Last night's workshop

I wasn't feeling too well yesterday. I had a serious case of dyspepsia that seemed like the beginning of a bug. I don't get sick very much anymore, so when I do, it's like those rare stormy days in Southern California, that seem so much more extreme than they really are because we are unused to them. And I probably had a mild fever, though I dosed myself with Ibuprofen to get through what I needed to yesterday, my major work day of the week.
This morning I slept in a little, as much as Whistler would allow, and feel somewhat better, well enough to go to yoga class at 10 this morning.
We are starting to talk about sound and rhythm in workshop, which is always a challenge. As I did last summer, I began with fun and games. Rather than doing the usual academic thing of going over the various nomenclatures for rhythm in poetry (iamb, trochee, anapest, etc.), which is boring to listen to and hard to talk about, I began by choosing poems that imitated the sounds of the things they were discussing, like Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree" and Kay Ryan's "Crustacean Island." Interesting they are both Islands, isn't it? We also closely examined a sound-game by Christian Bok, "Vowels," a spare little piece in which he used only the letters from the word "Vowels" to create a poem that sounded really interesting and accrued meaning as it went along.
Following that, we listened to some sound files from the Internet from a webpage in which an instructor read a poem by Emily Dickinson two different ways (one heavy on the poem's ostensible iambic tetrameter--blecch!) and the other to an altogether different rhythm, that of the thing he believed she was writing about, a train (intriguing and much more true to the nature of the poem). Then we sang Dickinson poems to the strain of midi tunes such as "The Yellow Rose of Texas," "Gilligan's Island," and "Amazing Grace." It was really a blast.
Then we did an exercise in which students wrote poems to the rhythm of songs of their choice, without of course ever using words from those songs' lyrics, if they had any. Some very interesting stuff emerged.
Several people were absent from class. One at least I knew was going to be absent since he was out of town. The other two might have been absent because I sent out an email and said if I was not feeling better, I would cancel class, but I didn't cancel class. Didn't send out an all clear email either because there was just too much to do yesterday. When a class is this small, that can be a problem.
I am still thinking about what my son was saying about my teaching. Though I think that I do have something of value to offer to my students or to whomever asks me to contribute my comments about their writing, I could definitely benefit from an effort to be less harsh in the way I phrase things. I resolve to work on that since it is the reason Richard hasn't shown me work in years and no doubt the reason many students have dropped and many friends don't ask my opinion anymore about things they have written.
I can only grow from the effort.