[For my annual Fall semester reflections series, I wanted to share some of the new texts and ideas I encountered this semester. I’d love to hear things you discovered or rediscovered this Fall in comments!]
It’s
pretty rare, here in my 19th year at Fitchburg State (and 24th
of college teaching overall), to get to teach a text I’ve never taught before.
It’s even rarer to teach one that I haven’t had the chance to read in full
prior to teaching it—and maybe that’s not recommended pedagogical practice, but
it’s also a way to guarantee that I will get to read books I’ve been wanting to!
That’s exactly what I was able to do in my English
Studies Capstone course this semester, assigning as the Literature work (I
divided the readings in that class up into the different concentrations in our
English Studies Major) Eric Nguyen’s novel Things
We Lost to the Water (2021). I loved Nguyen’s book, particularly the
way he weaves together its two distinct yet interconnected settings of Vietnam
and New Orleans (not entirely unlike one of my favorite songs, Springsteen’s “Galveston
Bay”). But what I loved even more was that when we came up with a handful
of questions as a class that we wanted to ask Nguyen, he responded thoughtfully
and at great length, offering these graduating English Studies students (many
of them professional writers in training) a vital perspective as well as a
model for remaining approachable and engaging at every stage of our careers.
Next Fall
find tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other Fall finds you’d share?
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