achhhh

My throat HURTS!! And my stomach is all wonky. And I ate a scone for breakfast, and I never even eat breakfast anymore. But whatcha gonna do when your stomach feels all blechy?

No practice for me today. I was going to have to miss my mysore practice at Shala X anyway because I had a thing in Brian's classroom, but I was going to try to go to Erika Hildebrandt's half led primary at Yoga Sutra at noontime. Unfortunately...well, whine whine whine.

Does anyone practice when they feel like crap? Am I supposed to? Still not clear on that....

Brian's classroom thing was a "Book Group". The book was Lemonade Sun, a collection of poetry, which every Third Grade kid at the school was required to read over the summer. Once the school-year began, the kids in Brian's classroom were given a set of questions to think about, like "What did the book make you think about?" and "How did the book of poems differ from other types of books you have read?" They wrote their answers down as a way of preparing for the Book Group.

Today, being the big day, the parents were invited into the classroom, where we sat in small groups with our kids and discussed the answers to the set of questions. At first, we talked about the type of language the poetry used (lots of aliteration, lots of onamotapoeia). Then somehow, the discussion veered into more philosophical territory....about the nature of poetry, comparing and contrasting it first to prose in general and then to any sort of work of fiction or non-fiction. After some lively debate (the Husband, a man who has not read a word of literature since Freshman Year of college, told the group that "poetry is all fiction, as it is never factual; another mom demanded, "But what about "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere?"), we came to the conclusion that poetry is really about the "form", rather than the "content".

Since I wrote poetry in college (I even won an award from the Academy of American Poets), I found this very intellectually stimulating. Thus, I was surprised when the groups, one by one, gave a summary of what they had discussed amongst themselves, and discovered that every other group talked about "lemonade" or "sun" or "summer" and stuff like that. My friend and fellow mom, Ann, and I giggled when we realized that we had actually subjected our little Third Grade Book Group to a college-level discussion of post-modern literary theory...

YC