teaching

The Summer of Somerville

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

Now that the dust has mostly settled from the teaching term, I’ve begun organizing my plans for the summer. One of my top priorities is preparing for my new seminar on ‘The Somerville Novelists,’ which is the first official academic manifestation of the reading I’ve been doing about Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, and Margaret Kennedy. Oh, and Dorothy Sayers, except that my interest in her goes back longer and I’ve taught Gaudy Night several times before, so there I don’t feel I am starting so much from scratch.

As I wrote in a previous post about the way reading changes when it becomes research, I am having to think now not just about what I’m interested in but also about what I need to know to do the job. But since there’s no pre-existing definition of “the job,” this early phase has to be both open-ended and creative: ‘there’s the whole “tempting range of relevancies called the universe,” and then there’s your part of it, but where that begins and ends, and why, is something that, in literary research at least, is rarely self-evident.’

I’ve actually been thinking that I’d like to preserve that lack of definition going into the course, rather than trying to get everything under control according to a template of my own. I’m enjoying the sense of discovery as I read in this new (to me) material, and ideally that’s something the students will feel too: that together we are finding things out, rather than that they are trying to catch up with my expertise. I don’t think my seminars are usually stifling, but they do often focus on material I know very well and have gone through often with students. This has the advantage that I can steer our discussions in what I know will be significant directions and give guidance on research and assignments that I feel confident about, but it has disadvantages too, not least of which is that there aren’t a lot of surprises, and the level of personal commitment from students isn’t that high. I don’t mean that students don’t work hard and aren’t often very engaged, because I’ve had some great seminar groups and usually the students are enthusiastic about them (at least judging from their course evaluations). But I’d like to see them working together on something they think is important–on something they feel collectively responsible for, rather than accountable to me for.

I’m going to be thinking through the summer about how to organize the course to create this kind of atmosphere, and especially about what kinds of assignments and course requirements to include. I’ve been thinking in terms of class projects – a wiki, perhaps, to go public at the end of term, or a collaborative Prezi (I’ve seen some that cover an enormous amount of content in really interesting ways). I’m also thinking less about critical essays or research papers of the conventional academic kind and more about writing projects that show off the class material for a general audience. If anyone has suggestions, especially of assignment sequences that have worked well when exploring non-canonical material for which there simply aren’t a lot of academic resources, I’d be very interested!

In the meantime, I’m brainstorming lists of things I need to know about that will probably become part of our class discussion, including historical, biographical, and literary contexts and connections. Here’s the list so far, in all its unpolished open-endedness:

  • Individual writers from our list (Brittain, Holtby, Sayers, Kennedy)
  • Core readings (Testament of Youth, South Riding, Gaudy Night, The Constant Nymph)
  • Other books by them not officially assigned to class (perhaps for student projects or presentations)
  • critical / theoretical approaches and contexts
  • History of Somerville / women at Oxford (perhaps women in Canadian universities?)
  • Boer War
  • WWI, especially women in the war (nursing)
  • Suffragist movement
  • Women’s / feminist press, e.g. Time and Tide
  • Other contemporary writers–Olive Schreiner, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, maybe D H Lawrence?
  • Genres, e.g. autobiography
  • Literary movements, e.g. modernism, in relation to our writers
  • Virago Press

I’m thinking in terms of a giant Venn diagram, with all these topics overlapping in different ways. The central artifice of the course is that there’s something coherent about our group of four, but part of what’s so interesting is that there isn’t, really, except that they all went to Somerville at roughly the same time and all became novelists. I’m used to organizing courses that are much more strongly unified by some kind of internal logic, usually thematic (the one I’ve offered most often is ‘The Victorian “Woman Question,”” for instance). Probably (though it’s too early to be sure) we will return regularly to the question of whether we’re doing something that makes any sense, and whether that matters. The diffusion of topics could lead to confusion in the course, so one of my jobs this summer is to bring it under control without spoiling the fun. You can expect lots of updates as I explore.

I’ve started, because it seemed pretty fundamental, with the history of women at Oxford, which has been really interesting to learn about. One of the first things I realized was that this aspect of the new class actually follows much more closely than I had realized from my usual teaching, including the  ‘Woman Question’ seminar, because an instigating factor in the movement of women into Oxford was the pressure to educational reform stimulated by the difficult situation of governesses in the mid-Victorian period (Jane Eyre!) and the statistical imbalance between men and women highlighted in the 1851 census and of increasing concern towards the end of the century (The Odd Women!). Many of the names of early advocates for women’s education are moderately familiar to me from my 19th-century studies: Emily Davis, Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), Matthew and Thomas Arnold, Mary (Mrs. Humphrey Humphry) Ward. George Eliot donated to the founding of Girton College, Cambridge — a modest £50 only, but evidence of the precedence she gave to education over political rights.

And on that note, it’s back to the Oxford History of Oxford!

Not Blogging But Drowning

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OK, I’m not really drowning, as this is my ‘light’ term and I’m also lucky enough to have a TA to share the essays with in my larger class. But working through papers and exams is really sapping my psychic energy right now. I hope–no, plan!–to have the last of the essays done tomorrow. Then I’ll be back! There’s nothing like being immersed in student writing to make you question your teaching and assignment strategies, and so Mark Bauerlein’s provocative post on his own decision to assign “all summary, no critical thinking” in his freshman comp class next time is timely and may provoke me all the way to a post of my own. I’m certainly wondering if the ‘critical essay’ will continue to be a standard part of my assignment sequences, even for upper-level classes. Marc Bousquet’s equally provocative post “Robots are Grading Your Papers!” is also timely: though I’m not (happily) teaching in anything like the kind of mechanical context he describes, and I’m not sure that working with students to produce writing that is more academic is what I want to do, I will be thinking about how to change my assignments to increase the amount of genuine engagement, not just between the students and the material, but between me and the students. I have the very strong feeling this term that I was asking students to do too many things at once that were new, difficult, and poorly understood, and that my own expectations about how they should prepare for and accomplish these things were not congruent with their own habits and expectations. This may be just the usual slump that comes from working through a large pile of assignments in a short period of time, but at this point my own level of dissatisfaction is high enough that I’m pretty motivated to think about how else to proceed next time.

