English majoring is so different from English teaching.

This week I'm trying a new thing. One of my classes is AP Prep, which means that it's supposed to be lining students up to be ready to take AP English senior year. In theory, this is where the kids whose strengths or interests lie in English Language Arts should be, and so again, in theory, this should be my likeliest group of potential English majors. (In practice, of course, that's not necessarily who takes this course.)

So to inject a little but of literary-ness into an otherwise reading and writing skill-based course, I'm trying to give the first few minutes each day in one of my classes to poetry. These past few days, it's taken ten, which is far too many of our fifty minutes to be "getting started with a poem," but I'll press on, because I think it's fun.

Tomorrow we're going to read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" , "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo", and "Anthem for Doomed Youth." (Some White man poetry because it's possible that I'm giving my students the impression that only women and/or people of color ever write anything worth reading. Whoops.)

I hadn't forgotten, but I'm glad I'm recalling how much I love this guy's WWI poetry. I loved these two poems before I knew how much I loved teaching, and I was just a plain-ol' English major. I wrote a paper about these and other WWI poetry for a course I took my sophomore year, and I'm reading over it now as a way to quick prep for our discussion tomorrow. I wrote it long enough ago that I don't remember my thought processes as I was putting together my thesis and argument, and so I can almost read it as though I wasn't the writer: "Keats' poetic philosphy, espcially the idea of the 'camelion poet' whose personal identity is removed from his or her poem, is completely absent as Owen' work grows closer to the Wordsworthian ideal of the poet as someone, 'endued with a more lively sensibility... than [is] supposed to be common among mankind' (894, 246). Owen's poetry, however, as opposed to being a strictly Wordsworthian poet-centered conduit for the emotion of mankind, is under the fierce possession of its creator."

Some totally self-involved part of me, a larger part than I'd like to admit, really misses being able to sit around and talk and write about stuff like this (or even know what it it's about. Keats' poetic philosophy? Totally gone from my brain. Wordsworth? Him, too. Vague recollections, that's all.)

part two

Teaching is way more challenging than college ever was for me. I've said that before, but had been referring to "real-world experience" challenges like having to know what to say to a kid who insists, "I. DON'T. CARE."

But actually, it's a lot more intellectually challenging, too.

In college, pretty much the answer to every question is, "Well, you see, it's complicated." ("How is marriage portrayed in Jane Austen's Persuasion?" "Well, you see, it's complicated." ; "Can the subaltern speak?" "Well, you see, it's complicated."; "What's the reason for the achievement gap?" "Well, you see, it's complicated.") It's kind of lovely to relish in the complicatedness of it all. Negative capability I think Keats called it. Or maybe it was some other British poet whose work Prof. Saville recited whimsically in ENGL 210. Who cares.

Except in public high schools you're supposed to make sense of the complicatedness. You're supposed to actually do something practical. Which I like to do and is always my goal, but it's hard to know which practical thing I can do, and how, while remaining faithful to my complicated ideals. It's a lot more comfortable to swim around in a bunch of theoretical bullshit -- in fact, I'm doing it right now -- but it doesn't get anything done. Which is what my students need from me. Which is hard.

One thing I miss about college

is taking mucho classes with people who are English majors, but not Secondary Ed minors; because they're cooler. They're less practical, more deliberately quirky, more hilarious in general.

And then they go and turn into teachers anyway, apparently.

I wrote one of my favorite English-not-teachers eons ago with a funny story about one of my students hating me (It's funny if you know him?). I was expecting to hear back some totally outlandish and yet simultaneously beautiful tale about life on the I'm-an-English-major edge. But he's in the classroom. Teaching kids. Sell-out.

At least he hasn't lost his knack for witty banter:

I'm glad to hear things are at least interesting for you if not easy. If you're anything like me (pray to God this is not the case) then some days are capped with the dizzying highs of kids actually getting it, and the abysmal lows of them not giving (if I may paraphrase you) a rat's fat ass about anything not related to sleep or their totally rad IPod touches.

All in all, it's okay, it's nice to feel like you're definitively helping someone everyday, but it's less nice to have to wade through halls of hormonal teens groping on each other in the hallways.

Remember that the one good thing about kids trashing you now is that they don't know shit. Not in the way that many teachers wrap themselves in the artificial smugness of thinking they know more than their kids, but seriously kids today are perhaps the least literate children in 100 years, so if n e 1 tellz u u don no sometin, tell em, to get a command of the fucking language before they decide to aim it critically at someone else.

The world needs more English-not-teachers. Exhibits A, B, and C: