Month: January 2011

Course Evaluations Redux

Rohan Maitzen12 Comments

A couple of years ago I noted that course evaluations do not necessarily help us understand our strengths and weaknesses as teachers because most of the time the responses are so contradictory. Last term’s batch, which just arrived in my mailbox, is no different. Some samples, from the Brit Lit survey:

One the one hand…

I really liked the collaborative wiki; it made for an engaging project that encouraged me to keep up with my readings.

The wiki pages worked well.

Her wikis are a great way to keep a class engaged and to help study for finals.

The wiki assignments are interesting and useful.

The wiki assignment is somewhat progressive and relevant.

but on the other hand,

I hated the wiki assignment!

The wiki was an unfair aspect of the course due to the amount of work it required … the wiki is a waste of time and effort for most of the students in the class.

Stop doing the wiki pages, just because we’ve moved into a technological era doesn’t mean we’re going to do something like this or want to.

On the one hand…

The material assigned helped the professor to be stimulating, and some lectures were inspiring.

Dr. Maitzen is brilliant and funny, and a pleasure to hear speak.

Dr. Maitzen made the course enjoyable and the lectures were easy to follow.

Maitzen is amazing at being informative and witty at the same time.

Maitzen did a great job being interesting with the material. The class moves along quickly but I was able to gain a good understanding of British literature.

but on the other hand,

Dr. Maitzen speaks too fast! … it is important for students to be able to follow.

The lectures were normally quite dry and boring.

I found it very difficult to stay interested in this class because of the teaching style.

On the one hand…

She also excelled in pushing her students to relate [to] course material with such a broad selection of writers.

The breadth of the material covered in this class was really nice.

but on the other hand,

Too much material to fit into one semester!

I think that Maitzen could have focused on fewer texts in a greater amount of detail.

The only thing I didn’t enjoy as much is the amount of poetry that we talked about. Poetry is not one of my favorite things to analyze.

I did not enjoy the amount of poetry, I would rather have more stories / novels.

Overall,

Professor Maitzen is very enthusiastic. She has a good influence on students to become excited about their studies. Also, she is able to relate to the various positions of students in order to maximize development.

The instructor led a superb class in which I learned quite a bit. I am very glad it was a required class as I gained valuable skills for my major.

One of the most engaging professors I’ve had so far at Dal, she’s brilliant but not in an intimidating way.

The instructor is interested in the students and makes sure they are engaged in the course, concerned with students’ academic success & cares about overall wellbeing of students.

Always willing to meet outside of class to help the student.

easy to approach!

She engaged the class in discussion often, making the class intellectually stimulating.

Although challenging at times, such difficult is necessary to learn.

She is approachable and lovely.

She was great! Really smart and interesting & I always left wishing class wasn’t over!

She is a wonderful prof who seems very interested in the material and in her students.

I appreciated how thoroughly Dr. Maitzen would prepare us for our assignments.

But then,

Professor Maitzen was an average instructor. She did what was necessary to get her point across.

Dr. Maitzen didn’t seem to care how we did in the course. By this I mean she only offered help when it was convenient for her and she offered no sympathy if you were busy with other school work.

A bit intimidating.

Not as bland as most instructors can be.

I found her classes very structured but not very stimulating.

I think she may have been a little too demanding in her assignment requirements.

Well, obviously you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and on balance the responses were actually more positive than I expected for this particular course. But what can I learn from these comments, going forward? Some of the reiterated complaints were predictable given the nature of the course. For instance, though I explained frequently that we would cover selected examples in class but that they should then be able to analyze the other assigned readings independently, using the information and models they learned, many of them objected to having been assigned readings that weren’t lectured on.  I can do better, perhaps, to clarify the relationship between class time and their own reading, though I know they will always (wrongly!) feel better served  if all the material has been “covered” by me explicitly.

There are some other fairly consistent comments across the set that I willcertainly keep in mind. One is that the course was very clearly organized–that I followed the schedule and syllabus closely, and so on (these comments always make me wonder what happens in their other classes!). It’s good to know that my efforts to be clear and consistent are appreciated. The other is that I talk too fast and they do not want to be responsible for putting their hands up and asking me to repeat things or slow down (as I always encourage them to do, if I start getting carried away). A couple of them felt it was easier for them to stay with me when I used PowerPoint slides; this is something I’ll think about, but mostly I need to keep reminding myself to slow down. My own perception often is that I am going slowly, doing a lot of repeating of key words and arguments, and so on, but enough of them felt harried by my pace that I should take their input seriously. Also, by and large they loved Atonement but not Mary Barton (but wait, here’s one who “particularly enjoyed Mary Barton“!). When (if!) I teach this survey course again, I’ll weigh my options again, but I think their lukewarm reaction to Mary Barton is as much a function of their unfamiliarity with long discursive novels in general (the most common specific complaint was about its length) as of Mary Barton in particular. Last year my exemplary Victorian novel was Great Expectations and the reaction was not that different. Also, though they were very enthusiastic about Atonement, their papers suggested a lot of them did not understand it very well! So as always, their preferences will not be the only, or even a major, influence on my book orders.

I must say, it’s easier to take in all this mixed and fairly personal feedback when I’m not going right back in the classroom. Although years of experience somewhat inures us all to the knowledge that we are being judged in this way, it’s still hard not to want to respond, sometimes quite sharply, to some of these comments (I did too care how you did in the course! And I held office hours every week that nobody came too, and I always invited students to set up appointments if those times weren’t convenient! And why are you an English major at all if you don’t like poetry? And I bet you didn’t think the wikis were a waste of time when you were using them to study for the final exam!). At the same time, the nice comments are a seduction that has its own dangers. You can’t teach well if you want too much to be liked. As one of the students says, with great (and rare) maturity, “difficulty is necessary to learn,” but difficulty is uncomfortable, and you may not realize until well after a particular course is over whether it was valuable to you or not–which is, surely, a more important issue than whether you enjoyed it in the moment.

Sabbatical!

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Today is the first day of the rest of my sabbatical! Much as I love being in the classroom (usually, anyway), it’s a good feeling to confront a term in which my time will not be overwhelmed with teaching tasks and I can concentrate on the other parts of my job description–particularly, of course, research and writing–that tend to get crowded out the rest of the time. The sabbatical system is a wonderful and very valuable feature of academic life. It’s impossible to imagine sustaining the commitment, creativity, and intellectual integrity that’s necessary to do this job well without these intermittent opportunities to update my own knowledge and exercise my own skills as a researcher, scholar, and writer. We bring our whole selves to the classroom; the richer, more energetic, and more imaginative our own intellectual lives, the more worthwhile that teaching time will be for everyone involved, but especially for our students.

Not that my teaching life screeches to a halt, of course. For one thing, class descriptions and book orders for the fall term will be due before too long, which means I’ll have to make a number of important decisions about how to approach the three classes I’m slated for. It will be nice to make those decisions a bit more reflectively, and in fact one of my sabbatical projects is to refresh my ideas and knowledge about the course topics by reviewing recent critical work as well as work on effective assignments and teaching strategies. All three are courses I have taught repeatedly in recent years, so it would be easy just to do basically the same readings and course structures as before, and to some extent I am likely to rely on the materials I’ve already developed (it’s not as if I have any reason to think they are no good at all!). But it’s important not to fall into a rut, or to assume I don’t have anything more to learn myself about the texts and topics I teach. Yesterday I began compiling a list of recent books in my field that look interesting, and I even picked up a few of them from the library, so I’m ready to get started on them. Also continuing is my work with four Ph.D. students, all of whom are in the thesis-writing stage of their degrees. At this moment I have about 140 pages of their draft material waiting for my input, and I expect more to come in pretty steadily over the next few months, as at least a couple of them hope to wrap the whole thing up this year. This is another task that will be much more pleasant–not to mention efficient–without the pressing distractions of a regular teaching term, and without competition for my time from M.A. students (my most recent one successfully submitted her thesis just before the break–hooray!). Requests for reference letters continue to come in pretty steadily. Otherwise, however, this term is clear of a number of the usual ongoing chores and commitments. Least missed will be marking undergraduate essays, with attending committee meetings a close second!

