Passive Aggression and Eagle's Wings
I am Odysseus, but on this journey through midterms, I think I may have failed to slay the Cyclopes. I assigned a poetry project to my lower writing class. They had to choose a poem from the Poetry 180 site and write a paraphrase and explication of it. Pretty simple, once they accepted the idea that they would have to actually think about the poem. I read some really thoughtful projects! And then there was The Project From Hell. Not only was this project about a patriotic poem (patriotism makes me wanna hurl), but the poor thing was one misadventure after another. The first explication that was submitted? A short story about the flight of eagles above the purple mountains majesty. A do-over was in order. A do-over which I heard about from a coworker in the Writing Lab. The student had brought in her rough draft for him to read. The draft actually had a discussion question to answer...but the question was, "How do we know eagles exist?" ("Because there are pi...