Last week - First Semester

by Lucy S.

I'm going to try to make this more even more of an account of my experience. Some days, I may be too tired to say anything of much substance, but maybe there's value in just getting it down in print.

I'm exhausted. I was up till about 1:30 am and woke up at 6:30 - which isn't all that bad compared to what some people do - especially considering I don't do this everyday. But I don't deal with sleep deprivation as well as I used to. It's almost 9 now and I need to sleep.

Today we returned to three poems the class voted to return to. All semester, on Wednesdays and Fridays, students have read a poem at the start of class and we've spent about 5 or 10 minutes talking about it. I kept telling them that at the end of the semester, we'd return to some of the poems. Fourteen of twenty voted. The top choice was "Child of the Americas" by Aurora Levins Morales. Second most popular was "I Too" (or "I Too Sing America") by Langston Hughes. There were several tied for third place, so I went with "Digging" by Seamus Heaney, because I found connections in all these poems. I also printed up "I Hear America Singing" by Walt Whitman, so that they'd understand that this was what Hughes was linking to. I prepared well, I think.  I brought in some background information about the authors and about the Harlem Renaissance movement for Hughes. I shared a little from Terry Eagleton's book How to Read a Poem. We talked a little about the idea of a poem being moral, as Eagleton says. I think they enjoyed it. I hope so. I don't think I was GREAT. But I think I did a decent job.

But it went by so quickly. We had 65 minutes total. So it felt a bit anti-climatic.

Ryan, my youngest, got burned on his foot with boiling water. He was making tea at his friend's house. While pouring the pot of water, he accidentally tipped the cup, so the water poured over the edge of the counter onto his foot. I've been trying to help him. I had him put some gel from freshly cut aloe vera onto the burned part. And manuka honey, which is supposed to heal burns like that, but the honey feels awful to him.

Our heater is also going out. So I'm looking at $3000 to $3500 for a new one, maybe more. They're coming tomorrow to give me estimates.  Meanwhile, it's cold in here, especially in my room.

That's all for now. Workaday writing without eloquence, and some common struggles.