today

Good first day of teaching at LaGuardia Community College. 30 or more kids waiting behind each elevator when I got there, so I took the stairs. Huge building, halls that seemed to go on forever.

Good kids. Queenstastic mix of African, Indian, Nepalese, French, Filipino.  Attentive, soft spoken. And my hearing's shot too, so I had to ask them to repeat themselves a lot. It was kind of comic, especially when I would misunderstand them. "Did you say you liked Coldplay?"  "Noooo. Opia!"

I asked them their favorite movies, books and music. Half of the movies I knew. Maybe quarter of the music artists. And most of them did not have a single book they liked, or else they spouted something they were made to read in HS. Most of these kids don't read books.

Lord of the Flies came up as one woman's favorite book and I asked her if she bought the premise. She said, "It could happen." She mentioned the controversy surrounding the new adaptation, explained the book is meant to be a criticism of masculinity, but the boy roles are all played by girls in the adaptation, so it's not true to the book. Then I asked if the gender switch was conceived by a man, and she said yes. "Sounds like maybe the dude's got issues?"  Good discussion.

Another student said he only read articles. Like what? "Like recently an article on DACA." A hot button topic. My guess is a few of these kids are personally affected. "And on Irma too." We talked about the hurricane that was, as we spoke, devastating the Carribbean, how it is the largest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. One student spoke up and said, "There are two hurricanes behind that one too." Again, I had the sense that more than one student had families that were being affected. There was a moment of tense and solemn silence in the room.

After introductions I had them write a Golden Shovel poem, Terrance Hayes' invented form named after a Gwendowlyn Brooks line, wherein he takes a short poem and embeds each successive word into the last line of a new poem.  I used the Brooks poem the form was named after, "The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel." I look forward to reading them.

Then we read and discussed Hayes' own Golden Shovel of the same poem, which lead to, among other things, a discussion of the terms "catharsis" and "synaesthesia," which none of the students had heard of before.

As I was writing the poem on the board, with my terrible handwriting, I told (myself) them the story of serving Muhammad Ali roomservice and how he showed his greatness by taking a full minute to perfectly sign his check with hands shaking from Parkinson's disease. How I was still learning that lesson. Badly.

Finally I gave them their assignment, to pick a song they like that seems to say something important and write 5 or 6 sentences about what the song is saying, what it means, trying to locate an argument if they can.

Not that you asked.







I had them

Students super polite and listening. My hearing is worse.