First, though, I have ten more essays to mark. And one revised thesis chapter to attend to.

Teaching Texts: Taking The Road into 2012-13

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Book orders for the fall term were due April 1. Apparently this early deadline helps the bookstore know which books are being re-used and thus which books they can buy back from students to re-sell next year–which makes sense and is a good thing to do for students! But April 1 is still very early to have worked out what you want to do next year, unless you are happy to just do exactly what you’ve done before and aren’t teaching any new classes. You know those legends about professors who show up with the same yellowed teaching notes they have used for 100 years? None of us wants to be that professor, honest! But this is the kind of bureaucratic thing that discourages innovation. When you are in the thick of one term, the easiest way to meet this deadline is by repetition. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that! You can in fact teach the same books over and over (cough *Middlemarch* cough) and never feel you are just going through a tired routine. There’s always something new to learn, new to say–or a new way to say it, or to try to engage students with it. But I do try to shake up every reading list every time, if just by a book or two, so that the new juxtapositions will keep me fresh.

Anyway, April 1 has come and gone and I’ve only submitted two of my three fall term orders. Sorry, bookstore! The course I haven’t ordered for yet, English 1000 (Introduction to Literature)  is not a repeat for me, though: the books I’ll be probably be ordering have not, to my knowledge, been assigned by anyone else this year, and I haven’t taught the class myself since 2000-2001 in its full-year version, though I have taught a half-year introductory class three times in the past decade. It’s really the shift back to a full-year version that has slowed down my ordering: you can do so much in full-year classes, and they have become such rare creatures. I haven’t in fact taught a full-year class of any description in many years: I’m almost giddy with excitement about the increased chances of my learning every student’s name well before the class is over. And it’s equally dizzying to think of all the many, many different books I could conceivably assign…which, of course, is why it has taken me too long to make up my mind. Our intro classes are, deliberately, not historical surveys (we offer those at the 2nd-year level) but introductions to genre, to university-level writing, and to literary critical terms and skills. The genres we are supposed to cover are non-fiction prose, poetry, fiction, and drama–but it is entirely up to us how to do this. The range of different reading lists that results is supposed to be a strength of our first-year program: in theory, students can peruse the different offerings and choose a section they like the looks of. This almost never works in practice, as despite our efforts to publicize the variation, students (and advisers) usually assume all the sections are the same, and they choose based on timetable more than anything else. As a result, it is not uncommon to have a conversation that begins with a student saying things like “But my friend in Dr. Flumberly’s section of English 1000 isn’t reading any novels, only short stories. It isn’t fair that we have to read this long book.”

I don’t actually think there are any sections of English 1000 that assign no novels at all (possibly, just possibly, students’ reports of what goes on elsewhere may not be 100% accurate). But absent any particular principle about which novels to assign, it’s always hard for me to decide which ones to go with. Over the years I have assigned Hard Times, The Wars, A Christmas Carol, A Room with a View, Saturday, and The Remains of the Day – always along with an array of shorter texts. I was thinking of going with A Christmas Carol again this year (it’s fun to teach it in December just as holiday madness is breaking out) but I wanted to do a more contemporary novel as well, since I do have a whole year. English 1000 is the teaching assignment that gives me the most latitude, so it’s a great chance to get outside my comfort zone. I mentioned this on Twitter and within about 10 minutes I had a whole array of tempting suggestions, most of which I had heard of but not read. I couldn’t possibly consider them all by April 1!

As the tweets were flying back and forth, Mark Athitakis asked an important question: what makes a novel a good choice for teaching?’ This is obviously a key issue: you can love reading a book but still conclude that for one reason or another, it would not work in the classroom, or at least in a particular class. For an intro class, what are the desiderata? It will vary for individual instructors, I know. Those of you who also teach similar classes, what are the factors for you? For me, one issue is length–shallow, maybe, but I think realistic. 200-300 pages seems to me about right, though I have colleagues who regularly teach Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights in their intro sections and it seems to go fine. Then there’s significance. It makes some sense to me that you would pick a book that either has some standing (why? is something you’ll want to talk about) or that you think deserves some standing — this helps you begin what you can hope will be a life-long engagement on their part with the puzzle of literary merit and reputation, and it gets them into an ongoing literary conversation. Merit itself is also a factor — I can’t see teaching a book you can’t in some sense get behind, as you are going to have to bring a lot of enthusiasm and energy to the classroom day after day, and it’s hard to do that for material you don’t think is any good. Sometimes it’s still important to do it, mind you: I teach novels I don’t think are great qua novels all the time, but in courses where coverage is a requirement in a way it is not for our intro classes. Then it has to be a book that gives us something to talk about and then something to write about — it needs to require and reward interpretation. Doesn’t every book? Well, no, at least not in isolation. Some very formulaic novels are much more interesting collectively than they are individually (from variations on repetitive patterns and tropes as in [some] romance or mystery novels, for instance). But I think that a certain level of complexity (thematic as well as aesthetic) makes for the best teaching texts. You want the feeling that the book is about something, and not just a simplistic, obvious single something but a problem, a crux. And you want the language and form to be related to that problem or crux in an interesting (and, again, not simplistic or obvious) way. Finally, it helps if you can see ways the book will create interesting conversations with the other texts you’re teaching in the course.

