Statement of the Whole: How does what you read affect how you write? Is it good or bad writing to see something of other writers show up in your writing? How does this question affect the teaching of the writing art? The Backporch boys take on a listener’s question and wind up meandering all through a number of sub-questions regarding the reading life, the writing life, and how the two are intertwined. Learn, laugh, and listen in as they consider this question.
Poem: none, instead Steve reads a quote from the work:
“Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brick-yard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town.” ― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
Statement of the Whole: What does a reader do with a difficult text? Steve and Jason take on the humorous and bizarre text of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins by discussing both the text and strategies for working with a text designed to put you off kilter. “I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all.” Join in the conversation.
Statement of the Whole: A listener poses the challenge and Jason and Steve almost refuse to respond. But a lot of fun ensues when they try to figure out how to get around the challenge. What books are indispensable to a sane life? Really, just ten, is that all? Or what ten would you pack for the proverbial desert island? Join in this fun adventure by listing your top ten in the comments.
Statement of the Whole: Research this! The dust clouds billow up and the sneezing begins. Most students unfortunately have been taught to despise the task of research. Jason and Steve beg to differ, viewing it as inquiry into the unknown, the natural result of wonder and questing for truth. Join them for some thoughts on how to turn this task into a life-long pursuit. No Googling going on here!
Statement of the Whole: Good reading is a good work. It is not simple. Many have experienced the sinking feeling of reading something, and shortly thereafter not remembering what they read.
Statement of the Whole: Talking. Conversation. Dialectic. Can words that pass between us really change the world? In this podcast, Steve brings in a guest, John Donohue, to chat about the use of Seminar in education. What are the benefits and possible pitfalls of just having a conversation be the central method of a classroom? Join in the conversation.
Resources:
Great book on using Seminar with younger readers: Socratic Circles
