The Illustrated Professor

On the first page just after the required novels
And before the list of learning outcomes
I’d paste a photo of me from ‘73
Scraggly hair and wire-rimmed glasses
And then torn from my long gone journal
Some half poem or worry on the day
So they might see me and not me
Who could be their dad or worse
With these handouts and so much to read
How jealous I am I am almost crying
How much I love them.

———————————————————————————————-

I’ve posted this poem before, but it seems so appropriate semester after semester as I begin to prepare for a new round of classes.

This semester I’m teaching two classes and one independent study for a graduate student.

One class is a first-year research and writing class.  The main topics for the course are visual thinking and graphic narratives, and we’ll be reading Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin, Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narratives, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and Art Spiegelman’s MAUS.

The second class is an American Literature class, and we’ll be reading a collection of poetry edited by Billy Collins (Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry) and a collection of short stories edited by Joyce Carol Oates (The Oxford Book of American Short Stories).

In the independent study graduate course, we’ll be reading selections around the theme of aesthetics in Christian literature.  We’ll be looking at John Dewey’s Art as Experience, Walker Percy’s A Message in the Bottle,  Northrop Frye’s The Great Code, and Flannery O’Connor’s collection of stories A Good Man is Hard to Find.