I looked up a number of new (to me) books, online and in the library. I started a couple and read two all the way through. One of these, The Talk-Funny Girl (recommended by D. G. Myers) was extremely interesting and gripping, but I felt in the end that not only was it a bit too alien for my purposes but it wasn’t as good as it could have been. The other one I read in its entirety was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. This is a book I have deliberately avoided until now. Not only did it sound very depressing but it sounded gimmicky, cheesy even. Well, as those of you who have read it will know, it certainly is depressing! I was teaching Jude the Obscure the week I read it and I announced with some perturbation to my class that I had finally found a novel that made Jude look optimistic! But gimmicky? I don’t think so. From the beginning, it interested me, and though it horrified me, it also moved and surprised me. The father-son relationship is intense but stripped bare of sentiment, as is everything in the novel’s landscape: we’re left with just the essentials, and that simple idea is what makes the novel so powerful. What does matter? Why – how – do we keep going? The language put me off a bit at first, as it seemed unduly self-displaying, but ultimately I thought it provided the art, the artifice, that made the story bearable. It also highlights its literariness: we are clearly in allegorical territory here. I couldn’t stop reading

When I finished the novel, I was struck by the glimmer of optimism it offers at the last minute  (I don’t know yet if I think the ending undermines the novel) and I found myself thinking about it a lot. At first I thought there was no way I would assign it. I couldn’t imagine spending hours and days in that world — or making my students come along with me. Poor things! Isn’t their first term at university hard enough? But then I began to reconsider. At the heart of the novel there is something that is anything but depressing, isn’t there? The father and son talk a lot about “the light” they are carrying. It’s a metaphorical or symbolic light, and it’s something the novel carries too. Then I thought about one of the non-fiction texts I’m assigning, Eli Wiesel’s Night. Night is also about surviving devastation, hanging on to shreds of humanity. One of the moments in Night that is particularly haunting and terrible is the selection scene:

‘Men to the left! Women to the right!’

Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father’s hand press against mine: we were alone. In a fraction of a second I could see my mother, my sisters, move to the right. Tzipora was holding Mother’s hand. I saw them walking farther and farther away; Mother was stroking my sister’s blond hair, as if to protect her. And I walked on with my father, with the men. I didn’t know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever. I kept walking, my father holding my hand.

This scene breaks my heart. I expect every parent has felt the magic of a little hand in theirs, realized the awesome, beautiful, devastating weight of the innocent belief that if we say it’s OK, if we go there, if we hold hands, it is OK.  “It’s OK,” the father in The Road tells his son over and over. “It’s OK.” And the son goes along.  Now I can’t stop thinking about that resonance between the two texts. The underlying theme of my sections of Introduction to Literature is usually something as simple as “words matter.” One way I think I can show this and make it meaningful and alive to our students is to work with texts that are about things that really matter. I’m not sure yet how the pieces will fit together or what exactly we’ll talk about, but at any rate I’ve decided to order The Road and see where it takes us.

This Week In My Classes: (How to Avoid) Reinventing the Wheel

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It’s too late now to do anything organized about this problem this term, but as I work my way through the next-to-last assignments my students are doing I’m puzzling over why so many of them seem not to have learned much from the assignments they have already turned in and had returned. It seems a no-brainer to me that you would scrutinize a returned assignment to learn how to do better next time: that’s the point, that’s why this is called ‘education,’ that’s why I write comments and corrections on it in the first place–that’s why I hold office hours, too, so that if my written comments don’t give you enough to go on, you can follow up in person. But I’m not the only resource, and for some problems (apostrophe errors, for instance) I’m not the best one to turn to, not because I can’t explain apostrophe errors, but because you can look those up easily on your own and save our inevitably limited one-on-one time for higher order things. Obvious as it seems to me that you don’t just note the grade and file the assignment away (or recycle it), though, I’m convinced that many of them simply put finished work behind them and move on to the next task as if it is unrelated.

It’s possible that a lot of students are actually diligently following up on my comments and just making very slow progress. It’s possible, too, that a lot of the problems I see are the result of haste rather than ignorance, and that they persist because the students get no better at time management as the term goes on, and even get busier, making proofreading an even more unlikely process. And it’s also possible that many students are happy enough with the grades they are getting that they can’t be bothered to strive for better–professors, themselves relentless and incurable “A students,” have a hard time understanding complacency in the face of a C, or even a B+, but that’s our problem. Whatever the reason, though, it is frustrating to get the sense on assignment after assignment that some students are endlessly and needlessly reinventing the wheel, opening a new document and just starting in (probably late at night before the due date!) as if there’s no connection between this new task and what they’ve already done.  I always urge them, as a new deadline approaches, to review their past work, but I’ve been thinking that I should actually build that into the structure of some classes as a requirement.

On Twitter the other night, when I was complaining about this issue, @rwpickard noted that he asks “for a commentary on the last paper’s grade & comments before I accept the next paper,” which sounds like a great idea. I remember that in my own first-year English class, we had to turn each essay back in after it was returned to us, making corrections or revisions on the opposite side of the page in response to the professor’s comments.  (I actually have a vague memory of having required something like this in my earliest sections of English 1000 myself, back in the dark ages.) My only concern is that with relatively large classes, such measures add a potentially onerous, or at least tedious, further step for me–but on the other hand, telling someone on three papers in a row that they haven’t stated a thesis but only announced their topic is also tedious, as is endlessly circling incorrect apostrophes. I have a small first-year class next year, the smallest I’ve ever had (30 students): I think this is a good chance to try something like this, as it clearly does not go without saying (and does not happen, by and large, without the element of coercion). Still, I am a bit anxious about the additional 180 items that will need to be submitted and returned across the year (we have a departmental requirement of six essays in our first year classes).