So, in addition to refreshing my stock of information and ideas for teaching, what are my sabbatical plans?

First of all, I’m committed to finishing the full version of the essay I’ve been working on for a couple of years on Ahdaf  Souief and George Eliot. I had worked through a lot of what I wanted to do with In the Eye of the Sun, but I want to cover The Map of Love also and have not come to terms yet with how it complements or complicates the arguments I made about the earlier novel. And then I stalled as I tried to figure out how to balance all of the potentially relevant aspects of this project, which include theoretical issues in postcolonial criticism,  postcolonial critiques of Victorian literature including George Eliot’s novels, historical and theoretical questions about Arabic literature and the novel tradition in Egyptian literature, work on neo-Victorian novels and on travel writing and on imperialism and on women travellers, specific interpretive questions about both In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love… Well, clearly one essay can’t do everything, and I don’t need to know everything about all of these topics before I can write my essay. But I need to regroup, review the work I’ve already done, and then go back to the novels themselves and focus on explaining what interests me so much about them, how they work both formally and thematically to get us somewhere new in our understanding. In order to write the essay I also need a target publication venue or two in mind; the decisions I make about where, finally, to place the emphasis of the essay (particularly its theoretical framing) will determine (or be determined by) the kind of journal I hope might accept it. I have been thinking about Edebiyat, but the Journal of Postcolonial Writing seems like another possibility. (Other suggestions?)

My second research and writing commitment is to a series of review essays I want to do for Open Letters Monthly on some titles from the Virago Modern Classics back catalogue. Looking at these early 20th-century titles will take me outside my usual Victorian beat, but I’ve spent more time in the modern period since working up my British Literature survey lectures, and I’m very interested in learning more about these texts and writers. I have been dithering about where to start, and yesterday I finally decided that absent any overwhelming reason to do anyone in particular, I’d just have to choose, so I’ve chosen Margaret Kennedy as my first subject, because Together and Apart was the title in the very enticing pile of VMC’s Steve Donoghue recently sent me that for whatever reason piqued my curiosity the most. I don’t intend to do a complete survey of all of her work, but I got The Constant Nymph from the library yesterday (it seems, also, to be the only one still in print at Virago), and I hope to read that, Troy Chimneys, Together and Apart, and The Ladies of Lyndon. My second pick, I think, is Barbara Comyns, for the excellent reason thatI loved the first line of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Antonia White (whose Frost in May was the first VMC published) is another possibility. The key here, though, is committing to whatever I’ve chosen, so Margaret Kennedy it is, a writer I’ve never read and indeed had never heard of until Steve’s parcel arrived in the fall. Though I will do some light research, into both Kennedy and Virago (I’ve already read a very interesting interview with Virago’s founder, Carmen Callil), I want to focus more on the reading experience here than on contextualizing or theorizing–all part of my project to gain confidence in my own critical voice and perspective. Happily, there isn’t nearly the weight of critical opinion on Kennedy as there is on George Eliot or Virginia Woolf anyway, so the whole anxiety of authority is somewhat allayed from the start.

I have a third writing project on the go, of at once narrower scope and grander ambition, based on my years of reading and loving George Eliot’s novels. But at this point I think it’s too soon to make pronouncements or declarations about how or when this will get done. And I’m also wondering if I can or should make anything more solid out of the fairly substantial archives here at Novel Readings. I was struck by the opening line of Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind–that she didn’t realize she had written a book. Blog posts aren’t ‘literary essays,’ but they can be revised into them. But then, I’m not Zadie Smith (or James Wood or Michael Dirda or whoever) and who would want to read a collection of my reviews and essays? But it’s something to think about, anyway.  I’ve been writing this blog since January 2007: I started it at the outset of my last sabbatical, and in fact my very first post was a short one on none other than Zadie Smith! When I look back at just how much I’ve written, I’m not altogether happy to let it just fade into the distance, as blog posts inevitably do.

