I’m not going to say this one was a total waste of time…though I kind of want to. Oh! but not for the reason you’d typically associate with me. It was because…it was an exact duplicate of something we’ve already done in class. It was the Cisneros poem, the exact same one, and the exact same idea of immitating the “such-and-so who” format. That was it. Almost an exact clone of the lesson we did.
On the plus side, I did meet an interesting first year teacher, and a dude too! And what’s more, he said he was really enjoying himself, and he’s even teaching 9th grade. So there’s hope for me yet, I suppose.
The lady who was holding the seminar did it pretty well, though. The main difference between what we did and what she did was include a form sort of paper for the students to write their imitation on with the same prepositions as in Cisneros’s poem at the beginning of each line. One odd thing was that she seemed to have, I don’t know, a different version of the poem or something—remember how we couldn’t figure out why the man in the poem “used to laugh and like the letter K”? Well, in the version she had it was “used to laugh like the letter K”. No “and”. Plus, she had a commentary about the poem from some teacher who devised the lesson plan, and she specifically references the line—her students thought it meant that he “laughed like the letter K” because he was ill and his laugh was half a cough. Well, that solves that mystery, I guess.
