These are pieces about teaching and writing.
There’s one about a young math teacher
who loses a bet with his students
and has to have a math function tattooed over his rib.
Also there’s a collection of remarkable
short essays written by my students at
Bennington College.
John
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This month I’m blogging about a book a quarter of which I don’t much understand. There’s my effort at transparency, a theme that will briefly return. A lot more of the book, however, I understand very well, and furthermore, I like and admire the author. So I’m going to praise what I can of it and admit what parts fly over my head.
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John
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I’ve just finished reading two books, both very different, polar opposites actually, yet with some interesting commonalities. Both are nonfiction, both new. Both were written by friends. Both move with compelling and provoking intelligence. But they are indeed dissimilar. One is by a man, one by a woman. One is about noise,
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The other day Jane and I saw SELMA. We were both extremely moved, and I was brought back to those difficult days of apartheid in the South. Growing up in Maine, going to college in western Massachusetts, I was very far away from the South and all the madness, but later,
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Finally I’m posting an essay from my last Bennington class. The assignment was to describe a person, to create a sort of sketch of someone in words. We had spent a couple of classes on modifiers, and I begged the class to use them sparingly, only when necessary. The author here,
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John
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With a certain amount of pride – justifiable, I hope you’ll agree – I announce the invention of a brand new art form: the nifty fifty. This is a piece of prose, not poetry, not a sonnet, not even a limerick. It doesn’t rhyme, although I suppose it could. Its only rule is that,
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For several years, I’ve been teaching a course at Bennington College called “Through Syntax to Style.” It’s (hold on) a grammar course. That’s right. I know: college students? Still, here the point is not to teach old-style grammar with diagramming (everyone asks), for the Bennington students are generally well-prepared syntactically;
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Build worlds, that’s what novelists do, and then they fill them with their people. Sometimes these fictional worlds are separated from ours by the thinness of tissue paper, and by the time lag of a minute. Other times they are moonscapes, unrecognizable to our eyes, set in years long past or years far yet to come.
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John
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Luke Henesy is standing in front of 24 Revere High School sophomores and juniors, and three seniors, wading through a lesson on graphing systems of linear inequalities. This is an Advanced Algebra class, the Green section, and no one is texting, though a couple of times he has asked for the removal of headphones.
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In a couple weeks I’m going to England for an Anthony Powell conference. Powell wrote a vast novel – 12 volumes long – called Dance to the Music of Time. I have taught the series several times, even published a book of student essays on it, Dance Class. I’m reading a third of a paper at the conference.
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