Sam is back from his school trip to France and he seems to have had a good time and saw a lot of cool stuff, although he’s not exactly speaking fluent French or anything.
I felt a little bit bad that neither of us were there to meet him when he got off the bus, but H was at work and I was teaching. But, being old enough to take a trip like this, he’s certainly old enough to find his way home and, in the end it was no problem at all.
Today, I used my most recent book of poetry in teaching, I tried to drag out the introductory conversation so poetry wouldn’t take up the whole period, I saw a big risk of boredom there. In the end, it was not a bad lesson.
One girl said “Ech, poetry” and I’m pretty sure it was in the class which suggested, last week, in a lesson on “what should we do more of this year,” that we do more poetry and, in fact, I think it might have been the same girl.
There was a strong tendency, since I let each of them choose which poem to read, to only read the short poems.
Like at any poetry reading, almost nobody was actually listening.
Nobody read with the inflections I would have, that I imagined as I was writing them.
Those are the negative points, and I don’t think I’ll do it very often. Once a year is about right. On the plus side, I think most of the students were impressed that I’d written a book of poetry and, in one class, a couple of students photographed the page they were reading from, and one girl looked the book up on Amazon.
Also, discussing the meaning of the poems gave me lots of opportunities to give pompous, pretentious mini-lectures on the meaning of life, the universe and everything, which is fun for me because I like sounding important and deep and thoughtful and all that, and maybe good for them, too. I hope so. Other than a little help with English, which they will either learn or not learn and it has little enough to do with me, it is what I have to give.
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