In addition to writing projects, I have many reading plans–too many to list, and more flexible, not so much commitments as ambitions and interests. For an English professor, time to read widely and curiously is enormously valuable. You never know what books you read ‘just’ for yourself will end up infiltrating your research and teaching life (many of the books I now teach regularly, such as Atonement or Fingersmith, I first read purely out of interest). But also, the more you read the richer your sense is of what literature can do, of how it can be beautiful or interesting or problematic or mediocre. I am convinced that I talk better about Victorian literature because of the contemporary literature I read, and that I teach with more commitment, and more hope of making connections with my students and their interests, because I read around and talk to them about books as things of pressing and immediate significance. So I’ll read a lot, I hope–and write about it here! Up soon are two books for reading groups: Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory for the local in-person group, and Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book for the Slaves of Golconda.

And with that, I’d better get going–apparently it’s going to be a very busy term for me!

Why Criticism Matters

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Is it just me or do the six “accomplished critics” writing on this topic for the New York Times go on and on without saying much of interest or substance? Most of the offerings exemplify the dangers of generalizing–whether about criticism, about literature, or about good writing. Indeed, some of their generalizations make me worry none of them read much, which surely can’t be true (for instance, “the serious contemporary novel withdraws from linearity”? so much for A. S. Byatt or Hilary Mantel, to name two obvious counter-examples;  but then “its focus [is] distributed across several characters”–which sounds not so much contemporary as Victorian to me). Then there’s the oddly facile pot-shot by Stephen Burn against English professors who abandon literature to become administrators (take note, Craig!): I guess he’d rather universities all be run by business professors? Well, that seems to be what most people want these days. By and large they all conflate criticism with book reviewing, they seem quite preoccupied with evaluation as the critic’s job, and there’s a lot of talk about good writing, but not much about good reading, by which I mean reading that comes from close, patient attention and expertise. The value of academic criticism is hardly acknowledged (the only one who admits it, indirectly at least, is Batuman, and then only through references to books she read in graduate school), and though there’s a nod or two to the possibility that some of the critical writing done by ‘amateurs’ on the internet might not be stupid or strident (they all assume that bloggers are amateurs, which is sort of funny, because there are a lot of bloggers whose professional credentials and accomplishments as critics are surely equal to those of this Big Six, if often in different venues), the general tone seems to be a defensive one, the mission to prove not so much why criticism matters as an activity but why their critical practices and habits matter. Still, there are some pretty good moments. I think Sam Anderson is close to the mark, for instance, when he notes that the “membrane between criticism and art has always been permeable”:

That’s one of the exciting things that books do: they talk to other books. The critic’s job is to help amplify that conversation. We make the whispered parts of it audible; we translate the coded parts into everyday language. But critics also participate actively in that conversation. We put authors who might never have spoken in touch with each other, thereby redefining both. We add our own idiosyncratic life experiences and opinions and modes of expression — and in doing so, fundamentally change the texts themselves.

Nobody asked me why criticism matters, but if they did, I think I would just say that criticism matters because literature matters. If I were then asked to expand on that response, I would say that serious criticism (a label which excludes plenty of what passes for book reviewing on the internet and in print) matters because it takes literature seriously enough to investigate, explain, contextualize, and challenge it. It may do so in myriad ways, from formalist or aesthetic or historical or political or even, per Batuman, Freudian perspectives. Good criticism, I would add, requires expertise as well as beautiful writing–indeed, I would say that the quest for beautiful sentences (though they are certainly requisite for truly great criticism) can also be a dangerous temptation, luring critics away from rigorous analysis. And though I think it’s fair to emphasize the importance of the critic’s voice, I don’t read criticism to learn about the critic but to enrich my understanding of, my thinking about, the work of literature under examination. If criticism accomplishes that, it matters.

Now, let me ask you, accomplished readers, critics, and bloggers: why do you think criticism matters–assuming you do, and it does?