Notes
A NOTE TO MINA SHAUGHNESSY
333 Central Park West
New York, 18 June ’68
Mrs. Mina Shaughnessy
Director, Pre-Baccalaureate Program
City College of New York
Convent Avenue and 133rd Street
New York, NY
Dear Mina:
The Richards REPUBLIC is a Cambridge U. P. paperback (CAM 359) priced at $1.95. I’d have to read it again closely with the class in mind before deciding whether to use it. In any case I’d use it in the second semester.
LeRoi Jones: HOME: Social Essays is an Apollo paperback, A-147, price $1.75. THE DEAD LECTURER: Poems is an Evergreen paperback, E-386, at $1.45.
As a poetry anthology, I want to use A CONTROVERSY OF POETS (edited by Paris Leary and Robert Kelly)—Doubleday Anchor Original, $2.45.
Beyond that, we’ll see. Probably a lot of ditto sheets, a little poetry anthology of my own.
How many pages a week have people been assigning? (I know it’s difficult to judge as books are so different, but for example would 10 pages of the Jones essays plus a written piece be average, light or heavy as a week’s assignment?)
I meant to ask also about direct vocabulary work. Have people been telling students to look up words they don’t understand, and raise questions about them in class if the dictionary definition doesn’t satisfy? (As it won’t, in poems, of course.) How much stress on this is necessary? I’ve always been lazy about using the dictionary myself, words exist for me extremely contextually. But it seems to me that an active energetic vocabulary is as important—more so—than the grammar. Has anyone tried doing a little with etymology?
I’ll be here through the weekend, it looks now. Anyway, mail is forwarded from here.
Yours,
Adrienne
June 26, 1968
Miss Adrienne Rich
333 Central Park West
New York, New York,
Dear Adrienne,
Thank you for the book order. I’ll hold off on Plato until I hear from you. We have to order afresh every semester.
Ten pages of Jones plus a short written piece is light, I would say. However, we don’t do enough close reading, so perhaps it might be good to spend time on slow, thorough analysis, covering only 10 pages a week, and then let them gallop through something light (this is where stories come in handy).
Everyone agrees that vocabulary development is terribly important. Students seem to ignore the things that they cannot deal with in words. The problem is how to get genuine vocabulary growth—that is, growth of awareness itself. This involves some kind of change that is difficult to bring about by any of the vocabulary-building methods I have encountered. We had a series of language lectures last semester that covered the history of English, usage, levels, prefixes-suffixes, metaphor, dialect, etc. I don’t know what it accomplished—perhaps a sense that words can be the object of study. Each teacher tackles the problem in his own way. And there are reading and study skills courses that focus on vocabulary building. Slow as it is, I tend to trust the method that keeps the word in its setting, that gives it the special meaning that it gathers from its context (this by discussion, dictionary, etc.) and trusts that the student, following the same impulse for analogy that has produced his present vocabulary, will know where to take it from there.
Please write whenever you have questions.
Sincerely,
[unsigned]