Electronic Teaching Journal, nothing new, hands recipe

Electronic Teaching Journal 5/12

Today I taught my newly reinvented hands poetry recipe that I developed from one of John Oliver Simon‘s lessons from Poetry Inside Out, but it was too simplistic, so I complicated the lesson up a bit, and offered more open-ended starter line options etc.

Then, when I was going through my teaching notes, I gleaned some of my old teaching files while looking for more support material. I happened upon an old teaching folder filled with drawings of hands, and exercises I developed from a workshop that Veronica Cunningham taught a long time ago, with California Poets in the Schools.

I had used that lesson and developed an art unit as well for Young Audiences. So, in a sense, the evolving lesson is part of the JOS teaching legacy because John was also there in Bishop, and that was my first time being with him on an extended basis after we broke up, so we were going through a lot.

But by revisiting the hands recipe, I had Inadvertently come full circle, and also paid homage to the beginning and the end. Call it the Alpha and the Omega if you will. The idea, that no matter how original we think we might be, there is always something that came before our latest brilliant idea. We are always holding onto, and beholden to the past. We all walk in one another’s shadows.

And that poetry recipe that I did on the backside of Sierra Nevada range in Bishop so long ago with Veronica Cunningham, developed into a full-blown art lesson that included symbolism and the origins of writing as well as picturegrams. I discovered that some of the poem recipes I was using from John Oliver Simon‘s Poetry Inside Out anthology have come full circle. Here I was, thinking I was developing a new lesson that was based upon an old lesson. But it was really the old, and the new colliding.

But what I really want to talk about is that prepping lessons for the process of electronic teaching has gotten me to go back into all these old files that, in some cases, haven’t been touched in two decades.

It’s a trip down memory lane to see my old self and the future self all at once. We are living in a post coronavirus world, nothing will ever be the same. So now is a good a time as any to let go of the old, so that the new ideas may come in.

I was talking about the teaching process with one of my teachers, Colleen Flores, about how difficult it was to teach via Zoom. Here we are all huddled around a tiny screen looking at each other, we’re insect-sized facsimiles of ourselves. I realized how much I rely upon my body, the dancing that I do in front of the classroom does not translate across the mediums. I am limited to my face being in the spotlight.

To teach with only your face as the only throughline, and knowing how self-conscious I am about all the strange and funny faces I make, I realized anew that teaching is more akin to acting, and stand-up comedy than ever. Because all that we are, we are merely talking heads.

I have to plan in advance so that students can see my hands. Forget about the rest of my body—it doesn’t exist. I only exist from the neck up. And God knows I’m trying to hide my neck it’s a frightening sight to see it on the Internet like that. And on it goes.

5/12