I have all but finished grading assignments for three of the five classes I have left.
Am working on number four.
Just graded journals in response to ...
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
The Stranger
The Fall
Siddhartha (2 more)
The Importance of Being Earnest (2; yeah I know it was first performed in 1895 & so is not a twentieth-century play but the kids like Wilde)
Good Morning, Midnight (Jean Rhys!)
Shadow of a Gunman (again; why that one of all the O'Casey?)
I'm sure I'm forgetting others.
Oh another student's project focused on
Yeats (10 poems), Langston Hughes (10 poems; I almost wrote just "Hughes" but that'd bring Ted to mind considering the project was to focus on Europe...I allowed students to pick one Euro & one North American poet), & misc. European modernist artists (five).

In the new Elicitor the GHS lit mag, there's a clever parody of faux-Irishness that includes a character named William B. Yeats. (I forget what the B. stand for but I know it's not Butler.)

Only eight more journals to grade. Then the Hamlet soliloquies & medieval lit. exams.
A few of the journals have been quite good. No. Really.

Hope all is well with all.
Slainte.

Blogger was down for updates so I've failed in my attempt to post daily.
Last night read nine student journals on a twentieth-century European novel, play, or poems.
Read responses to ...
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Cherry Orchard
Murder in the Cathedral
Siddhartha (3)
Shadow of a Gunman (though the student called it Tale of a Gunman)
Things Fall Apart
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Thirty or so left to grade.
~
Went to sleep re-reading The Amerindian Coastline Poem & listening to Tallahassee by The Mountain Goats.
~
Missed dinner with Amanda, Gerrit, Gerrit's nephew Gerrit, Timotha, John, and Patrick in order to read & grade journals.
~
School day begins now ...
~
slainte

Fountains of words
fall against the window
every one
different from
the other, and,
wanting to taint oblivion,
I organize them

Nothing is true.
*
Fanny Howe, from The Amerindian Coastline Poem
~~~
I'd like to go on rereading this book on and off for the next day or so. I love rereading. I love texts that ask to be reread.
~~~
This seascape fits exactly with
the geography of my mind:
whatever is close is dangerous
*
from The Amerindian Coastline Poem
~~~
At ironstonewhirlygig.blogspot.com Amanda mentioned our drive from Lanesville to Rockport (the two northern most parts of Cape Ann, the former actually being part of Gloucester though very different in character from downtown, West Gloucester, East Gloucester, Magnolia, Annisquam, etc.). Along this drive the outermost rocks of Folly Cove were particularly alluring today. & though the seascape did not match my mind, looking at it I was able to recall times past when that seascape has fit my mind's geography. I wish for those times to return.
~~~
I have another class-worth of short essays & comic strips on Kafka's Metamorphosis to grade before tomorrow morning.
Teaching the book went well considering the novella/long-short-story was a last minute replacement after I was forced to ditch my plans to teach Catcher in the Rye because we'd run out of books. It lead to many interesting discussions about dreams, alienation, revulsion, & family dynamics. I hope I will be able to teach the book again. {I had no idea GHS owned it until I came upon it while desperately searching for interesting titles in the catacomb-like English Department Book Room.}

Next year, I probably will not be teaching tenth graders anymore, but I will probably be teaching a senior Great Books class in which I can use Metamorphosis & for which--judging by the lack of "great books" in the catacombs--I will be xeroxing & asking students to purchase a few books. Ah, but that's next year. Another week & finals to go in this one. Much work still to do.

slan leat.