Wassailing through Another Semester

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Wednesday, December 10, 2025

BY TRACY HOFFMAN

Today, my Washington Irving class finished up our semester together. They still have final exams, and I still have grades to crunch, but today was the last day of classes. To finish off our time together, students worked on blogs, which will soon appear on the Washington Irving Society page, and I also put together a mini Wassail Fest in our classroom.

The wassail bowl is passed around in Washington Irving’s Christmas stories, so it seems appropriate for us to enjoy a similar beverage. Irving writes: “When the cloth was removed, the butler brought in a huge silver vessel of rare and curious workmanship, which he placed before the Squire. Its appearance was hailed with acclamation; being the Wassail Bowl, so renowned in Christmas festivity. The contents had been prepared by the Squire himself; for it was a beverage in the skilful mixture of which he particularly prided himself; alleging that it was too abstruse and complex for the comprehension of an ordinary servant. It was a potation, indeed, that might well make the heart of a toper leap within him; being composed of the richest and raciest wines, highly spiced and sweetened, with roasted apples bobbing about the surface.”

Of course, we didn’t have apples bobbing, nor did we have racy wine.

Irving continues: “The old gentleman’s whole countenance beamed with a serene look of indwelling delight, as he stirred this mighty bowl. Having raised it to his lips, with a hearty wish of a merry Christmas to all present, he sent it brimming round the board, for every one to follow his example, according to the primitive style: pronouncing it ‘the ancient fountain of good feeling, where all hearts met together.'”

We didn’t pass wassail round the room, but I did circulate the room, pouring the samples. Irving calls the wassail “the honest emblem of Christmas joviality.” I’m not quite sure my students felt much “Christmas joviality” as they face finals, but perhaps when they reach the other side of their exams, they will have happy thoughts about our wassailing efforts.

For our Wassail Fest, three students volunteered to make their own versions of wassail, using various combinations of:

  • Apples
  • Oranges
  • Cinnamon
  • Nutmeg
  • Cloves
  • Ginger
  • Sugar
  • Apple Juice

I brought the fruit, juice, spices, containers, knife, peeler, and measuring spoons. Each contestant assembled a wassail blend, and then I mixed the blend with two cups of 100% apple juice. When the tea kettle cut off, the batch was complete.

We had a taste test and voted, but in the end, all three wassails were excellent. I will be emailing all of our contestants certificates for winning the First Annual Washington Irving Wassail Fest at Baylor University.

The first concoction didn’t have too much spice, so it wasn’t far from apple juice, but still quite good. The second one was a little more spicy, and also quite good. And the final beverage included extra sugar, so we all agreed the sugar made the spices pop. I felt like it would be a good beverage if you had a cold. It seemed like it could awaken all the senses, though the sugar content probably wouldn’t be so great if you were sick.

One student was allergic to cinnamon, so she couldn’t participate. I’ve had students allergic to peanuts, so I’m accustomed to leaving nuts out of most anything I bring to class, but someone being allergic to spices never crossed my mind. Fortunately, the smell of cinnamon is okay. She just couldn’t ingest it. Everybody agreed the classroom smelled like Christmas after we started brewing our beverages.

In fact, one student who had recently recovered from a nasal infection was excited to realize she could now smell! Her olfactory system hadn’t been working properly, but the power of wassail returned her sense of smell.

Smelling cinnamon makes me happy, too. I remember sniffing cinnamon every morning the one time I had Covid in 2022. I monitored the situation with cinnamon, ginger, and coffee smell checks. I was happy that very first time I could smell cinnamon once again, and that happiness hits me again when I get a whiff of it.

At some point over the holiday break, I’ll put all the ingredients in a big pot on the stove to make my home smell like Christmas, too. And, of course, the wassail tastes much better after simmering on the stove for awhile, instead of quickly boiling in a tea kettle, like we did in the classroom.

I’m aware of at least three major Wassail Fests in Texas: San Marcos, Denton, and Paris. A few of these have already happened, but the Paris event is scheduled for this weekend. I may give it a go:

https://business.paristexas.com/events/details/14th-annual-wassail-fest-19657

And here’s the audio recording of today’s blog:

Published in: on December 10, 2025 at 9:16 pm  Leave a Comment  
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“Spilling the Tea” on Washington Irving: Podcasting Considerations

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Wednesday, December 3, 2025

BY TRACY HOFFMAN

This week my American Literature classes wrapped up podcasting for the semester. I could have talked for hours about several of the questions raised during their podcast presentations. Four students pretended to be the four daughters of The Joy Luck Club. They “spilled the tea” on all the gossip in the novel. Another podcast team took a more serious slant, working through ideas about the American Dream.

Their creativity amazes me. Students who are seemingly shy during a regular class often come to life when given a platform and a microphone. It’s a treat to see how talented and interesting each and every student happens to be. They wouldn’t be at Baylor in the first place if they weren’t terrific, but when it’s podcast time, I really get to see their talents shine bright.

My students have been doing podcasts for my classes since Fall 2019, so we’ve been working through the process for six years now. We’ve recorded in the library’s podcast studios, on my laptop with a nano microphone, on cell phones, and Zoom recordings. We’ve edited, not edited, recorded live in the classroom, and recorded individually from home.

And I upload their recordings into Canvas, our learning management system. I enjoy relistening to the podcasts on my drives back home to Fort Worth from Waco. But what has been a private conversation, available only to students enrolled in my classes, might be an opportunity to share with the world what we manage to bring together throughout the course of a semester, in a literature class, at Baylor University. But I haven’t taken that step.

Knowing what I now know about my students and all the exceptional content they’ve created, I realize we, the Washington Irving Society, needs to get more audio content out there about our guy.

When I checked the stats recently on this WordPress page, I learned the most popular blog I’ve posted lately happens to be the Washington Irving playlist my students put together. I told them today in our Irving class. They seemed pleased.

But this fact, combined with all my students’ podcasting efforts, makes me see how important audio can and should be for our Irving efforts.

Ironically, at this very moment, as I’m typing this blog, I can’t concentrate because of the noise coming from outside my office door. The vacuum cleaner has been going for awhile now, as the cleaning staff works on my floor. After looking around online for royalty-free podcast music to launch the intro to a potential podcast, I’m tempted to record vacuum sounds.

And on that note, I’ll close this blog. But please know, I honestly do want to get a podcast or two or three or four out there soon. Perhaps I could record a set of four over the Christmas break.

Published in: on December 3, 2025 at 7:14 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Pedagogy of Chautauqua: “Round the Campfire” Conversations about Irving’s Tour on the Prairies

This log has camped out near my office for the past week. (And yes, that’s Washington Irving decor in my office.) Photo by Tracy Hoffman

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

BY TRACY HOFFMAN

My Washington Irving class completed our reading of A Tour on the Prairies today. If some of you were working through the text along with us, congratulations! We made it to Chapter 35.

I would like to thank Cheryl Weaver for crafting two wonderful blogs during the Halloween season while teaching “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” She gave me a few weeks to catch up, and it was better to hear about “Sleepy Hollow” during October than Irving’s buffalo hunt. Thank you, Cheryl. You’re awesome!

In the next few weeks, I’ll try to touch on themes my class discussed on our adventure through Oklahoma Territory with Washington Irving, but for today, I want to focus on one overall idea we used in the classroom–chautauqua.

The class concluded our study with a Zoom chat featuring Dr. John Dennis Anderson, who performs as Washington Irving. Another special thanks goes out to John for spending time with us today. Thank you! Thank you! John told the class how fortunate they were to have Dr. Hoffman as their instructor, and I reminded them of how lucky they were to have John Anderson join them for a conversation.

Awhile back, after having my class watch John’s performance on YouTube, I decided to experiment with chautauqua in the classroom. As I told John later, he makes it look easy, but it’s not that easy. Despite the challenges, the experience was still a fun classroom experiment. I would highly recommend teachers of literature apply such a technique to their teaching repertoire.

At the beginning of our journey through Irving’s book, I assigned each student one of the following characters or people groups. Their goal was to focus on these folks during the readings and be prepared to report on the assigned characters for upcoming reading quizzes:

  1. Washington Irving, the narrator
  2. Swiss Count (Albert-Alexandre de Pourtalés)
  3. Mr. L (Charles Latrobe)
  4. Commissioner/Rangers
  5. Tribes
  6. Settlers
  7. Antoine (not Tonish)
  8. Tonish (Antoine)
  9. Pierre Beatte

I’ve done this sort of thing before, most often when I teach Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club. Following one of the four mothers or one of the four daughters works great for keeping up with the very detailed reading. Anyhow, beyond a close reading of characters, I added a chautauqua component.

Instead of giving students a quiz at the beginning of class to check their reading, I gave the quiz at the end of class, after we had chatted about the reading, from each character’s vantage point. It was uncomfortable at first, but I forced everybody to do their best to get into character, to have a conversation as if your characters were sharing “round the campfire,” like Irving and his companions spend their evenings on the prairies talking about the day’s events.

For a performance, John Anderson typically appears in character for the greater portion of his time and then steps out of character for the final part. However, my students and I were not able to stay in character for long. We found ourselves wanting to step aside and add commentary and ask questions, so we simply modified the process to flow in and out of character as needed.

