One of the astonishing realizations that I never expected was the feeling that students could take away a great deal from notoriously difficult literature. 'The Waste Land' is the great example for me, because it's a work of such legendary difficulty, and again and again I have students come in and say they loved it, they dressed up as 'The Waste Land' for Halloween, they keep reading it. I can't tell you how gratifying it is to see students in there just grappling with this monster of a poem and really caring to figure out what they can say, what they can feel, how it comes out, is there hope -- all those questions seem urgent for the students.
|