I’d be very interested in ideas from other people about how to encourage students to follow up on the feedback they get, and particularly about strategies that are fairly easy and efficient to handle with larger groups. Even with my nice small class of 30, I will have two other classes going on at the same time, adding up to about another 100 students, and no TA support: there’s only so much paperwork I can do and keep track of. Also, in classes where writing is meant to be a supporting issue, while literary content is the chief class objective, it’s tricky to know how to balance demands that they write clearly and correctly against the other aims of an assignment.

“On the Duties of Professors”: Research vs. Scholarship

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A friend and colleague who read and sympathized with my previous post passed along to me an essay by the late C. Q. Drummond, a long-time member of the Department of English at the University of Alberta. The essay is called “On the Duties of Professors,” and it addresses many of the same issues as my post, particularly the competition for attention, resources, and rewards between research and teaching. As competitions go, all academics know, this is a distinctly unequal one these days: officially, university policies may stress the equal importance of both duties, but inadequacy or irresponsibility in teaching will never hold back someone’s tenure or promotion if they have a “strong” publication record, and while the administrative infrastructure for research is large and powerful, topping out at the Vice Presidential level, if the two factors are really equally important, where, Drummond rightly asks, is the “Vice President (Teaching)”? (Here at Dalhousie, our office of Research Services has 22 staff, including a VP and an Associate VP. Our Center for Learning and Teaching has 10, with a Director and Associate Director at the top.) Not that Drummond wants to see an expansion of teaching-related bureaucracy–though I quite like his idea for how a VP (Teaching) would go about his or her business: this VP “would move through all the Faculties, visiting classes, hearing lectures, attending seminars, drinking coffee, joining oral examinations, talking into the night.” Through qualitative engagement with teachers and students, this VP would become “another source of evidence, besides tabulated student assessments, for who teaches well and who poorly.”

Drummond’s remarks are directed specifically at his own situation: at the time of writing (around 1984), he had recently been “penalize[d] for insufficient publication during a year in which [his Faculty] received extraordinary evidence of his merit as a teacher.” There’s a polemical thrust to them, as a result, but Drummond uses the occasion to place his own professional experience into its larger context: the increasing dominance of precisely the kind of quantitative measures of research “output” about which I was complaining yesterday. Actually, there is one difference that signals the 30-year gap between us: I didn’t notice any mention of research grants in his piece. I expect he would have objected still more strenuously to measuring scholarly success by level of external funding. He directs his criticism at “forced publication,” and at the reductive equation of publication with research or scholarship:

The Salaries and Promotions Committee certainly does not ask for wisdom; it does not ask for erudition or for scholarship; it does not ask for learning, or even for research; it asks for output, something to be measured or counted. . . . What good does such output do anyone? If research in an Arts Faculty means humane learning, then we all hope our teachers are as much involved in research as they possibly can be. We want them to know better and better what they are talking about, so that they will have, and will continue to have, something intelligent and important to profess to their students. But if research means output or publication, as it so often does today, how do the students profit? And how does the scholarly world profit from the forced production of ephemera? Most professors in Arts Faculties would be better off reading more and publishing less, and their students would be better off too, and so would the world of scholarship.

The very term “research” is, he argues, part of the problem.  He quotes George Whalley, who argued in an essay of his own that “research” suggests a goal-oriented activity, work carried out in pursuit of something in particular. “The functions of research,” Whalley writes, “are specialized and limited; … the word research is not a suitable term for referring to the central initiative and purpose of sustained inquiry in “the humanities” . . . “The humanities” is what “humanists” do; not only what they study, but how they study, and why . . . .”

Drawing on the Handbook published by the CAUT (invoked by his Dean in response to Drummond’s appeal of the Committee’s decision), Drummond himself brings in the vocabulary of knowledge “dissemination” which is once again very current in discussions of our aims:

Research should result in teaching, and might result in publication, teaching and publication being the most important means of dissemination of knowledge. We may teach those near at hand in our lectures, discussions, tutorials, apprenticeships, and supervised practical training, or we may teach those distant through our published papers, articles, essays, and books. But in either case we will have to have found out and shown something worth lecturing about, discussing, or writing down. And where will we have our greatest effect in disseminating what we have found out and know? . . . Dissemination has to do with sowing seed; what we hope when we disseminate is that the seed will take root and grow. . . . So much of the seed one sows in publication falls by the wayside and is devoured by birds, or falls on stony ground, or among thorns and yields no fruit. What the good teacher sows in his class or tutorial is far more likely to find the good ground, spring up, increase, and itself bring forth.

 He reiterates at intervals throughout the piece that he is not opposed to either research or publication, only to a mechanistic understanding of both, especially when it “drives out teaching”–which almost inevitably follows: institutional systems of measurement and incentives are set up not “to encourage the combination of knowing and teaching,” but to “encourage the production of printed pages,” and “because we live in a world in which time itself is scarce, the time taken for one must be taken from the other.” Again, it’s not that he wishes teaching, in its turn, to drive out research–teaching depends on research, broadly understood as inquiry.

It’s not, in my turn, that I wish to drive out either research or publication, both of which are essential (as Drummond too acknowledges) to learning, teaching, and knowledge dissemination. What bothers me is the  incessant identification of “productive” scholarly activity with a narrow model of  output, a cloistered, specialized, self-referential kind of publishing supported, ideally, by as large an external grant as possible. It’s a shame that the faux-scientific model Drummond objects to is now so firmly entrenched–so deeply entangled in the values, practices, and especially the finances of our universities–that it seems unimaginable that we could ever undo it. Some might argue that we have won more by it than we have lost–that without playing the game that way, we would have forfeited any place in the contemporary academy. Others might reply that, yes, we are playing the game, but on terms by which we can only, ultimately, lose: however vast our research output, will we ever win either the public or the institutional respect enjoyed by the sciences? Hasn’t our preoccupation with research actually isolated us and cost us public support? And in our effort to insist on the goal-oriented practicality of our fields, we may have flagged in our defense of their intrinsic value. Again, it’s not that I think we should not do research, or publish what it teaches us–but it’s a shame that the system is so rigged in favor of hurrying it along and rushing it into print–not to mention aiming it at a specific (and very narrow) audience. “I know for a fact,” Drummond observes, “that policies of forced publication never brought into being–nor could ever have brought into being–those critical books that have been to me most valuable.” That’s certainly true of my reading as well. The narrow concept of research and the pressure to publish also, when made the primary measures of professional success, marginalize undergraduate teaching. (The emphasis in grantsmanship on teaching and funding graduate students, or “HQP” [Highly Qualifed Personnel] is another whole area of trouble.) Finally, it seems to me paradoxically retrograde to be urging or following a model that measures productivity by grant size or output of peer-reviewed publications at a time when the entire landscape of scholarly communication is changing. We can circulate our ideas, enhance our and others’ understanding, pursue our inquiries and disseminate our knowledge in more, and often cheaper, ways than ever before. As long as we are all using our time in service of the university’s central mission–the advancement of knowledge, including through teaching–by the means best suited to the problems we think are most important and interesting to pursue, aren’t we doing our duty as professors?

But as the Associate Vice President who spoke to my Faculty on Thursday said repeatedly, there aren’t “metrics” for those other ways of doing (or discussing) research or measuring its impact: they do not yield data that can be counted, measured, and easily compared across departments, faculties, and campuses. Apparently, that means we have to set them aside–or, at any rate, that the VP (Research) will do so, when reporting to us on our “performance.”

The essay I discuss here is in the volume In Defence of Adam: Essays on Bunyan, Milton, and Others by C. Q. Drummond, edited by John Baxter and Gordon Harvey (Edgeways Books, 2004).

This Week in My Classes: Contact Hours

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

One of my goals for this term was to increase the amount of direct contact between me and my students. One step towards that goal was my (re)introduction of seminar groups into my 3rd-year “lecture” class on the Victorian novel. It’s not a straight lecture class: hostile media reports to the contrary, I know no professors who literally only lecture, and in English, some degree of back-and-forth with the class is, I’m confident, 100% the norm in every class. English is not a fact-finding discipline at heart, after all: though we need to teach vocabulary, provide contexts, and model interpretation, the overall goal is students who can think and write their own way through the course material. My Victorian novels classes are probably pretty typical, in that sometimes I do hold forth for most of the 50 minute session, especially when introducing new material, but most often I gather ideas from the class and return them reorganized, or challenge them, or complicate them, or offer illustrative examples for them. The classes are capped at 40 and are usually full (this term, Barchester Towers seems to have scared a few away during the last bit of the add-drop period, and we are down to 34, which is an atypically small group). In a class that size you can get quite a bit of student involvement, but it’s still not possible to hear from everyone or to give everyone’s ideas a lot of sustained attention. And the more I talk specifically to a student, the more I find that student engages and learns. So I’ve broken them up into two groups, one meeting basically every Friday while the other had a dedicated reading hour (Friday afternoons–yes, I’m positive they will all use that hour to go to the library, definitely!).

We had our first small group session last Friday, and I was extremely encouraged about the plan: it went great! Although it was clear that many of them were not falling in love with Barchester Towers (the word ‘dry’ was used!!), the discussion was very lively and did not require a lot of intervention from me to keep it going. It was great to hear what they were thinking about and responding to, and to have a chance to steer them from observation to analysis in a more immediate way. Some students were particularly keen on the Stanhopes–one said that they had “saved” the novel for her by livening it up just as she was worrying that it would be all dull clergymen all the time (I’m paraphrasing loosely, but that seemed to be the gist of it). I am so fond of Mr Harding and the Archdeacon that I admit I hadn’t been focusing that intently on the Stanhopes (except the Signora, of course) but it’s quite right that they bring a degree of informality into the book, as well as a careless cosmopolitanism that does break up the intense provincialism of the other characters. That very looseness of theirs enables some key developments in the plot (for instance, it’s the Signora’s interference, improper as it is from some perspectives, that finally gets Eleanor and Arabin together), so that was a great place to take the discussion. The general topic I had settled on as the focus of the session was the women of Barchester Towers, as in the first lecture meetings our focus was primarily on the men and their ‘parties.’ Eleanor was not a great favorite! I guess she is rather dull at first. I hope by the time she boxes Mr Slope’s ears, they were giving her more credit.

So that’s one way I am changing things up. I’m doing something quite different in my Close Reading class that turns out to be another way of increasing direct contact, although that isn’t exactly how I’d thought of it–and that’s regular homework. We have tutorial groups already in Close Reading, as it is a skills-oriented course and supposed to include plenty of hands-on, collaborative, and consultative time. Because of that hands-on emphasis and my previous experience when reading assignments are light that students rather blow off class preparation (sure, you can breeze through a sonnet while waiting for the classroom to open and be ready to go, right? wrong! especially, though not exclusively, when it’s a Donne sonnet!)–because of those features of the class, and because for the first time I’m using an actual textbook that includes question sets and practice exercises, I thought it made sense to assign specific things to get done before each class, usually fairly simple questions that apply the current topic (say, meter and scansion, or figurative language, or poetic structure) to select texts. I actually called it ‘homework’ in the syllabus and have been feeling kind of self-conscious about that; I even acknowledged to the class that I know that terminology sounds a bit high schoolish. But I also stressed that all the homework does is make tangible what would be my expectation anyway, namely that they would actually work on the material before class, and practice applying what they have learned.

The thing is, I have graded four sets now, and to my surprise (I expected to find it tedious) I quite like the experience of it, precisely because it does put me in contact with the students so often and in such a non-threatening way (well, non-threatening to me, at least). The homework sets are not “worth” a lot each (2%), and as long as they are responsibly completed, I’m giving them full marks: it’s not about deducting points for scanning it wrong or calling something “anaphora” when it’s not. The point is I can see their work, see how they are doing, what they get and what they don’t, and give them prompt feedback. I can also see who’s doing the work and who’s not, and as the evidence about this accumulates, I’ll use it to nudge the slackers, because I bet there will be a strong correlation between doing the weekly work for the class and doing well in the class! It’s not like I haven’t given regular small assignments of one kind or another in a lot of classes. Often they are in the form of discussion questions and reading responses, or in-class writing starts, or reading journals (which is what these homework assignments will become when we have finished our time with the textbook). It’s just that these exercises feel very straightforward, both in their relationship to the course objectives and in terms of my interaction with them: they are about practising, for them, and about coaching, for me. I hope that getting that kind of personal feedback, even on such a small scale, will help them feel connected to me and to the work we are doing: as they see that I do go over their homework and use it to prompt them towards better work, I hope they won’t see it as “busywork” but as a meaningful, if minute, interaction between us.

A New Year, A New Term!

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Winter term classes start for us today. Happily, it’s a dry day, with no ice or snow complicating the back-to-school logistics. On the other hand, with the wind chill it “feels like” -21C, so there’s no forgetting that it is winter. (The distinction between the actual temperature and what it feels like always seems such a silly one: who cares what temperature it doesn’t feel like?)

Things ease up for me a bit this term, as I shift down from three courses to two. I prefer it this way, as I find winter both physically and psychologically exhausting. Also, there’s less time to get ready for it than there is to prepare for the fall term! I was marking exams until December 23, and with such an early start date for this term, I had to start puttering away on syllabi and handouts and Blackboard sites and reading for my new courses pretty much as soon as my fall grades were filed. However, I do feel pretty well prepared this week. We’ll see how long that lasts!

I’m teaching one class this term that I haven’t taught since I started blogging–since even before then, actually, as I last offered it in 2005. This is a class on ‘Close Reading,’ which, as I explained at some length in lecture today, is one of our department’s core ‘theory and methods’ classes (the others are ‘History of Literary Criticism’ and ‘Contemporary Critical Theory’). When I first taught Close Reading, back in 2003, it had fairly recently been invented and added to the curriculum as a mandatory class for all English Honours and Majors students. I found it exhilarating teaching a class that so clearly had (or, appeared to have!) the backing of the whole department: it made it easy to make statements about the use and value of the skills we were practicing. Now that students are required to choose one from this cluster, I make my pitch in a somewhat different way, focusing not just on what I still see as the generic importance of close reading skills to answering all critical and interpretive questions, but also on the extra-curricular importance of really paying attention to, and asking questions about, the things we read. There are lots of good reasons for English students to learn about the history of criticism and about the array of theoretical approaches that are practiced in our discipline. There are also discipline-specific reasons for working hard on close reading. But the specialized approach and vocabulary of literary theory becomes less and less useful and relevant the further you get from campus–which is not to say literary theory has no value, or no intrinsic interest (though at times I have thought both of these things myself!). But the importance of being an attentive, well-informed, questioning reader matters more and more as you get away from school and take over primary responsibility for your own book lists! Much of what we require of students in our curriculum aims at making them mini-critics, mini-professionals, but that’s exactly what most of them won’t be. I particularly emphasized in my talk today ways in which close reading takes us through aesthetic questions into ethical ones: here I am influenced, of course, by Wayne Booth, and in fact I quoted some of what he says about the choices that lie behind the finished literary product, and about the choice we make about whether we want to be “friends” with particular books. I hope that these general remarks helped frame the course in an interesting and even provocative way for the students. Much of what we will be doing on a day to day basis will be much more concrete, down in the nitty-gritty details. But if they can think about where this kind of analysis can take them, or about what kinds of broader conversations it supports and enhances, I think they’ll find it a more resonant experience.

My other class is the second installment of the 19th-century novel, the Dickens-to-Hardy half. I taught this last in 2009, when the book list was North and South, Great Expectations, Lady Audley’s Secret, Middlemarch, and Jude the Obscure. I shuffle the books around a bit every time, and this time I’m leading off with Barchester Towers–in past versions of the course, I have often started with The Warden, which I am very fond of, but I’ve been wanting to bring in Barchester Towers for a long time so finally I just made up my mind to it. Since I’ve never lectured on it before, I’m feeling slightly regretful right now, since if I were doing The Warden again I’d have all my materials to hand plus I’d be intimately familiar with the novel. But I’ve been rereading Barchester Towers and enjoying it enormously. How could I not? It is funny, poignant, sharp, and sentimental–sometimes all at once! I’ve kept Great Expectations (though I kind of wish I’d had the guts to sub in Bleak House, just because, well, because it’s Bleak House, and because I’ve taught and thus read Great Expectations pretty often lately). Then it’s The Woman in White, which I alternate with Lady Audley, and then Middlemarch and Jude to close. The tweaks in the book list keep me alert. I decided to stick with the letter exchange assignments that I used last term. I haven’t actually had time to look at my fall course evaluations, so I don’t know if the students were happy with the assignment sequence, but there are a lot of things I like about it, including keeping everyone focused on every book as we go, and giving them lots of writing practice.

