1 March 2018: I walked into my ENGL 311 class feeling a bit crummy. I might have a cold coming on--and I have no time for it. But by the end of the class, my mind was far from any impending crumminess--almost entirely because of the wonderful students and the great work they did with Keats' poems and letters.
I really knew we had hit our stride when we got to the last stanza of "Ode to a Nightingale." After one student read it out loud, I said, "I always find that last sentence so unsettling" And another student jumped right in: "This whole stanza is wild. It goes crazy here." That's the kind of reaction a teacher dreams of. On the surface, there's nothing wild or crazy about that stanza. You have to be really deeply engaged to see it. And they were, so they did.
I suppose it's all a bit meta, too, since in the poem Keats writes about wanting to escape materiality (including sickness) through poetry. For a good hour, I did just that.
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