February 5, 2020

Yet, at the back of my mind is the discovery that my creative writing students didn’t know who Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce, Percy Shelley, Plato, Virginia Woolf James Fenimore Cooper, or Dwight Eisenhower were. One remembered vaguely the Cyclops, but no one else had read The Odyssey, or heard of Ulysses. They thought that stream of consciousness was when there was no structure to the writing. I got into huge trouble in the Humanities by insisting that sometimes a student should be taught something in particular, and that it was our duty to teach that.