I dropped The Standard Method of Term Paper Production. I assigned instead The Waste Land, the 1922 poem by T.S. Eliot. My students had enrolled in 102, an introduction to formal academic discourse, the second half of Techno's core English requirement. I offered Eliot's poem to my students as an historical document, one inviting their inquiry and research as well as their speculations on philosophical and religious matters, their literary analysis and interpretation, and finally their evaluation, criticism, and judgment. But I knew also that because of its complexity and unfamiliar form the poem would function as a kind of linguistic Rorschach test—inkblot, enigma, and mirror—onto which students would project their own hopes, fears, needs, desires, and beliefs. On day one I directed my students' attention to a promotional blurb on the back cover of the text calling The Waste Land the most important and influential poem written in English in the twentieth century. For my students, for most of my colleagues, and for the vast majority of Americans, the words "important and influential poem" were an oxymoron. A poem—any poem, every poem—was not important, almost by definition.
"We approach the end of the twentieth century," I told them. "It's your hundred-year-old mother, the womb of your thinking (and unthinking) mind, and the English language is for most of you your mother tongue." For two students, a man from Korea and a woman from Germany, English was their second language.
My students' first assignment was to read the poem themselves in the privacy of their own homes. I distributed a handout I had prepared which provided an English translation of all the foreign language both in the poem itself and in Eliot's notes to it. For this first reading of the poem I told them no other research was necessary.
"There is no wrong answer and no one right answer," I explained.
But I warned them that the poem was considered by some so difficult and obscure, even for experienced readers trained and educated in poetry, that they might want to give up in frustration, and I exhorted them to plow forward, to read on, to surrender to the language of the poem (I couldn't explain what I meant by that) and to let it do its work upon their minds, to re-read as many times as necessary (within reason, of course, and time permitting), and to reflect, to think, in short to study.
"I'll help," I promised, "but it's your own personal reactions and opinions I'm most interested in."
"But what will you grade us on?" asked a young woman in the front row.
"Form, mechanics, and effort," I said.
Their grades, I explained, would be based almost entirely upon their command of the conventions of academic discourse (form and mechanics) and upon their effort. They would not be penalized for interpretations different from my own, no matter how contrary. I asked only that they cite specific evidence from the text to support their observations, always, without exception, every time (I was deliberately and emphatically redundant), and that they follow precisely the prescribed form and mechanics when they did so.
"Even if you can state only that the poem or a part of the poem confuses you," I explained, "you must still cite and document the specific passage, line, or image which evokes and supports your observation."
I handed out and read aloud my radically truncated version of the instructions for and examples of citing and documenting both short and long excerpts from the text. I emphasized the importance of the conventions and the reasons for them. We discussed their bearing on the credibility and integrity of the academician. Some rolled their eyes in exasperation. Some groaned. I answered questions.
"I'm just plain curious," I said. I held up in my hand the paperback text of Eliot's poem. "What do you think of this?"
At the conclusion of our first class meeting my students walked down the hall to the bookstore to buy a copy.
.......................................
WASTE to be continued
"We approach the end of the twentieth century," I told them. "It's your hundred-year-old mother, the womb of your thinking (and unthinking) mind, and the English language is for most of you your mother tongue." For two students, a man from Korea and a woman from Germany, English was their second language.
My students' first assignment was to read the poem themselves in the privacy of their own homes. I distributed a handout I had prepared which provided an English translation of all the foreign language both in the poem itself and in Eliot's notes to it. For this first reading of the poem I told them no other research was necessary.
"There is no wrong answer and no one right answer," I explained.
But I warned them that the poem was considered by some so difficult and obscure, even for experienced readers trained and educated in poetry, that they might want to give up in frustration, and I exhorted them to plow forward, to read on, to surrender to the language of the poem (I couldn't explain what I meant by that) and to let it do its work upon their minds, to re-read as many times as necessary (within reason, of course, and time permitting), and to reflect, to think, in short to study.
"I'll help," I promised, "but it's your own personal reactions and opinions I'm most interested in."
"But what will you grade us on?" asked a young woman in the front row.
"Form, mechanics, and effort," I said.
Their grades, I explained, would be based almost entirely upon their command of the conventions of academic discourse (form and mechanics) and upon their effort. They would not be penalized for interpretations different from my own, no matter how contrary. I asked only that they cite specific evidence from the text to support their observations, always, without exception, every time (I was deliberately and emphatically redundant), and that they follow precisely the prescribed form and mechanics when they did so.
"Even if you can state only that the poem or a part of the poem confuses you," I explained, "you must still cite and document the specific passage, line, or image which evokes and supports your observation."
I handed out and read aloud my radically truncated version of the instructions for and examples of citing and documenting both short and long excerpts from the text. I emphasized the importance of the conventions and the reasons for them. We discussed their bearing on the credibility and integrity of the academician. Some rolled their eyes in exasperation. Some groaned. I answered questions.
"I'm just plain curious," I said. I held up in my hand the paperback text of Eliot's poem. "What do you think of this?"
At the conclusion of our first class meeting my students walked down the hall to the bookstore to buy a copy.
.......................................
WASTE to be continued
