And....it's a wrap! I'm done with the teaching but not with the grading, the pleading, the meetings meetings meetings, the proctoring and assessing and filing of reports. And in fact I'm not entirely done with teaching for the semester; I'm just done with the standing-in-front-of-the-class part of teaching. I'll still be engaging in informal instruction as I respond to students' questions and offer comments on their projects and do my best to push them across the finish line in one piece.
My American Lit Survey students started the semester discussing Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser, " a poem that rejects the call for poetry proclaiming the glory of war and instead draws attention to the nation's woundedness. We talked about the relationship between literature and history and what role literature can play in healing a nation's wounds, a topic we returned to repeatedly throughout the semester.
Today we closed the loop by ending with Natasha Trethewey's "Native Guard," a poem inviting us to see history as a messy palimpsest of crosshatched stories, sometimes written in ink on paper and sometimes in blood on the backs of powerless people. Students may have thought we'd finished with the Civil War back in February, but here's Natasha Trethewey directing our attention to previously disregarded voices, reminding us that there's always another story to unearth, always something more to learn.
Is there always more to teach? Yes, but not today. Today I'm DONE. (But ask me again tomorrow.)
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