s what I wrote during the free-write period, as the students were […]
Sunday Morning
I’m sitting around the house this morning, drinking my second cup of coffee, pajamas and cardigans and throw-blankets hanging off me like I was some kind of feudal lord. I feel stiff and slightly inflamed; I think I am fighting off a shadowy illness. I couldn’t just be stiff from sitting and stressing, could I? […]
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
I’m going to take just half an hour to write something for CP before I dive into studying GRE math. A few disparate strands: Class was a mess today. I under-prepared on purpose, because if I can’t wean myself off of spending three, four, or even more hours than that prepping each class, I don’t […]
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