This week will be unusual for Spring semester. I'm only teaching two days this week, on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday through Saturday morning, I'll be over at Lutheridge, at Quilt Camp. I'll be returning to my Lutheridge house to sleep, but I'll be spending most of my time sewing.
Earlier in the semester, when we were missing so many classes because of snowy weather, I thought about trying to divide my time between Quilt Camp and Spartanburg Methodist College. But my students can use some unstructured time to work on all the papers that are due in the next few weeks. Will they? If they are smart. If not, they, too, can enjoy a few days off and then get back to work.
Today is the heavy teaching day, yet my heart is light. We finish Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" today. I had thought about canceling it, because it is long. But we had space in the syllabus, and I didn't feel like devising a new plan. I am so glad I went ahead with it. I had forgotten how delightful it is to teach.
I taught the first part last week, and it made me so happy to hear students still discussing it on the way out of class; as two students tried to determine if the poem was really talking about bestiality, I thought, I am so happy not to be teaching in high school. I don't have to worry about angry parents coming back to demand that I be fired for teaching their students about this poem.
As the semester winds down, particularly in April, I sometimes feel a bit of despair about all that I am not doing, the poems I'm not writing, the journals that will be closing down their reading periods for the year without a single submission from me, the books of poems I'm not reading, the events I didn't organize to celebrate National Poetry Month. It's good to remember all the ways I am celebrating National Poetry Month, by bringing poetry into my classrooms, by reading poetry to students and sparking interest.
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