Novel Readings

If you’d asked me on March 13 of this year (the last “regular” day before we were all locked down!) whether I ordinarily spent a lot of time working at my computer, I would have said “Yes!” without hesitation. It turns out, however, that I used to greatly underestimate the amount of time I spent away from my computer–at least, relative to the balance (or, rather, imbalance) between these two options in my pandemic life. While preparing for class always involved at least some time typing up notes and preparing handouts, worksheets, slides, and other materials, for example, going to class meant gathering up actual books and papers and markers–and sometimes toys!–and moving to a different space, sometimes even going outside to get there! Teaching meant being in a classroom looking at and talking to and listening to other people. Office hours meant sitting in my office talking to other people face to face. Meetings meant sitting in yet another room, talking to yet more other people in person. Lunch time meant going to get food somewhere else and then eating it at my desk … wait, that at least is still exactly the same! Now that all of these activities mean staring at my screen and typing, I find that it is hard to motivate myself to do other things, like blogging or personal correspondence, that also involve screen time: when I finally call it quits on my actual work, I need to get away from the computer, both for physical relief (my eyes and especially my shoulder are not at all happy these days) and to restore some sense of boundaries, of difference, to my days.

But here I am now, ready once again to take stock of how things are going in my classes. And the disconcerting truth is that a third of the way through this strange term, I still don’t really know, because I have no base line for comparison, no past experience to check this one against. I’m working pretty incessantly on one teaching task or another, but I get very little feedback compared to the ongoing opportunity, in face-to-face teaching, to “read the room”–which could, of course, be discouraging if you could tell they weren’t with you, but at least there was some immediacy to that input and enough flexibility to the whole operation to let you change things up, on the fly or more deliberately. One of the most disorienting things about online teaching so far, in fact, is the time lapse: because a lot of materials need to be ready ahead of time, I’m usually working on next week’s lectures and handouts while the students are working on this week’s. (Yes, that gets very confusing sometimes!) If I sense that something isn’t clicking this week, it can be pretty hard to figure out where or how to adapt.

Certainly some parts of this feel easier now than they did at first. The start of term is always chaotic, and this year it was worse than ever before because communicating by writing is just less efficient than talking to people or showing them things directly. (That said, at least when everything is written down there is less chance of details just getting lost or forgotten: the documents are always there for reference! The sheer quantity of written materials becomes its own kind of burden, but there’s still something to be said for having what amounts to a detailed instruction manual for the entire course.) By and large my classes seem to have settled into a rhythm now, though, and as a result the stress has gone down on both sides and the quality of actual work has gone up. It’s clear that the online model is harder for some students who would almost certainly be better off with more external structure and tangible support–but there are also students who find the move away from in-person pressures congenial. At this point I personally feel that, given the option, I would never teach online again: I have not had the transformative experience I’ve heard about from other instructors who ended up wholly converted to this mode of instruction. But it’s early yet, I suppose, and of course right now I don’t have a choice–and in spite of everything, I’m glad about that, as it’s not as if being in the classroom under current circumstances would be a return to the kind of work I loved. I’m also very grateful to have the job security I do, and that, along with my real desire to do the best I can for my students, keeps me pretty motivated and determined to keep trying to do this as well as I can.

The best thing I can say about my courses right now is that I do finally feel as if I am paying more attention to content than to logistics–which means that when I post about them, I might start talking  more about what we’re actually studying in them, like I used to! A trial run: In my intro class (“Literature: How It Works” – a dull title but a pragmatic focus that actually suits my usual approach to first-year classes) we are wrapping up our work on poetry.  This week students get to choose a ‘cluster’ of related poems to discuss, hopefully showing off what they have learned about literary devices and poetic form and interpretation so far; then next week we will turn our attention to short stories. I expect a lot of them will like that change of focus; I just hope I can coach them to keep paying attention to details and form and not relax into plot summary.

In 19th-Century Fiction we start Middlemarch this week! I, at least, am very excited about this! (Honestly, though: isn’t the cover of the new OWC edition dreadful? They could hardly have made the novel look less fun and inviting. Dorothea is supposed to be blooming, not gloomy!) Rereading the novel and working on my slide presentations to launch our discussions of it has been pretty fun, and also very intellectually challenging, because I have had to make a lot of decisions about how to package the concepts and examples and approaches I would usually lay out over the first few class meetings. While I would certainly do some lecturing in a face-to-face course, I always prefer to draw students towards ideas about how the novel works and what it means through discussion, using a lot of open-ended questions and brainstorming on the white board (where I draw lots of what one of my students [hi, Bea!] recently described as “demented stick figures” 😊). This is hard to reproduce asynchronously!

My basic approach this term has been to use my recorded presentations as starting points: I lay out any important contexts then try to set up questions and frameworks that will help them consider specific examples on their own. I think this is actually working pretty well–though, again, I miss being able to read the room, and being able to follow up on their suggestions and questions in a way that involves everyone at once, instead of there being a wide range of contributions diffused across different threads. I’ve been brooding a lot about how to convert this breadth into more depth–but, interestingly (to me, anyway!) when I polled the class about subdividing them into smaller groups so they could engaged with a narrower set of responses, most of them preferred the variety they get from seeing everyone’s posts and choosing where to follow up. (There are 30-something students; the discussion boards are set up with three different headings for each week, and they can contribute wherever they want.) This week’s discussions of North and South have really been very good, so I guess if it ain’t broke, I shouldn’t try to fix it!

I do expect a bit of stuttering as we get going on Middlemarch: my experience of teaching it in the classroom, where I can play ‘cheerleader-in-chief,’ has been that even with me absolutely radiating enthusiasm for it, it can be a hard sell at first, and though I am trying to be as enthusiastic as I can this time too, I have to communicate so much more indirectly that I can’t be sure it will come across, much less be contagious! The stumbling block is usually the amount of exposition, which requires a different kind of attention and patience and can muffle, on a first reading, the sharpness and comedy of the dialogue as well as of the narrator herself. I’m also often surprised by how little students like Dorothea: is idealism so out of fashion these days? But there are always some students who love the book, at first or eventually, and of course my job is not to make them like our readings but to help them learn about them.

I really hope that by the end of this term I am not so bewildered about what’s working and what’s not. Some of that should be evident from the results, by which I mean the students’ work as well as their feelings about that work and the course experience. One thing I think I am doing right is what the learning-and-teaching folks who provided so much training over the summer called “teacher presence”: I am as there for them as I know how to be. My biggest regret in this respect is that I haven’t figured out how to have fun the way we do in the classroom, where on a good day we laugh a lot. (I did sneak a crack about Mr. Casaubon’s “low wick” into this week’s Middlemarch lectures.) I suppose under the circumstances, though, if we aren’t crying, that’s good enough.