Thursday, July 07, 2005

Is there anybody out there"

Sometimes I feel like a radio station test broadcasting to folks who don’t know I am here.  It is not a feeling of dismay, but rather one of being dismissed or ignored by all the adults in the room when all you want to do is tell them that the house is on fire.  I can but sigh.  OK, I am over it for now.

The Academy of American Poets - Poems for Weddings

The Academy of American Poets - Poems for Weddings

The epithalamium was employed as a literary form for the first time by Sappho, who wrote:

Raise up the roof-tree--
a wedding song!
High up, carpenters--
a wedding song!
The bridegroom is coming,
the equal of Ares,
much bigger than a big man.

It’s wedding season so go to poets.org and find some good wedding poems.  I can imagine using this in a class.  Assign different occasions to different groups and set them the task of designing a short anthology of poems with introductions to the poems.  Let’s see: weddings, funerals, births, baptisms, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduations.  Can anyone think of others?  Break ups?  I guess I could just go to the card store and check out categories.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Teaching, Wither Thou? I Think Not!

MIT OpenCourseWare | Master Course List

 

In itself an extraordinary attempt at knowledge management, MIT’s attempt to create “open” classrooms for all is democracy in learning.  Check out this Intro to LitTheory.  This all begs the question:  what is the teacher for in this open source learning world?  It is a central question that has attracted us all to teaching.  I think that teaching is more like therapy than any of is quite willing to admit.