Update two: Presentations

The students presented their work on the cemetery/poem project last week, and it went pretty well.  I've got some ideas for how to revise the project -- overall, it works, but I should probably spend more time in the preparation stages getting students to read physical objects.  We wound up with a lot of focus on text on gravestones (which is fine), but not always paying as much attention to the decorative and other physical aspects (though there was some of that).

Some students like this style of interpretation; some do not. That's completely to be expected (in fact, one of the students asked if I would dock the grade if the response paper explains why this style of literary criticism is flawed. I have no problem with that).

Within the presentations, though, I found some wonderful insights from students.  One student payed particular attention to the engraving that the person "sleeps with Jesus."  Someone else explained the passage on a tomb that describes death as "the suburbs of Elysium" (and found the original passage from Longfellow that was quoted on the tomb).

Yet another of the students began her analysis of the tombstone by focusing on the way that the stone dated the death of the person: not only does the stone include the years of birth and death, but it also includes the number of years, months and days that the person lived.  (And several students observed this about the stones.)  This student, though, remarked on what that means, drawing our attention to the idea that this is a finite amount of time in a life.  Death comes for us all, she suggested, but what do you do with the time that you're given?  This linked nicely with the poem that the student was reading.  It also led the student to explain her thought process: she had a moment when she looked at this tombstone and said "Okay, Penelope, what did you do?"

So, all in all, I think that the project works.  I think I'll stick to it for the future.

But it also is going to require, as I said, some revision and reflection on my part.  One of the things that I realized in discussing the project with the students is that it's hard to get students to think beyond "compare and contrast."  I'm not quite sure how to express the idea of reading two texts or objects against one another without just reverting to the language of compare and contrast.  While what we do in literary studies often comes out of that particular idea, we're doing something more than strictly lining things up to say what they have in common and what they don't.  I'm just not sure how to get there yet.