School--You--Icebreaker

First-day jitters are setting in. I'm teaching workshop again, which should be fine, but I'm also teaching a new prep: Intro to Literature. My first assignment, in light of Time Magazine's naming "You"--the creators and purveyors of information--the person(s?) of the year, asks the students to define what literature is, and whether or not it has changed over the course of the past twenty, one hundred, five hundred years. As a part of this assignment, I'm giving them eight texts--poems, blog entries, short stories, flash fictions--but I didn't identify any of the works' authors or genres. The deal is, once the students define what they think literature is, and its importance in the world, they have to attempt to rank the texts in order from most "literary" to least "literary." So, there's a chance some of "your" work may end up ranked ahead of Hemingway's or Robert Frost's.

And since I'll be doing that old icebreaker thing two times again today...here are five statements about me--three true, two false.

I once grand marshaled Logansport, Indiana's Iron Horse Festival Parade, during which event I sat on the back of the same baby blue convertible Cadillac Larry Bird sat on during a parade in the movie Blue Chips.

I didn't learn to read until I was seven.

I spent one season as the head coach of both a Little League team and a Youth Football League team in Champaign, Illinois.

I attended four schools as an undergraduate, but only one as a graduate student.

When I was nine years old I decided I wanted to break the Guinness Book of World Records record for the longest fingernails on a living human being. I spent a total of four years growing them out before my mom came at me with a pair of scissors.