Grief

I've just wrapped up my first set of block days.   Over the last two days, English 11 worked with poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and AP worked with an essay by Sherman Alexie and wrote responses to a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

English 11 - We read two poems by Longfellow - "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" and "The Cross of Snow".  Both of these poems, like Bryan's "Thanatopsis", deal with mortality by reflecting on nature.  We spent some time differentiating between summary and interpretation.  Students wrote a plot summary of the poems and then used the summary to build an interpretation about what the poems might say about death.  We established that "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" dealt mostly with the fact that nature continues it cyclical movement for long after we have died and the memory of us has fallen into oblivion.  I found our discussion of "The Cross of Snow" to be much more interesting.  In "The Cross of Snow", the speaker reflects on the loss of a loved one and finds similarities between the cross he's worn over his heart since she died and a cross of snow he sees on a mountain that refuses to melt under the sun's rays.  We delved into the poem at length and by the end discussed the fact that eventually the snow would melt, but that the speaker's memory and grief would last throughout his lifetime.  From this observation, we could see that Longfellow's observation in "Tide Rises" that Nature allows our memory to fall into oblivion is warmed by the fact that the human capacity for language allows for reflection on the past and the continuance of our memory after death through grief and mourning.  I walked away from our discussion of this poem feeling that grief was a much more powerful emotion than I had ever considered.  Our capacity for mourning and grieving are uniquely human powers and can be a truly rewarding and arresting experience.

After finishing the poems, we wrote outside quietly for thirty minutes.  Romantic writers frequently worked this way and I am hoping that the students' experience will allow for us to better get at how Romantic writers thought and why they structured their work the way they did.

AP - We worked again with Francine Prose's essay "I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read", but this time used Sherman Alexie's essay "Superman and Me" to support arguments against Prose.  Alexie better helped us see some of the problems with Prose's argument.  We found that Prose too quickly universalized her experience.  In the essay, she claims that life-long love of literature is ignited by contact with complex, challenging works and uses her experience reading King Lear in high school as support.  Alexie's alternate story of a love of reading and writing ignited by comics and pulp novels shows a differing experience and points out the flaw in a writer too quickly allowing her own experience to stand in for everyone else's.  This discussion allowed us to stretch two skills: critiquing the flaws in arguments and using support from one text to argue with another text.  Both of these skills will be critical for student success on the AP exam and in college.

After finishing with Alexie and Prose, the students wrote for a half hour on a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Their job was to explain the argument Emerson was making and then defend or attack it.  This activity asked students to closely read an argument and reckon with it rather than attempting to tackle an entire set.  In doing so, they worked on heightening their ability to do close, careful readings.  After finishing their essays, they reviewed essays from two other students in the class and provided feedback on what the essay did well and what it could do better.  Peer review skills are an important feature of most college composition courses and an important long-term skill for most careers.  While students can learn a lot from reading each other's papers, they also become acculturated to the world of work where we frequently work on or critique compositions produced by our colleagues.