I have put one small innovation in place in the 19th-century fiction class. I have been regretting the difficulties of having more direct contact with students as class sizes in general go up, and in these 19th-century novels classes I have also been feeling that there is less reciprocal engagement during class sessions–I have my lecture notes more carefully planned out, usually, and though there is always a core of talkers in the class when I work on generating discussion, there are also a lot who don’t speak up and thus at least seem fairly passive. I have a theory that this passivity sometimes (not always) shows up in their written work: it’s not very lively, it’s not very excited, it’s very safe (if they are attentive) or off the mark (if they aren’t). Students who come to confer with me one-on-one very often not only do better assignments and show more improvement across the term, but seem more energetic in class. Of course, this correlation is probably because those who come to see me are precisely those who have that extra bit of keenness! Anyway, I wanted to change the classroom dynamic a bit, so I’ve designated most Friday classes as seminar meetings: I’m dividing the class into two subsections, and each time one group will meet with me seminar-style, around a table. With a class of 40, we can’t do better than 20 for these, but 20 is actually the usual size for our 4th-year seminars, and it’s much smaller than a typical tutorial in the classes where this kind of break-out group is the norm (these are usually around 30). We’ll do general discussion but also some worksheets and practice for assignments–tutorial kind of stuff. I hope this will help them get to know both me and the course material better, in a different way. It will also force me to change up what I do with the other hours and to loosen up a bit in my own control of our time. There’s nothing intrinsically radical about including tutorials, of course, but they are not at all the norm here for classes of this size and at this level. We’ll see how the plan goes over!

This Week in My Classes: Exams!

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Last night I invigilated a three-hour exam for my 19th-Century Fiction class; Saturday is the three-hour exam for my Mystery and Detective Fiction class. Papers for all three classes (from everyone in the seminar, and from those who did the essay option in the other two) came in on Monday. So mostly what I’m doing this week is pacing and marking! I’m making decent but not great progress on the essays–I have about 10 left. I haven’t started the exams yet, but tomorrow I’ll be working on the first set in alternation with the papers, and next week of course I need to get everything wrapped up so that I can submit this term’s grades … and move on to prepping for next term.

In some ways I’m not a big fan of exams. I know that they are not always reliable indicators of what students know or what kind of thinking and writing they are capable of, and I don’t think students retain all that well material they cram into their heads during intense last-minute study sessions. On the other hand, there are always some students who flourish in exam situations–who find themselves released from whatever writer’s block made them fumble on essays, or who (whether out of brilliance or desperation, who knows) become remarkably insightful on the fly. Exams also are one more way to take stock of who has done all the reading and who is good at doing the kind of analysis I’ve been trying to teach them, and this is what they are, after all, earning a course credit for. The real reason I keep holding exams for my courses, though, is really quite cynical: I feel that I need the threat of the exam as a motivator over the term. Students, understandably, set priorities, and my experience has been that, perhaps because exams are (or seem) so concrete and measurable, students often ‘prioritize’ exam preparation over other work. (This tendency often manifests itself in the form of late papers submitted with the shameless “excuse” that the students didn’t meet my deadline because they had to study for their chem or psych or Spanish midterms.)

So holding exams is one way to make sure I’m in the game, competing with their other courses for priority. Also, knowing that there will be an exam that covers all of the course material is a helpful incentive for them to actually  do the reading, come to class, and take notes, and these things make our class time much more productive for all of us. Some students need this incentive more than others, of course, but sadly I find nothing focuses attention in the room more visibly than prefacing an exercise or example with “this is the kind of thing I’m likely to ask about on the exam” or “this is a favorite exam passage of mine.” I try to use this phenomenon to our collective advantage: my goal is to get them interested in the readings, to help them learn how to analyze them, etc. To reach these goals, they need to be paying attention. If they are paying attention in part because they are worried that, if they don’t, they won’t do well on the exam, that’s fine with me. In the past couple of weeks I have had more than one conversation with a student who said that they planned to use some of the time before the exam “to finish reading X book”–and since another of my goals is to have them just do all the reading that the course credit they are getting suggests they have done, that’s good too. I try to make my exams thorough, transparent, and fair: I work on practice questions and passages, which we do together in class, and I relate the skills we are practicing in doing this to the other work we’re doing in the course. I make no effort to catch them out, though I do cover the full range of course material. I give out the essay questions in advance so that they can plan their answers.

I don’t hold exams in all my classes. There are no exams in my honours seminars, for instance, where I assume a higher level of commitment and make different kinds of demands (including more emphasis on class participation) across the whole term. I also won’t have an exam in my Close Reading class next term: not only will be we doing a lot of very challenging writing and editing, but it’s not a class that emphasizes coverage, whether of material or of terminology, or skills that can be quickly demonstrated and assessed. But overall I think exams do more good than harm in my classes. There’s even some real satisfaction in marking the good ones and seeing how much students know. Sometimes, bless their hearts, they even write little ‘thanks for the course’ notes at the end. After three stressful hours of exam-writing, that’s pretty generous of them.

Last night’s exam went by more quickly because I brought along Testament of Experience to read. I was at a terribly exciting section: not only was Vera in London enduring the Blitz, but G. was crossing the Atlantic by boat and was torpedoed! Though in some ways this volume is not as surprising or intellectually satisfying to read as the first two, it’s still a remarkable story told by a woman whose life is itself a testament to ideas and commitment, and her account of the devastation of the war is gripping and occasionally heart-rending. More about that later…maybe I’ll be able to finish it during Saturday’s invigilation.

This Week in My Classes: Amidst the Mess, Three Mysterious Morsels

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The past week or so has just felt crazy with tasks and details to keep on top of. When we’re planning courses, we (or maybe it’s just me?) tend to focus on big picture issues, like which books to assign and which assignment sequences to use. Once that’s all decided, there’s filling in the syllabus, usually a happy task full of dreams of lively discussion prompted by clever juxtapositions (like this week’s cluster of ‘poems by women poets about women poets’ right before we start Aurora Leigh!) and supported or solidified by informal and formal writing. What we (or maybe just I) tend not to prepare so well in advance are things like spreadsheets for record-keeping or evaluation forms for seminars, or attendance sheets–which it is nearly pointless to get to organized about anyway, at least until the add-drop period ends and the list has some stability! I’ve reached the point in all of my classes where I needed all these things firmly in place, as assignments have been coming in, quizzes have been written, students have given seminar presentations, and so on.  Luckily I do have templates for all these kinds of things, or at least a set of best (or usual) practices, so I’m not dreaming them up from nothing, but I am drawing them up or finessing them to suit this year’s particularities. And of course this administrative stuff (plus the marking of quizzes and evaluation of assignments and so on) has to happen in addition to the other aspects of class prep, so just when you are starting to think “see, the teaching term isn’t that busy after all–I’m getting all my readings and class notes ready in plenty of time!” you are reminded why the teaching term actually is quite intense.

