Instructors’ Teaching Experience

I was surprised at how well my class responded to this poem.  Many of them found that they could identify with the speaker of the poem. Once they began to think of the poem as potentially applicable to their own lives, classroom discussion became remarkably lively.  I jumpstarted the conversation by playing a recording of Eliot reading the poem himself, then asking my students to consider the way that his reading differed from their own.  There are a few different recordings on YouTube, each with a few surprising choices. Starting from the premise that a reading was an interpretation, I asked my students to identify where they were surprised by Eliot’s choices, how they would read it differently, and what the differences could mean.  On their mid-term evaluations, several students counted listening to Eliot’s reading as the most memorable aspect of the class to date. [Andrew Williams, andrew-williams@uiowa.edu]