Saturday, June 5, 2021

Beatnik teaching recaps.

Like last month or so ago I caught up on the phone with my one (beatnik) friend who's from the Rust Belt and who teaches the Humanities in a public university in the Southwest.

He said that the kids in his classes this past year were great, and for class this year he assigned Obama's Jeremiah Wright speech, and then Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem, as well as some graphic novel dealing with (Chinese-American) identity.

"It's all stuff that they're going through and thinking about, so it's great," he was like.

He also said that he had some earlier readings assigned that had some prominent homoerotic themes, and though they were uncomfortable with that at first, they ended up being cool with that, and then later when they got to non-sexual readings they were all like, "Hey prof, where's the gay?".

He also recommended to me some Medieval French poem in a prose translation, for how good the stories are, for my personal reading.

No comments: