Teaching full-time means 50 to 60 hours a week for many college professors. Tenured professor at Kaua‘i Community College Brian Cronwall is no exception. But not this year. Cronwall is on sabbatical. The word “sabbatical” is derived from the word
Teaching full-time means 50 to 60 hours a week for many college professors. Tenured professor at Kaua‘i Community College Brian Cronwall is no exception. But not this year. Cronwall is on sabbatical.
The word “sabbatical” is derived from the word Sabbath. The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week and literally translated means rest.
“It’s traditional in teaching to take a break every seven years,” said Cronwall.
“It’s a time to reflect on your work. To do things that make us more effective teachers.”
A goal on Cronwall’s list is learn more about literacy. “The one area I feel deficient as a professor is in teaching reading.”
Over the next 12 months, Cronwall will, among other things, be attending literacy conferences on the Mainland.
In fact, he had already been to Toronto for the International Reading Association’s Annual Convention. One tidbit Cronwall picked up at the convention: “Reading aloud improves comprehension.” This little nugget is easy to apply for any struggling reader.
Cronwall teaches as many as five classes per semester. Classes range from basic composition to include, of course, classes in poetry. When it comes to exposing students to poetry, this 14-year veteran at KCC employs user-friendly tactics to encourage his reluctant students.
“I use some of my own poems that are set here on Kaua‘i,” he said.
Cronwall discovered that the presence of a familiar place makes poetry much more accessible to students with little experience with this form of self-expression.
“Poetry isn’t just written in a little country called England, by people who have been dead a hundred years,” said Cronwall.
When students are approached with a familiar place and language that is not intimidating, they are much more likely to warm up to the experience of writing a poem themselves.
One challenge Cronwall faces as a teacher is juggling all the different experiences that students come into his classes with.
“I try to give examples of many different ways of writing,” he said.
“Some people learn visually or by hearing or kinesthetically. I think my exercises lead to improvement in communication for students.”
One exercise Cronwall uses to help his students write about emotion is to have them pull a card with an emotion written on it — like anger, joy or sorrow. Then they write a scene without naming the emotion they drew from the deck. An example might be to write a description of the classroom with sadness as the pretext.
An observation a student might make would be: “People with their eyes lowered,” said Cronwall. “Or students slumping at their desks, or write about the dark corners of the room,” he said.
“We tend to perceive through the filter of our emotions. Just how we focus changes our perception, mood and our emotions.”
Cronwall is always on a quest to deepen his poetic life. During many summer breaks, he attends poetry workshops around the world. In 2006 it was the Paris Writers Workshop and earlier this summer he went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York for a conference specific to literature with a medical bent.
Since beginning his sabbatical year his focus is on revision. “I’ve spent the last six weeks revising poems from 30 years ago,” said Cronwall.
This diligent poet submits an average of three poems a month to literary magazines. “I’ve published 99 poems since 1994,” he said.
Can we expect a book of poems from Cronwall in the future? “Oh, definitely, yes,” he says.
In the meantime, he’ll spend the next year writing new work and unearthing decades-worth of filed poems to breathe life into.
