A week ago yesterday, Jen emailed me about guest-blogging. Predictably, I forgot until about ten minutes ago. Hurrah for Eileen.<\/p>\n
Today, my senior class read John Donne’s “Meditation 17.” We discussed how to read figurative language (which I thought they would hate, but they did rather well with it), and then we compared it to “I am a Rock” by Simon and Garfunkel (which I thought they would enjoy, but they laughed at it and ridiculed it and asked me if this was the music I listened to when I was growing up, which made my 22-going-on-23 inner self giggle). They don’t really like anything I give them to read. They are what can be termed “HATERS.” Some of them seemed to enjoy Macbeth<\/em>, but a lot of them very vocally thought that it was stupid and worthless. They are very delightful people to teach.<\/p>\n Sometimes it is very frustrating to love literature, especially brilliant, gorgeous literature like John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, which have inspired me as an artist and as a person of faith, and bring that literature into a classroom full of seventeen and eighteen (and, um, twenty-one) year-olds, only to have them denounce it as “stupid,” “pointless,” and “without meaning.” But I teach students, not literature. I have to remember that.<\/p>\n I suppose most people struggle with vocation (and most often, I guess, would be struggling to decide whether one job or the other is actually their vocation). Jen has struggled (differently than I have), my parents have struggled, my boyfriend struggles. I want a life-work, you know? I’m just not sure if teaching is going to end up being it… but if I quit, I’ll wonder if I just didn’t try hard enough. Guess I’ll stick with it for a few more semesters and see if it doesn’t get better. I’ll end up where I’m supposed to be, one way or the other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A week ago yesterday, Jen emailed me about guest-blogging. Predictably, I forgot until about ten minutes ago. Hurrah for Eileen. Today, my senior class read John Donne’s “Meditation 17.” We discussed how to read figurative language (which I thought they … Continue reading