Engl 203 and Core 101, 8/30

The lit. class went well today. After asking students if they had questions regarding the syllabus, I divided the class into groups of 3 and answer questions on either Frost, Blanco, or Hughes. These questions concerned the tone of the poems (optimistic, angry, passionate, etc.), what "America" meant for each author, and whether the poems were hopeful. As I mentioned in the last post, Blanco's poem is very inclusive ("e Pluribus, Unum) and celebrates the unity in diversity. Frost's poem is more ambiguous, especially since it ends with the word "become" (suggesting America is a work in progress, as Blanco's poem also does), but the "we" in the poem certainly seems to be European settlers, and the poem seems to connect to ideas of manifest destiny, that God gave Europeans this land to cultivate and "civilize." Still, it's not straightforward that Frost thought of the settlers as all positive. That we've given ourselves in war rather than in more spiritual/ artistic ways could perhaps be read as a criticism. Hughes poem is powerful in its angry and indignation. Whereas Blanco's poem includes everyone (a bit like Whitman), Hughes angrily speaks for all those who have been pushed to the margins, who see America as a land of hope and opportunity only to be crushed or turned away. Hughes "I" is multiracial.

To get students involved, I divided the class into groups of 3 gave each group about  20 minutes to come up with answers in their groups. The discussions within the groups seemed to go well, and the discussion went well once we came back together as a class.