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Week Links: 10 Oct 2020

The thin places. A poem. A teacher hack. Plenty of required reading about stuff like poetry, Kamala Harris, and #ThisIsWhy2020. Week Links is here!

Week Links: 10 Oct 2020

The Thin Places

This week, I decided to pivot my focus away from the big, systemic problems facing us, e.g., the fate of my country’s democracy. Instead, I focused on poetry a bit.

I am in a lovely situation right now where I’m being inundated with poetry. I’m teaching a variety of poetry assignments in my Creative Writing class at Cooper, and I’m taking a poetry workshop for teachers, taught by B. Ray Crowell. In the weird world of COVID, a workshop that would typically be taught in-person in Houston has been moved to Zoom, which means that we have several folks from places far flung—like Ohio!—in the class.

It’s a beautiful thing.

Today, in our conversation of a variety of poems, one of the participants began talking about “the thin places,” places where the spirit world meets the physical world. Poetry—along with most forms of art, I suppose—is one of the places where this happens. It’s that thinly veiled place that can be heaven or hell, Twilight Zone or Touched By an Angel. ← (That’s the weirdest sentence I’ve ever written.)

We find it in this place and in this time. Be here now.

I wrote a poem for the class, you’ll find it linked below. “Dulcinea” explores the thin place between dreaming and awake, between fiction and reality, between the ethereal and…baseball?

Give it a read. Tweet your thoughts at me: @sbhebert.

I wrote these…

Dulcinea
This dream will be forgotten, save that moment where the don turns to me, smiling through sun-dried crust of old age and smacking salt pork between his gums.
Stephen B. HebertStephen Hebert
Hack Comments: Another Step Toward a Reflective Classroom
Student reflections form not only the basis for my summative comments, but they also help me to steer the student toward greater productivity.
ROOTEDStephen Hebert

RequiredReading

I’m keeping a #RequiredReading Collection on Twitter.

Added this week:



Photo by Drew Beamer / Unsplash