Not Dylan Thomas of And Death Shall Have No Dominion but Bob Dylan himself. Yep, that's him on the wall, blowing on his harmonica and singing Blowin' in the Wind. And that's not just any wall but the wall of my classroom where I was last Friday showing a video of him singing. A little hazy but still in my class, doing his stuff. Besides him, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. making his I have a Dream speech, as well as a video of the song I had blogged about here last year. Yes, the times they are a-changin' indeed.
All of it is part of a radical, new twist in the syllabi. Six classic songs from the 60s and early 70s and I get to teach the course, yippee! Growing up on those songs, I had never remotely imagined for even a minute that I'd one day be actually teaching them in a classroom situation. On the flip side, and a rather burdensome flip side it is too, it turned out I have to do a whole lot of researching into an era that was, to put it mildly, fast and furious. And maybe it's because I've become so used to teaching things that are over a few hundred years old and have little, if any, relevance today apart from the fact that they're literary classics but I feel decidedly daunted about teaching stuff like this which has so much contemporary significance.
Fingers crossed.
Fingers crossed.
Sounds interesting, can non student attend the class. Seriously, am a big Dylan fan, my dream is to do a Dylan show and in it have his poems/ songs read and analysed. Maybe it'll come true one day.
ReplyDeleteYou never know, it could. And it'd be a great learning experience for these college kids if we could actually herd them along to sth like that. I'm done with Dylan and just getting into The Sound of Silence :)
DeleteMe,definitely Still Crazy After All These Years!
ReplyDeleteLikewise. But I'm having a really hard time interpreting SoS. It's one of my very favourite songs but I've never really properly grasped its meaning and now I have to not only interpret it, I have to teach it :'(
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