Starting English Class with Finnegans Wake-I Don't Think So: includes scurrying quails: haiku and senryu

By Dan Lukiv

Starting English Class with Finnegans Wake-I Don't Think So, previously entitled Getting English Class Started

"I...enjoyed it," Leif Danielson, The English Teacher.

"I love it," Elizabeth Haller, Academic Exchange Extra, 2009.

"I think the strategy of students writ ing] "something" no matter how many words, with a subtle expectation that they are welcome to write...much or...little is a great strategy. We use this in elementary school. It is called building stamina and endurance for a specific task, especially reading and writing....I enjoy reading Lukiv's] poetry and other writings," Dennis Bogle (Principal, McNaughton Education Centre).

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Revised Edition: LukivPress (Victoria, BC), 2022.

Previously published as Getting English Class Started (Academic Exchange Extra Greeley, CO (University of Northern Colorado)], 2010, Final Issue).

An excerpt

In my school, McNaughton Education Centre (Quesnel, BC), I teach English, English Literature, Communications, and Creative Writing to secondary alternate high school students, many of whom abhor reading and writing. Often I have asked students, "Do you mean you have never read a book? Not ever?"

A typical response: "I've never read a book. I hate reading."

My starting off class with their reading Dickens' David Copperfield won't work. I don't think their reading Joyce's Finnegans Wake will work either. That said (I feel a little laugh coming on), I remind myself of a song that my daughters sang in kindergarten: It begins with "inch by inch, row by row, I'm gonna make this garden grow."

One summer (1988), as my wife and I and our three girls (aged 5, 8, and 11; we have four daughters now, all adults, I think) headed south to Disneyland, in our deluxe Hyundai Pony, those girls, bouncing their legs, sang that song from the back seat, adding delightful harmonics to the underpowered drone of the 1600cc Mitsubishi motor.

In a literary sense, each class, I apply the words of their catchy song by giving each student a haiku or senryu printed on a little, non-intimidating sheet of paper. I ask students to write any comment on the front or back of the sheet: "Any memory, any image, anything your imagination conjures up, anything, any criticism, any comment about what you like about the poem-anything. No comment can be wrong."...

The author

Dan Lukiv, published in 19 countries, is a poet, novelist, columnist, short story and article writer, and independent education researcher (hermeneutic phenomenology). As a creative writer, he apprenticed with Canada's Professor Robert Harlow (recipient of the George Woodcock Achievement award for an outstanding literary career), the USA's Paul Bagdon (Spur Award finalist for Best Original Paperback), and England's D. M. Thomas (recipient of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature, Orwell Prize biography], Los Angeles Fiction Prize, and Cholmondeley award for poetry). He attended The University of British Columbia (creative writing department), the acclaimed Humber School for Writers (poetry writing program), and Writer's Digest University (novel writing program).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1699071667
• ISBN13: 9781699071663
• Release Date: October 2019
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 30 Pages
• Weight: 0.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 8.5" x 11.0"