"Bawds of Euphony"

Today, we had a Sophomore English: Critical Thinking sub department meeting. There are ten of us, and we take turns each meeting running through a lesson from our respective class. Hopefully, the lesson leverages our one-to-one laptop environment in some way. The lesson today was a critical thinking exercise using Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

The subject of this post is not really the lesson, rather, something that came up within the activity. A very 21st century question. The activity had us in partners, posting ideas about a stanza to a Moodle forum, where other sets of partners answer meta questions about our original ideas.

My partner and I had stanza ten, which includes the phrase "bawds of euphony." Better look that one up. As a phrase search, Google takes us straight to a scholarly (or maybe pseudo-scholarly) essay explicating the stanza. There we go. Being the fun-loving English teachers we are, we continued the activity by looking up each words individually in the dictionary. These definitions helped us form our own idea.

So the question is: how do we teach critical thinking if students have easy access to somebody else's (an expert's?) critical thinking?

It doesn't work to say "don't use those sites." That'll be as effective as scaring students away from Sparksnotes.

Finding somebody's thinking isn't the same as doing your own thinking.

My initial idea was, well, you do the activity. Then, you teach students how to conduct a scholarly search, find some materials, and hold them up to the class's discussion to identify similarities and differences.

BTW - that's a pic of an albino blackbird

Introduction to Poetry

I came across this poem in Poetry 180 and found it explanatory of the problems that I've always had reading and teaching poetry. Along with Barbara Helfgott Hyett's weeklong residency at Punahou School, the poem sparked in me a refreshed interest and approach to poetry.

Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins

Besides having to explain what a color slide is, students seem to really respond to the poem (although in the spirit of the poem, I don't ask them to).