Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Happy Ides of November!!



These leaves belonged to a lovely tree near our hotel room in Nashville last weekend. Aren't they lovely? They positively glowed, they were so bright. It's impossible to capture that, I think. Or very difficult, at least.

This week, my freshmen are beginning a unit on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I'm giving them some background information on the author first; Madame Shelley had a rather tragic life. I was talking to one of my classes today about the hardships that go along with being raised in a stepfamily, and one of my girls was quietly wiping away tears. I happen to know that she's in a very repressive and unhappy stepmom relationship and I think our class discussion touched a raw nerve. Poor kid. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting background on the story; I'm hoping it will make up for the exceedingly difficult 200-year-old English that it's written in. It's worse than Shakespeare, in my opinion, even though Shakespeare is quite a bit older. At least in Shakespeare, it's almost a complete other language altogether, so you can go about it like you're translating it. With this, it's got a lot of familiar words that don't mean the same thing anymore. Plus, it's just denser; there's something to be said for the brevity forced upon one when one must write everything in blank verse.

I've been incredibly busy this week... I apologize for the appalling lack of goofy, dorky posts. I want so badly to do a good job teaching English here in North Ruralville, and I'm so afraid I'll do something else to screw it up. I feel like a paramecium under a microscope... squished flat between two slices of glass and examined under very bright light. It's not a position I relish, particulary when I'm still a bit unfamiliar with everything and everyone and I don't know what to expect next. Plum skeery, it is. But I love my students dearly and feel very responsible to give them my best. Hope the administration sees it.

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