I'm Not Leaving until I Eat This Thing

For class today, we're reading John T. Edge's "I'm Not Leaving until I Eat This Thing," as an example in profile writing. Edge frames his profile of a visit to an offal factory with his own experience in trying to eat a pig lip. It's a fun essay, and students tend to engage really well in discussion on whether or not they'd eat organ meat.

We've just begun the profile unit, not quite ready to pre-write, so I turned to the instructors' manual to see if it had any additional tips for expanding our class discussion.

The editors' suggestion? Ask a room full of college freshmen to complete the following sentence:

• Eating ________ is like eating __________.

Are you kidding me?

Seriously, what was the first simile that came to mind? Be honest. Organ meat indeed.**

________________

Knitting Olympics: I'm deep in Civil War knitting, having cranked out eight sleeping caps and a pair of winter cuffs in double knitting. I'm engaged in a mighty struggle with a typically frustratingly vague pattern, but the Olympics keep me plugging away at it.

____________

**With some significant alteration and very careful phraseology on my part, I did use the exercise as a way to work on simile and concrete vs. abstract language. We had a lovely chat about tripe and blood sausage, alligator and squid, snails and crab mustard (the last being my contribution).