“Love and Loss in Literature and Life”, State University of New York at Albany
All their lives, Jeffrey Berman says, he and his wife were worriers. They worried about their kids, they worried about their jobs, they worried about the dangers of the world.
“Nothing that my wife or I ever worried about came true,” says Mr. Berman, a professor of English. “In Barbara’s case, it’s what we did not worry about — namely, pancreatic cancer — that came true.”
The death of his wife in 2004 devastated Mr. Berman. To deal with the loss, he decided to share his grief with students in a classroom. The course — which was influenced by Mr. Berman’s recent book, Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning (State University of New York Press, 2007) — looks at mourning in literature. Students read the Book of Job, Wuthering Heights, and A Farewell to Arms. They write about the death of loved ones and even their own deaths.
In the “emotionally charged” course, students have occasionally excused themselves and once even exploded in anger. While it may sound morose, Mr. Berman insists that the class is a balance of joy and sorrow.
“Teaching courses on dying and death not only helps me deal with my own grief, but it helps my students when they write about their feelings of grief,” he says. “Tears are as appropriate in a college course as smiles.”
Students say:
“I absolutely loved it,” says Jessica K. Deatcher, a senior majoring in psychology and English. “It was one of the few classes that I made a point of getting to every time.”
Ms. Deatcher says Mr. Berman taught the class less as an authority and more as a student himself. It was his own experience with death, she says, not his position as professor, that gave him authority. No stranger to grief herself, Ms. Deatcher says the course did not change the way she thought about death, but gave here a way to process her experience.
Reading list:
The Book of Job, King James Version (augmented by The Five Books of Moses, translated by Robert Alter, W.W. Norton, 2004 ); Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë; A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway; Empathic Teaching: Education for Life, by Jeffrey Berman (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); One True Thing, by Anna Quindlen (Random House, 1994); Elegy for Iris, by John Bayley (St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
Assignments:
Students have seven writing assignments, including writing a classmate’s obituary, a eulogy, and an essay about the 10 things to accomplish before death. There are two written exams.
Do you have a great course? E-mail syllabus@chronicle.com
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 36, Page A22
