A Great Teaching Day: Nuclear Apocalypses and Civil Rights Primers

Yesterday was a great teaching day, although I didn't fully savor it.  I had several seminary projects due last night, one of which was a presentation, so that stress was simmering in the background.  My commuting has gotten a bit nightmarish, with slow downs and stops that add an hour to my trip home.  By the time my seminary class started, I was more stressed than normal.

So let me savor the teaching day here.  In my Nonfiction Writing class on Tuesday, we sketched out the remaining class days--there are only 6 of them, or there were on Tuesday.  My students wanted to think about propaganda yesterday, so we began with the Daisy ad from LBJ's 1964 presidential campaign, the ad which combines a cute toddler pulling apart a daisy with a nuclear explosion.

I knew that we were going to discuss the ad, so I spent yesterday morning watching this video that compares The Day After to Threads.  It talks about The Day After as a form of propaganda/teaching.  We only watched the first part, because I didn't want to expose them to Threads, which is quite graphic and gruesome.  We had a good discussion.  The students had never seen either film, but the commentary was understandable (as we watched it, I wasn't sure that it would be).

Then I went to teach my American Lit survey class.  It was the day to discuss Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."  I wanted to use some music to set the mood as they came in, so I cued up this album (by the magic of YouTube):

I had the CD cover on the screen, and one of my students walked in and said, "That looks like they're having fun."  Hmmm.  So I used it as a later teaching moment.

I've actually seen the real photograph--there was a display of Civil Rights photo at the Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art.  As I recall, it's part of a three part set.  I said to the class, "What you can't see on this side is the firehose of water being aimed at peaceful protestors."

We talked about protest, about the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, about the unjust situation that King described in his letter.  We talked about modern issues of injustice that need our attention and how we might affect change (write letters, protest, run for office, write a poem or a song).  I talked about how the Civil Rights protestors of the 50's and 60's came from a church background and what that meant.  And then to conclude class, I had them write about the best way to do that, while we listened to two songs from the album, "This Little Light of Mine" and "(Ain't Gonna Let Nobody) Turn Me Round."

It was a good mix of history, modern politics/issues of social injustice, civics reminders (your legislators will take notice if you write or call, and they may change their minds), literature, and song.  It was less a focus on literature than most class meetings, but it felt important.  And it will lead nicely to Claudia Rankine's Citizen:  A Lyric on Tuesday. 

A Week of Interviews and Contracts

It has been a whirlwind week, and I'm not talking about the "will he or won't he" tariff chaos.  It's been a week where I have multiple seminary assignments due--from here on out, they will be more spread out.  I do think that if I was smart, I would go ahead and get the final projects done, and maybe I will.

I had an interview this week.  On Tuesday, I interviewed to be part of the Summer 2025 cohort of the CPE program at the Asheville VA Hospital.  I wasn't sure what to expect--after all, it's not like a job interview, where people are trying to determine if they want me to be part of their lives for what could be a long time.  

My mom sent me this e-mail, which I thought was charming in so many ways:  "Hope all goes well. You are a dynamite young lady who can ace this interview. Keep us posted! Mom."  It's been a long time since anyone called me a dynamite young lady--I certainly don't feel young anymore.

The interview went well, I thought.  It was the kind of interview where I could tell that the three people on the interview team had read my extensive application materials and thought about them and come up with incisive questions.  I answered them honestly.  The interview lasted 45 minutes, so there could have been plenty of places where I stumbled.

For example, they asked me what I hoped to learn outside of skills, what kind of self development did I hope to experience, and I said that I wanted to learn more about how to be present to people with problems that aren't fixable. I felt like it was a good answer, but they might have found it problematic.

Happily, they must have found more about me to like than reject.  Yesterday, the day after the interview, I sent a thank you e-mail, and I got a reply offering me a spot.  I wrote back to say yes.  

You might be asking why I am doing CPE this summer--aren't I graduating?  Yes, I am on schedule to graduate with my MDiv degree, but I still have requirements to complete before I am eligible for ordination.  One of them is CPE, a kind of chaplaincy training.

I also got my teaching contract for next year, signed it, and made some inquiries about health insurance.  Happily, our health insurance continues through the summer, even though technically I'm between contracts for a few months.  It is so nice to be at a place where I'm treated well.

Here it is Thursday, and it feels like I should be done with my tasks for the week.  But I still have two papers due today to finish, and seminary class tonight,  along with teaching tasks--and it's time to start thinking about my sermon for Sunday.

Well, let me get to it.  The weather seems iffy, so I'll get a walk in.

Sketching Progress

Because my writing time is limited this morning, let me post about my sketching progress.  Back in January, I made three intentions.  One of them was this:  "I have lots of ways to improve my ability to sketch a lifelike human, but I want to concentrate on faces (both from the front and profile) and hands, and not in isolation, but as part of the figures that I draw."

I'm still not great at drawing humans out of my imagination, but I've practiced by sketching humans that appear in catalogs.  Here's what I did back in January:

Here's a close up of my sketch, done with a .3 tip black pen.

Here's the original:

And here's what I did last night.  I spent roughly the same amount of time on each sketch, the January one and last night's:

Last night I used colored pens.

I'm using pens with a .5 tip (black and red) and a .1 tip (brown and burgundy).  Here's the original:

I'm pleased with my efforts.  What pleases me even more is that I reached for a sketchbook last night, as I brought my busy day to a close.

National Poetry Month Begins

It is April 1--I am astonished that it is April, astonished that the semester at Spartanburg Methodist College is almost over, astonished that the year is one quarter over, astonished that I will be done with my MDiv degree in a month.  It is National Poetry Month, and this year, like many years, I will not be writing a poem a day.

In the early days of this year, I was writing a poem a day or every other day.  I felt ideas coursing through me, and I wrote them down.  I hope to experience that situation again, but it won't be in April.  At this point, most of my creative energy needs to be directed to my seminary papers.  I don't have regrets--that writing feeds my soul and energizes me in the same way writing a poem does.

Still, I would like to get back to poetry writing.  I haven't really written much poetry since mid-March.  Let me start jotting down some ideas.  Let me start opening a Word document alongside the other work that I'm doing. 

I would also like to read more poetry.  I've been doing well at doing that; my teaching life, I'm happy to report, has me reading poetry almost daily.  But that teaching ends in three weeks.  Let me plan now, so that I can be more intentional once my classes end.