Do you agree that it is one of the best feelings in the world when someone surpasses your expectations and does much more than expected?
Recently, I have been teaching my students the poetry unit. Usually, the students take my Junior English course because they are required to do so, not really because they are super eager to learn more about literary texts. It is a required course, not an elective one at the university. In our course, we talk about poetry, drama, novels, and short stories.
I do not expect all of my students to fall in love with poetry in my class. I simply want them to pay attention to it, to get familiar with it, and to appreciate the art of writing in such a concise form. So when I asked my students to write their own sonnets (after studying traditional English and Italian sonnets) last week, I expected resistance or complete lack of interest or motivation. I even prepared a grammar task in case they really did not want to be creative in class.
You could only imagine how surprised I was when I saw the genuine smiles on the faces of my students. They immediately got to the task. It was a warm atmosphere of fun, joy, and mutual effort. Each group was writing a sonnet on a different topic. I was cruising around the classroom and eavesdropping their heated discussions about the next rhyme in the sonnet. In my 5-year experience of teaching at the university, it is the first time the sonnet challenge has received such response and reaction.
They spent the whole class working on the sonnets, and none of the groups was able to finish. They worked with such enthusiasm that no one even noticed that the class was over. I let them go and congratulated myself with a good lesson.
So imagine my surprise when the next class they brought complete sonnets. All finished and ready. I did not ask them to do that. I did not expect them to work outside of the classroom or to spend their weekend, writing sonnets. I thought it was a one class thing. But it was not. They came to the next class and expressed the desire to read the sonnets out loud. To the whole class. And we listened to them. There were sonnets about the breakup. Sonnets about winter madness in Alberta. Sonnets about the futility of university degree. Sonnets about 8 am classes at the university. There were traditional sonnets. Sonnets with a twist. Contemporary sonnets with slang and pop culture references. It was like a poetry reading.
I could not stop smiling. It made my day. It made my week. It left such a warm feeling inside me that I decided to devote a blog post to that. To keep the memory of this class alive. To smile. To remember how people can surprise you when you least expect that.
