Novel Readings

Our fall term started last week and so once again it has been warm-up time, for me and for the students. Even after all these years, I still find it hard to find my rhythm for a while: I try too hard at first, I think, always anxiously remembering that data showing that students make up their mind about you and the class in the first five minutes. I bring a lot of nervous energy to it as a result, although I also do my best to bring my genuine positivity. I am (more or less!) always really happy to be back in the classroom.

I am the undergraduate program coordinator and Honours advisor again this year, a position that comes with a course release, so I have just one class this fall. I sometimes feel guilty about that light load, especially because that one class is my beloved “19th-Century British Fiction from Dickens to Hardy.” It is a pretty big job, though: advising alone takes hours, not just because there are so many variations (hardly anyone is doing just a straight BA or Honours in English – there are combined honours and minors of all kinds, each with their own requirements and bureaucratic challenges) but because the software we rely on is sometimes more baffling than clarifying and because administrative services across campus are woefully understaffed. In the next few days I will begin drafting our slate of classes for next year, a process that was delayed last year first by the lockout and subsequent strike action, and then by some sudden and fairly radical interventions by our Dean’s office. We are all hoping it goes more quickly and smoothly than last year, not to mention more collegially, but there’s no way it can be anything but disheartening in some respects as our faculty complement is so depleted that we are going to be hard-pressed to offer any courses in a number of once well-represented fields.

Still, (to paraphrase We Rate Dogs!), the students are good again this year. It’s early days yet, but the room is full, the faces are attentive, the comments are smart, and there are plenty of signs that they are actually reading Hard Times. One of my favourite moments so far was overhearing one student telling another that while she liked it OK, it wasn’t her favourite Dickens novel. What is? David Copperfield. Hooray! And, fair! Hard Times isn’t my favourite Dickens novel either, but it’s so strange and insistent and fabular that I have come to appreciate it deeply, and even to be deeply moved by its relentless demand for a world that nourishes our humanity. It’s so weirdly timely, too, from its indictment of reductive ideas of what education is for to its depiction of powerful men who bluster and bloviate and bully without apology. In Dickens’s world, though, they either learn better or get their comeuppance. We should be so lucky in our own.

I’d like to keep this series up more regularly this year, but I said more or less that last year and didn’t do it. I think it was partly the sense that I’ve said what I’ve got to say about teaching at this point in my career: it’s not that I’m just going through the motions while I’m teaching (far from it, I hope!), but that my priorities and commitments and practises are well established. It has, after all, been 31 years since I started teaching at Dalhousie–and almost 20 since I started this blog! The hopes I had for it at times as offering a counter-narrative to negative accounts of higher ed have long faded, though the practice it has given me at articulating both how and why I teach has had its own unexpected value, some of which I hope will bear fruit in the George Eliot book that I am now under contract to write. As she says in Middlemarch, though, who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? Only if I post will I find out what I have to say this year, some of which might be new and different. And I do anticipate some coming changes that I will also want to write about, when the time is right.