Tag: english

Kairos in English Class, or The Story of the English Teacher Who Was Mistaken for a Rhetorical Clown: A Narrative Poem in Free Verse

When I’m dancing and singing
and acting like a clown,
My students love me —
“because you’re entertaining
and funny,” they say.

But as soon as I start talking
about the Greeks, about rhetoric,
about kronos and about kairos,
‘the opportune moment’ —
they fall asleep.

I drive the chalk deep into
the blackboard and watch the
white powder slowly cover
my hands, my hair
my shirt, and my pants.

I’m soaked in it —
the ephemera of teaching,
the mojo of learning,
the antidote of ignorance,
the genesis of thinking:
standing but swimming
in white chalk powder.

Falling knowledge
like December snow —
free for the taking,
highly expected
but severely
ignored.

“It’s too theoretical,”
they tell me.
It’s all too far removed
from their worlds
(or so they think)
and they doze off,
hanging their heads
upon their palms —
guillotines of thought.

And swiftly
they drift
into a
barren
and hollow
world
far away
from

the
utopia of

English
class.

Thank you.

Come again.

[Fervent Applause]

MA Comps

The long-expected culmination of my M.A. program came on Saturday, two years after I finished coursework for the degree. I spent 8 hours writing three essays for the comprehensive competency examinations. On the first, I applied a critical theory (deconstructionism and its extension: postcolonial theory) to the year’s common text, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. I wrote, quite eloquently although probably incoherently, on themes of convergence and liminality in the novel. I’d rank this essay second in the pile.

The second essay I produced dealt with practical/pedagogical issues in the profession–teaching freshmen writing, more specifically. Since I am not in that context (of prostituting myself as part-time adjunct writing instructor at two or three community colleges in the U.S. without money to pay the rent at the end of the month), I wrote on my experience of teaching College English abroad to foreign language learners. I think this was my best essay.

My least favorite essay, the last one I worked on, was actually supposed to be the easiest from the three (hence why I left it for last). It was based on one of three committee/student generated questions. The exam proctor, I guess, chose one question from the three at random and I was expected to use whatever I could from my M.A. reading list. The problem was that the one question chosen asked for an inverse response to the subject of my mentored scholarly paper on the benefits of a digital writing environment on L2 writing. My reading list didn’t contain ANYTHING that pertained to this topic. Without much mental energy left, I wrote this third, and least successful essay, based on my own experiences without any outside material being incorporated into my response.

We’ll see how it turns out.