Yesterday, I made this Facebook post: "I had great fun teaching Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Black Cat today.' Because it's Poe, I can say outrageous things, like, 'Let's take a class survey to see how normal our narrator is, like he says his actions are. Anyone in class gauge out the eye of your pet? No?'"
In the past, my students, at least the ones who have an opinion when I ask them what they want to read, have professed a great love for Poe. I do realize that it may be because it's the name they remember from high school literature classes. "The Black Cat" is the only Poe story in our anthology, so I chose it.
As I read it yesterday morning, before getting ready for the drive down the mountain, I was a bit shocked by the goriness: not one but two dead cats, and scooped out eye socket, and a hatchet buried in the head of an interfering wife. It made for a great teaching day, and it will make for a good writing prompt--is this material really that gory? I realize it may be to me, because I don't watch much modern horror, precisely because it is too gory.
I don't have as much blogging time this morning because I'm a bit behind in my grading. I'm trying to get the American Lit tests graded before I leave, and I need to leave a smidge early, because I'm covering the Writing Center shift today. One of our Writing Center student interns left suddenly, and now we have to cover 6 hours each between now and the end of the term. In some ways, it's not that huge a deal, but when we found out yesterday, I did feel a bit discombobulated. Staffing the writing center is not my favorite thing, although as I'm doing it, I find myself thinking, O.K., this is not that bad.
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