Play-Doctopus, pen, and notebook.

I’ve started to think of the start of each semester as something like getting together to give and get gifts on Christmas.  You get to see friends who’ve become your family.  It’s fun and exciting, but it’s also nerve-wracking — will everyone like what you got them?  And will you like what everyone got you?  Inside each wrapped, ribboned, and bowed package is a surprise, be it wonderful or terrible, and you never quite know what you’ll get.

Of course, there are some givens — you will, for instance, invariably receive socks.  Core/required classes — like composition — are like the socks of the academic world: when you get a present from your schedule that says “composition” on the tag, you’ve got a pretty clear idea of what’s inside.  However, socks don’t have to be dreaded or dreadful.  I’m personally a big fan of socks, and have maintained a massive, eclectic, and exciting sock collection since first picking up a pair of yellow socks with hula girls on them my senior year of high school.  Whenever I give my Composition students the gift of my syllabus, I hope to convey some of my excitement about socks — er, this particular core class.  I mean, I give visual rhetoric socks.  What’s cooler than that?

This semester, I feel like my Forms of Poetry students were perhaps the most nervous when about what the class had in store

A Play-Doh replica of the feline Gertrude Stein.

with them — and the most surprised about what they received.  It’s difficult to convey in a course description exactly what forms of poetry will be — especially in this case, when my forms class went under the broader title of “Special Topics in Writing and Literature” and therefore had a very generic “this is a class in which the professor teaches about a special topic in writing and literature” wrapping in the college catalog.  It was like that one present in the back of the tree that’s either wrapped in newspaper

or plain brown paper.  It could be anything.  A kitten.  A set of cryptozoology action figures.  A BB gun.  The worst socks or plain white underwear ever.

Still, a brave group of students signed up, and stayed even after they found out what they were getting: a rigorous course of study of the history of poetic forms, from blank verse to renga to the ghazal, and meter and scansion and so forth.  On our first full day of class, I brought in a party pack of Play-Doh and let everyone pick a pack and play for a while before I told them what I wanted to remind them of with the gift: that there’s joy in the making.  Even if it’s not perfect, as Play-Doh creations rarely are, and even if it’s not permanent, as Play-Doh creations never are — there’s still that great joy in the making, the kind of happiness I felt when I reached under the tree, grabbed a package, and found not only a great pair of socks but a Play-Doh barber shop inside.