I don’t often talk here on this blog about my RL job, which is teaching history, among other subjects, to adult students returning to school. But last night was special. Last night we got very little done in my Crusades class. I spent a good part of the class showing the students how to put together a story from what they had read; as usual they were reading for facts, not connecting the ideas to an argument, and therefore feeling very, very lost. Part of the time they also prepared for a “TV NEWS’ style exercise in whcih one group compared the Second Crusade to the First, and another compared the Third tot he Second–not just events, but politics, motivation, purpose, etc. Most of my class time, however, was spent attending an authors’ reading from our new journal, Regeneration! A Journal of Creative Writing.
Regeneration! was a project generated by our adult students, and is the first journal in the country, we think, to emerge from an adult program. Some of the writing is raw, but all of it is impressive — and a lot of it packs a serious wallop. I saw my initially skeptical students start nodding their heads, some even crying. For our students to have discovered this kind of voice is truly powerful. These are people who have been told all their lives that they are stupid, or ordinary, or powerless. cut.”>
VARIATIONS on a HACKNEYED THEME:
Nature gets me once a month.
Husband gets me when he wants.
But Thursday mornings, I belong to Marcus.
Dreadful roar and hullabaloo!
Husband crackling, bristling, snorting:
Every manner of insult retorting,
Classifying my intentions
To ignore society’s conventions
among those same which, only latterly,
Motivated Lady Chatterley … (Karen Lacey; read the rest!)
WHO’S GOING TO TELL?
Who’s going to tell me
the joyous news today?
They proved my son is innocent
by testing DNA.
Who’s going to tell him
everyone was wrong?
I will go tell him myself
and change the flowers on his stone …
By Michael Ragland. Read the rest in Regeneration! A Journal of Creative Writing.
These two examples are incredible writings, especially the second one; powerful.
Thank you! These students are amazing. Many of them are the kind of people that broader society writes off–working or lower middle class, 70% minority, single mothers, often on assistance. Many went to secondary schools that just warehoused them instead of teaching them to write, think, or learn, because nobody expected them to go to college anyway or to amount to much. They tried college and failed, or had to drop out because of family obligations. Often they enter Mercer speaking broad Georgia dialect, suspicious of school, wanting only to endure school one last time to get “that piece of paper” so they can make a better life. Some are sick of training the bright young things in their companies who go on to become patronizing managers, lawyers, supervisors, when *they* could do the work and have the knowledge but not the schooling or the language. And some of them discover that they have so much more within them. All of them are transformed in some fashion. It really, truly humbles me to be allowed to be one of the many agents for my students’ evolution.