For three classes, we followed a chautauqua-style conversation, which forced students to move their chairs, get out of the regular rows, and face me and each other. This shook a few of my “back row Baptist” students into a more significant role in the conversation. I really enjoyed hearing these students open up, and I hope they enjoyed playing a greater role in our chats.

For three classes in a row, I added to our makeshift “campfire.” At first, it was only an old Baylor popcorn can with construction-paper cut into flame-shaped shards of red, yellow, and brown.  I’ve heard tissue paper works better, but I didn’t have any of that on hand.

On Wednesday of last week, I exited my car, after arriving on campus, and immediately spotted a nice log—a branch which had obviously fallen during recent storms. I carefully lugged it to my office, where it sat in the hallway until class time. One of my colleagues passed by my office that day and said, “I like your log,” and kept walking.

One of my friends over the weekend said we needed smores, but I said no, since Irving had zero smores on the prairies. He did, however, have brown sugar with his black coffee. I scrounged up a canister of Folgers from the faculty lounge, but my personal coffee maker needed cleaning before sharing it with students. Next time I teach the book, I’ll be sure to reenact all the coffee drinking, which I appreciate.

My students told me we needed rocks to properly set up a campfire, so I “borrowed” a bag full of rocks from a lovely flower bed. (Hopefully, my HOA didn’t notice my digging in the flower beds on the security camera.) My students weren’t fans of the rocks I gathered, since they weren’t big enough to enclose a real campfire. Again, I have goals for the next time I teach the book.

It’s getting late, and I still need to return the rocks to their proper home, so I’ll stop for now. I’ll catch you next week for more debriefing about Irving’s Tour on the Prairies. Until then, you can check out one of John’s performances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXCoEwa2dqk

Published in: on November 12, 2025 at 8:10 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Teaching “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in the High School Classroom

2025 Halloween photo of myself as Ichabod Crane with the AP U.S. History teacher as the Headless Horseman

November 5, 2025

BY CHERYL WEAVER

“Irving is really haunting the text!”
—11th-grade student after class

I was initially uncertain about how to teach this text. Irving’s work had never appeared in any anthologies my district provided, and I hadn’t encountered Irving—at least in my memory (a Rip Van Winkle moment?)—until graduate school. I developed three main instructional objectives:

  • Thematic: The story serves as part of the narrative of a new nation, emphasizing identity as beyond the individual and situated within societal constructs.
  • Comprehension: Focus on Irving’s detailed descriptions of characters and settings, helping students understand why he invested so heavily in these descriptions.
  • Vocabulary: After reviewing the story, I identified a few words that might require additional support for my students.

Here’s an overview of the short plan I developed, incorporating various activities:

Day 1: Students were tired from taking the PSAT in the morning, so to introduce the story, I showed the 1949 Disney adaptation. We used a short worksheet to explore questions about the post-WW2 context and what this adaptation reveals about the United States at that time.

Days 2-4: I gave a brief PowerPoint presentation on Irving and began reading the story with the students. Using an “I do, we do, you do” approach, I read and annotated the text on the first day, having students note brief subtopics for each paragraph. This helped them practice organizing their writing. On the second day, we annotated together, and on the third day, students read and annotated a section individually. We concluded with a 20-question multiple-choice assessment to gauge their understanding and identify areas needing review.

On the last day, Halloween, I read the story’s conclusion dressed as Ichabod Crane. To strengthen cross-curricular connections, this unit aligned with the students’ AP U.S. History studies; their history teacher dressed as the Headless Horseman!

To further engage students and assess their understanding of the text’s connections, we started two class days with a game I designed. Topics included natural imagery, real and fictional characters, settings, and vocabulary, specifically focusing on last names and the term “cognomen” from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Overall, students enjoyed the unit and made insightful connections between Irving’s role in crafting history and identity for the newly formed nation. One student remarked, “Irving is really haunting the text!”

Now, I’m beginning to introduce “Rip Van Winkle,” aiming for a culminating project where students can choose between a creative writing option, a traditional analysis essay, or a visual design incorporating elements of Irving’s story and themes.

I eagerly anticipate sharing my students’ creations with you!

Published in: on November 5, 2025 at 7:23 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Ichabod Crane in the Twenty-First Century High School Classroom

Photo by Cheryl Weaver

October 29, 2025

BY CHERYL WEAVER

“That all this might not be too onerous on…his rustic patrons, who are apt to consider…schoolmasters as mere drones.”

The first time I encountered Irving’s work—aside from vague childhood memories of Disney’s 1949 The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and my young adult adoration of Tim Burton’s 1999 Sleepy Hollow—I sat enthralled as my graduate school American Lit professor regaled me with Irving’s importance. Who knew, I thought, as I considered the context of Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, that Irving’s project played such a role in creating an American cultural identity? Roughly ten years later, my interest in Irving reignited when I was awarded a fellowship through the Women’s History Institute at Historic Hudson Valley. My research centered on women’s letters and the United States Post Office, but archivist Catalina Hannan’s knowledge and enthusiasm for Irving piqued my interest once again.

