For comparison with The Waste Land I provided my students with photocopies of other poems in which poets had addressed the subject of the apocalypse or had recorded their private visions of ultimate things or had written in vatic or prophetic voice. We read them aloud in class and briefly discussed them—Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice,” W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” “Christina Rossetti’s “Up-Hill,” William Carlos Williams’ “The Yachts,” and T.S. Eliot’s own “The Hollow Men” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Throughout the quarter I also photocopied and distributed excerpts from Eliot’s sources for The Waste Land and from these we also read aloud. We discussed briefly the tale of Tereus, Philomela, and Procne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Fire Sermon of Buddha, relevant verses from Ecclesiastes, from Ezekiel, and from Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, the concluding section of the “Brihadaranyaka” Upanishad, the refrain of Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion,” the opening lines of the prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” relevant passages from William Shakespeare’s Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, and—to assist my students in interpretation—a chapter on suffering from the Tibetan Buddhist priest Chogyam Trungpa’s book The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation and a chapter on peace and war from philosopher and educator Jiddu Krishnamurti’s essay Education and the Significance of Life. For the most part I resisted student pleas and requests for explication of The Waste Land, although I did provide information and assistance if and when I thought it would foster and advance their own explorations and interpretations. At some point in the middle of all this, I returned to my office cubicle one morning after class to find a message on my voice mail from a student who had been absent.
“Hi, Mr. Skank! It’s me, Heather!” she announced cheerfully. “Something came up and I just couldn’t make it. But I’ll see you next week, I promise! I’m really sorry I missed your class. Will you please leave your lecture on my answering machine? Thanks!”
Heather signed off with her number.
Hmm.
For their second essay, like their first no more than a thousand words, students cited, documented, and discussed—in order to explicate two or more passages of Eliot’s poem—two or more of the collateral texts I had excerpted and provided. Once again I graded on form, mechanics, and effort. These student essays I marked like their first, and for the second time students integrated my corrections, made improvements of their own, and resubmitted. By the end of the following week I had recorded four grades for each student, two on each paper, one for the original and one for the revision. In addition I kept a careful record of attendance. In class I reviewed and verified my records with each student individually.
“How many days have you been absent?” I asked.
“Oh, maybe three or four?”
“My record shows that you’ve been absent nine times.”
“What!”
I ignored this expression of incredulity and pressed on. “What final grade do you believe you have earned?”
“I’d like an A,” the student suggested. Grinning, he looked around the room for signs of approval and support in the faces of his amused classmates. Skeptical, they glanced at each other and then looked at me.
“I know,” I smiled. “But what grade have you earned?”
“B?” he asked.
I squinted and screwed my face into a mask of grave doubt and stared at my student for several silent seconds. Still I waited. Then, lightly in pencil, I noted the student’s response in my book. His was an opinion I would consider.
“I’ll get back to you,” I said.
In this fashion I proceeded through my roster. We discussed minor discrepancies and I corrected obvious errors. I informed every student of his or her preliminary final grade. With an unhappy one or two I scheduled a private conference. But by this point I’d pretty much made up my mind.
.......................................
WASTE to be continued
“Hi, Mr. Skank! It’s me, Heather!” she announced cheerfully. “Something came up and I just couldn’t make it. But I’ll see you next week, I promise! I’m really sorry I missed your class. Will you please leave your lecture on my answering machine? Thanks!”
Heather signed off with her number.
Hmm.
For their second essay, like their first no more than a thousand words, students cited, documented, and discussed—in order to explicate two or more passages of Eliot’s poem—two or more of the collateral texts I had excerpted and provided. Once again I graded on form, mechanics, and effort. These student essays I marked like their first, and for the second time students integrated my corrections, made improvements of their own, and resubmitted. By the end of the following week I had recorded four grades for each student, two on each paper, one for the original and one for the revision. In addition I kept a careful record of attendance. In class I reviewed and verified my records with each student individually.
“How many days have you been absent?” I asked.
“Oh, maybe three or four?”
“My record shows that you’ve been absent nine times.”
“What!”
I ignored this expression of incredulity and pressed on. “What final grade do you believe you have earned?”
“I’d like an A,” the student suggested. Grinning, he looked around the room for signs of approval and support in the faces of his amused classmates. Skeptical, they glanced at each other and then looked at me.
“I know,” I smiled. “But what grade have you earned?”
“B?” he asked.
I squinted and screwed my face into a mask of grave doubt and stared at my student for several silent seconds. Still I waited. Then, lightly in pencil, I noted the student’s response in my book. His was an opinion I would consider.
“I’ll get back to you,” I said.
In this fashion I proceeded through my roster. We discussed minor discrepancies and I corrected obvious errors. I informed every student of his or her preliminary final grade. With an unhappy one or two I scheduled a private conference. But by this point I’d pretty much made up my mind.
.......................................
WASTE to be continued
