The Buffalo River

The school year is a month underway, and I am drowning in papers and quizzes and exams to grade. I'm teaching the usual Intro to Lit survey at Niagara University, and although there's some comfort in that, there's also the undeniable fact that every class is different, and every student is different. It's nice to back in the smaller room I had the first semester, and I'm very glad that the students are good at contributing to the class discussion. My primary objectives are two-fold--getting the students to enjoy the idea of talking about literature as much as possible in this age of YouTube and Facebook, and teaching to the objectives of the syllabus and the department. We really flew through the fiction unit; I was on the verge of postponing Friday's exam, but I'm glad we kept on track. The first paper assignment is coming up fast, and then we get into poetry, which can be very challenging. As my friend Doug said last night at dinner, teaching is infinitely improvable.
The American Literature survey has proved a little bit of a challenge. There are 36 students in the class, and the demographics are broad. I have seniors as well as home-schooled freshmen. I have older students, and the class is 80% female. This makes for a challenging discussion, but I'm going to keep adjusting my methods until things get a little looser and freer. This past week both classes had exam-fear in their faces.

At Medaille, the class I'm teaching is an intermediate composition class. It's also new to me, and something of a challenge, but I'm beginning to see how the three classes fit together and play off of each other. The students are so young, and the other day when I (for what reason, God only knows) used the phrase "you bet your sweet bippy," I had them (and me) laughing. I realized that explaining "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" to them was utterly beside the point. The sad truth is that most of their parents probably don't remember it. Anyway, we're doing this Learning Community thing throughout the semester, which ties their General Education class on critical thinking in with my class. We're working around the theme of "Life as a River" and on Thursday we did something very cool: we took a canoe trip on the Buffalo River. We took the trip with the help of a team from Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper. One of the things we learned was that the river has a "pulse": it actually "reverses" its flow every three hours or so. This means that contaminants aren't cycled downriver--and of course, thinking that way isn't too smart to begin with. We learned that the storm overflow and the sewage overflow combine when the runoff is sizeable, releasing more contaminants into the river--and the surrounding soil. We learned that a number of plants have overgrown the area, driving out more diverse, appropriate species.

We paddled from the junction of Cayuga Creek and Buffalo Creek downriver to the Ogden Street Bridge, and that's where two of the students tipped over. The Riverkeeper team had only moments prior remarked that there had been no upsets the entire season, when we all heard a shout and a splash as the two were dumped into the river. Impressively, the students kept their cool and didn't panic. It took a long time to get them back in the canoe. The canoe was turned over and "t-ed"--placed crosswise over the gunwales of one of one of the leaders' canoes so that all the water drained out. We all finally made it back to the launching point, and relatively speaking, safe and sound.