Brilliant! but oh, so hard!

So, I'm teaching this poetry class. That's the first of the brilliant-but-oh-so-hard parts of this story.

I don't study poetry. I have one publication about a poem, but it's a long poem, and my work on it was in identifying its connection to the poet's biography and to the myths that are invoked in the imagery of the poem. So that's the first problem - I'm working outside of my comfort zone.

I'm teaching a second year poetry course. It's actually the first half of our university transfer course, leftover from the days (just over a year ago, in fact!) when we weren't offering degrees ourselves, only university transfer. Because our students can stay with us now, this is the last semester it'll be offered. (It is also the equivalent of the poetry class I took as an undergrad since my alma mater is where most of our students transferred to.) But since it's my first time teaching it, and the last time it'll be offered, I figured I had nothing to lose.

That's where the second brilliant-but-oh-so-hard part comes in. In considering how to teach this course, I figured a topical approach might be more interesting than a simple chronological one. I do find as I'm teaching the course, that a lack of chronological structure is difficult for me because we are bouncing around the anthology quite a bit, but I still think it's pedagogically sound, so we've been troopering along fairly successfully I think.

This means we have four units: "sound and structure" where we attend to alliteration, rhythm, meter and such, "forms and figures" where we examine sonnets, villanelles etc. as well as satire, monologues and figures of speech (yes, it's a bit of a hodgepodge), "periods" where we'll touch on some major periods and examine their features e.g. metaphysical and modernist poets, and finally a "poet study" where we'll examine the work of one poet for the last two weeks of class.

This is where my biggest brilliant-but-oh-so-hard part comes in. I decided that one of the assessment pieces would involve having the students propose who that final poet will be. They will need to write a proposal, which will need to include some information about the poet, which poems we should read, and a rationale for why we should study this poet's work. The class will vote on which proposal they want to adopt (I'll retain veto power if it seems that the vote is going in a really bad direction for whatever myriad of reasons it could). Then we'll study the poet in the last two weeks.

Yeah, I know. I'm not exactly making this easy on myself. I will have to generate two weeks of lectures based on the recommendation of a student, and in short order. But the assignment is due in mid-November, so we'll have almost three weeks before we will start studying that poet. Which should be enough time. (At least, I hope.)

But right now, I feel like I'm writing some kind of huge legal document in trying to describe this assignment to the students, since it is so different than anything I've done before and I'm certain very different from anything they've been asked to do before. There's logistics of access to the poet's works that we have to wade through, not to mention the politics of the class voting and trying to reassure students that votes don't correlate with grades (though in reality, they certainly could!) I am requiring them to provide scholarly criticism on the poet and/or his/her works, so they should still have to do some research in order to complete the assignment. And in order to really be persuasive, I think they'll have to develop a good rationale for the study as well as read a good deal of poetry.

I really like the idea of this assignment. It's just that it's looking like there's a lot of explanation that's going to have to go into the assignment sheet, and it's a bit overwhelming right now.

So I guess I oughtta get back at it instead of whining on the interwebs.