"The Pedestrian"

19 February 2020: I keep telling my students this semester that I wish every one of them was in every one of my classes because the material keeps intersecting in such unusual and unexpected ways. In American Ethnic literature, we've been wrestling with questions about identity, racism, and double-consciousness. In Young Adult Literature, we've wrapped up our discussion of Monster and are about half-way through The Hate U Give. In my seminar on gender and humor, we've finished Phoebe Robinson's book and spent our last class discussing 2 Dope Queens. 

So today's poem-of-the-day just really hit me. I love its use of the sonnet form, its title's double-meaning (as a noun and an adjective--as in, this is just an ordinary occurrence), and its quiet devastation. Give it a read.

"...never stop doing right..."

5 October 2018: What a day. Spent part of it talking about Middlemarch and how one person's deciding vote (Lydgate voting on the hospital chaplaincy) can have ripple effects he couldn't anticipate right as Susan Collins was about to declare her Kavanaugh vote. Taught The Hate U Give on the very day a Chicago police officer was convicted of shooting a black man who was running away from him. Left campus a bit earlier than usual to make it to an early screening of A Star is Born, which was amazing, if not exactly uplifting.

So it's been a lot.

Here's what I want to post for today: just a little bit from The Hate U Give. Lisa, Starr's mother, is trying to tell Starr to let go of guilt over her friend's death. She tells her about the day Starr was born--how Starr wasn't breathing and her mother wondered what she had done wrong, how it might be her fault. She explains, "One of the nurses took my hand...looked me in the eye and said, 'Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. The key is to never stop doing right.'"