Laura T. Smith: Teaching

Presentation, or Your Day To Be The Most Interesting Person In The Room (6%)

Each student will select a partner and a class day (please see syllabus for available days and topics). On your chosen day, you and your partner will be responsible for offering opening thoughts on the readings.

Your presentation should be primarily analytical in nature. That is, while some research may be very valuable (e.g., historical or political context of poems, or information about an author’s political, religious, or philosophical inclinations), the important thing is to show how such background changes the way we might understand the poems. Thus, if you use research, you’ll move quickly from information to interpretation (to applying the information you've gathered to the poems). (Research, however, is not required; it’s absolutely fine to focus solely on the texts themselves.) The point is to show us some interesting ways to think about the readings and to flesh out a couple key aspects of their meaning.

In keeping with the analytical focus, you should minimize summary. You may find you want to include one or two statements of summary about the reading, the historical background, or the author’s predelictions to start off your presentation, but move quickly to interpretive comments about how this background influences the way you understand the poems.

Some sample ideas for presentations:
• What is an important theme raised by the day’s readings?
• What cultural issues (technology, social issues, social change, politics, religion, etc) do the poems address or respond to?
• (Or, a slightly different version) Can you draw links between the poems and other contemporaneous cultural products (scientific discoveries, art, music, technological developments, philosophical debates, etc)?
• What historical events do the poems respond to?
• What formal or representational problems do the poems address?
• Are the poems dealing with an aspect of human identity (e.g., struggling with identity or working to understand identity in a new way)?
• What are the poems doing similarly/differently? (Yes, the old compare/contrast…. It’s as old as the hills, but always a fruitful way to generate analysis….)
• Linking the part to the whole: Focus us in on a section (a stanza, a few lines) that encapsulates the whole and perform/facilitate some close-reading.
• What ideas stand out as most significant or interesting?
• How do these poems interact or compare with others we’ve read in the course?

Fine Print:
You are required to talk to me briefly about your plans for your presentation before the presentation date. Knowing what you will be focusing on helps me plan the rest of the class day. You may do this after class, during office hours, or by email. A five-minute chat is sufficient.

You are not required to talk about every reading assigned for your day; it’s absolutely fine (even advisable) to focus on a couple pieces.

Your presentation should be 6-8 minutes. You may deliver your presentation from notes or you may read a fully-prepared statement, but either way, make sure it’s well-organized. Remember that in an oral presentation, the audience needs clear organization and prominent oral sign-posting to follow the stream of your thoughts; it’s usually helpful to tell your audience what you’re going to say before you say it. For example, if you are talking about Gwendolyn Brooks’ sonnets and want to discuss stylistic innovation and its relation to socio-political critique and race relations during World War II, you might start by saying, “After I read these poems, I was really interested in how Brooks is experimenting with the sonnet form, and also how she’s commenting on how race politics changed in the US during and after World War II. I’m going to start by talking about her more formally conventional sonnet, ‘Gay Chaps at the Bar,’ and then I’ll talk about the more radical critique offered by her experimental sonnet, ‘kitchenette building.’”

If you choose to deliver your presentation from notes, I recommend planning (writing out) key moments such as your opening and your major transitions.