At the May ALA conference, I attended a panel hosted by the Washington Irving Society and met the Society’s President, Tracy Hoffman. We spoke briefly at the WIS Business Meeting: she, thinking ahead about the direction of the Society, and I, puzzling out how I could contribute, turned to pedagogy—not an altogether drastic turn considering Ichabod Crane’s occupation. We made tentative plans to develop instructional materials and methods for engaging learners of all academic levels in the serious study of the author. Ideas began percolating in my mind about how I could fit Irving thematically into my current curriculum.

I teach Language and Literature at a public high school boasting a robust International Baccalaureate program. My students are academically successful, with the expected mischievous nature of young people. (There are a few young Brom Boneses in my midst—harmless, though boisterous.) I needed to hatch a plan to cover the author and share my own adoration of his work. But I had some fundamental questions to consider first.

What exactly do my high school students know about Irving? Sure, most are familiar with the broad strokes—a headless man atop a strong steed, knife in hand, roaring and galloping toward his frightened object desperate to escape across a bridge. But would they be interested in the original text? Further, how could I frame Irving within the parameters of my course and work on stronger cross-curricular planning?

And then it hit me.

Could I position Washington Irving as America’s first influencer? Could that be a starting point to engage my students in reading Irving’s text? Could my larger curricular focus on identity use Washington to consider individual, regional, and national identities and how those are formed?

Those questions frame the unit I’ve just begun on Irving’s stories, timed to coincide with the same historical period in my students’ course on U.S. History…and Halloween. A few days in, students seem to be receptive (more on that to come!), and I anxiously await their reaction when I appear in class on Friday as Crane before they head to their history class, taught by a certain headless horseman.

Published in: on October 29, 2025 at 6:56 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Pedagogy on the Prairie: Preparing to Teach Irving’s Western Narratives

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025

BY TRACY HOFFMAN

Over the weekend, I attended the ALA Symposium in Santa Fe, and gave a paper, “A Tour of Pedagogy with Washington Irving,” on a Genre Pedagogy panel with colleagues from Baylor. We were pleased with how the panel went, and are considering next steps for the material.

After taking the road trip from Waco to Santa Fe, and back, stopping at the grave of Billy the Kid, I’m ready to get moving on Irving’s western narratives. Next week, my Washington Irving class begins reading A Tour on the Prairies (1835). We’re taking it slowly, doing a much closer reading of Irving, as this will be the one text we read from cover to cover.

And I literally mean cover to cover. Today, I managed to give all my students a hard copy of the book, in a variety of shapes and sizes. I’m especially thankful all my Amazon orders arrived on time, and in good shape. Students seemed pleased with the latest edition to their library collections, but we’ll see how the reading goes in the weeks ahead. We’ll be working through the readings as they finish up Literature Reviews/Annotated Bibliographies and Alternative Reality Game (ARG) projects, due before Thanksgiving.

In case you’re interested, here’s our breakdown for the reading of A Tour on the Prairies:

Monday, 10-27 Chapters 1-5
Wednesday, 10-29Chapters 6-10
Monday, 11-03Chapters 11-15
Wednesday, 11-05 Chapters 16-20
Monday, 11-10Chapters 21-25
Wednesday, 11-12Chapters 26-35

As we move through the material, I’ll be sure to share on Washington Irving Wednesdays what we noticed, uncovered, and discussed. If you have any tips on the text, please feel free to comment. I’ve taught the book many times, but it’s been awhile. I’m looking forward to fresh lesson plans and updated conversations about Irving’s trip to Oklahoma Territory.

Published in: on October 22, 2025 at 8:09 pm  Comments (1)  
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Washington Irving Playlist Revealed

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Wednesday, October 15, 2025

BY TRACY HOFFMAN

Last week, I promised to report back on songs students told me reminded them of Washington Irving. Since I have vacated my office this afternoon, due to high temperatures, and since I’m behind on a million and one things, I’m going to let their songs speak, or shall I say sing, for themselves.

On their midterm exam, students listed numerous songs, more than what I am giving to you. But today, I asked them to narrow down the list, and they did. Students plan to submit their own blogs at the end of the semester, so if a song needs commentary or explanation, perhaps more could be added to the conversation later.

These songs made me smile as I was cutting and pasting them into the blog, and I hope they make you smile, too, and remind you of Irving and his writing. Enjoy!

Published in: on October 15, 2025 at 5:18 pm  Comments (1)  
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