My daughter’s enrolled in my freshman lecture – Global Film and Literature – and I’ve had my concerns and misgivings. It’s great having her there. But I really didn’t want her taking any of my classes, ever. I let her take this one because it’s co-taught, and I’ll never see a piece of her work. My colleague will grade her fairly, so the conflict of interest is gone. I’d probably grade her harder than everyone else, so it’s more fair to her than to the rest.
I include student discussion posts in lectures, and one of the six student interns in the class flagged hers as one of the better ones the other day. We were working on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and she saw how the darkness wasn’t just in Africa, but in Belgium, in England, in many of the settings and atmospheres throughout the book, maybe most ominously in the shadows that come down at the end when Marlow visits Kurtz’s “Intended.” I tried not to use it as an example of a good post, but had to in the end.
She came up to me after class and said: “That was so embarrassing, dad.” And she’s right, it was. Embarrassing for me, for her, even though most people in the class have no idea she’s related to me. But what can you do? Not allow your kid in your class, I guess. But she wanted to take the class, and I didn’t want to force her into something that didn’t interest her.
I hope this parenting stuff gets easier some day.
One plus is that after I talked about W.B. Yeats and Eavan Boland the other day, with a lot of information about the 1916 Easter Rising and the Famine, she texted me: “You just talked about the potato famine and now we’re having baked potatoes for dinner in the cafeteria.”
She’s making connections. Here’s hoping she isn’t the only one.
Parkinson's Disease Diary 