Then as if this year’s classes aren’t enough to be worrying about, the deadlines for course proposals and timetabling for next year have been moved way up, and in fact we were asked to submit our teaching preferences for 2012-13 by last Friday. I’m reasonably certain that this deadline has nothing to do with program planning or pedagogy (heaven forbid we should think about next year once we have some kind of idea how this year is going) and everything to do with recruiting: Dal’s big fall Open House is October 14, and it probably helps to be able to point prospective students to at least tentative course listings. This process was further complicated for us this year by bad budget news in the faculty that had repercussions for our TA allocation and thus, potentially, for our graduate student funding–which meant rejigging much of our curriculum on the fly to ward off various worst-case scenarios. Once again, program planning and pedagogy were given short shrift because of external imperatives! This is not to trivialize the budget difficulties, but it’s a real shame the timetable for figuring out how to deal with them was not different. Book orders for the winter term also came due, though luckily I had made most of my decisions about that already. Still, I’ve been stymied by discovering, to my great surprise, that a book I had counted on assigning (Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day) appears not to have a Canadian edition available at the moment. Seriously? The bookstore and I are working on this, but if we can’t find a workaround, I’m going to have to decide on something else in something of a hurry.

Add in the three tenure and promotion cases I’m involved in, the three Ph.D. students I’m supervising who persist (darn them!) in being industrious and thus giving me work to do, the two Honours students I’m now mentoring in preparation for our year-end Honours “conference,” the reference letters I’m already assembling documents for (and then writing, collating, addressing, and mailing), and the two other committees I’m on that persist in holding meetings or circulating materials for us to read (darn them too!)–and whew! My head has been buzzing, and my stress levels nasty, by the end of most days. The student union president who blithely commented in a recent Maclean’s story that “Professors have a pretty good gig . . . You put in some office hours, you teach for a few hours and then you end up with a decent paycheque” should maybe job-shadow a professor or two before concluding that it’s only reasonable for us to return all student emails within 12 hours. (Yes, that’s right: we were born knowing even the most recent developments in our field–amazing, eh?–and basically just sit around until it’s time to go pontificate. Assignments appear from nowhere, and magically reappear with comments and grades! Hmm: I just might contribute a little to that Facebook group mentioned in the article…)

Happily, at the center of all this you still do have those “few” hours in the classroom, and even more happily, it is often a treat getting ready for them because you are working on something you find genuinely interesting and exercising not just your expertise but your creativity in figuring out how to get your students equally involved in it. I’ve been teaching a lot of quite familiar material so far this term, but as always I’ve tweaked my syllabi here and there for variety and to keep me alert. One regular source for new material is whatever reader I’ve chosen for Mystery and Detective Fiction: it’s easier to change up smaller readings, and I’m often dissatisfied with an anthology for one reason or another so I have used quite a few over the years. This year, after much (much!) exploring, I settled on the inexpensive and perfectly suitable Dover collection Classic Crime Stories, and this week, much welcome relief from the other dull or worrisome things I’m taking care of comes from the three short stories we’re reading about “Great Detectives”: Jacques Futrelle’s “The Problem of Cell 13,” G. K. Chesterton’s “The Blue Cross,” and R. Austin Freeman’s “The Case of Oscar Brodski.” All of them are models of ingenuity in both the construction and the telling of the plot. All of them feature detectives who reason their way to solutions beyond the reach of us ordinary people, but each detective has a unique character and very particular gifts–and one of them, Father Brown, of course also has enormous endearing charm. Futrelle’s Thinking Machine is the least appealing of them, I think: his sheer arrogance is interestingly offset by the way his promise to think his way out of his solitary cell turns out to be, let’s say, misleading (of the three, he’s the one whose solution to his problem is ultimately most un-astonishing–though certainly surprising until explained–and relies the most on quite ordinary kinds of help from other people). The fellow-convict who believes his guilty conscience is driving him to confess provides another example of the Holmes-like trope of the seemingly unnatural element that has a perfectly natural explanation. Father Brown brings a new dimension to the uncomfortable proximity between the criminal and the crime-solver that we have been discussing from the beginning of the course: unlike many famous detectives, he manages to retain his innocence despite his deep understanding of guilt.  “The Case of Oscar Brodski” is the most formally interesting, with its first part (“The Mechanism of Crime”) telling us the crime going forwards, and its second part (“The Mechanism of Detection”) taking us backwards as each bit of evidence is traced to its source and the events are reconstructed. It is also the one with the most violent crime, and thus the one that most emphasizes another uncomfortable aspect of this kind of detective fiction, namely, the lack of human feeling so often displayed as the intellectual problem is given priority. Nobody is particularly upset by the decapitated corpse of poor Brodski! We’ll be spending a lot more time on this problem (if it is one) when we discuss The Murder of Roger Ackroyd starting Friday. Today, I have planned an in-class exercise designed to prompt the students to generate their own commentary on the stories: I asked them to read with an eye to “teachable” moments, explaining (as per my previous post) that they are supposed to be reading actively enough to get what’s interesting and relevant on their own. I’m going to put them in pairs and then larger groups and circulate transparencies for them to write up ‘lecture notes’ on, and then put them up on the overhead projector and see what they’ve come up with.

 

This Week in My Classes: Modelling the Process

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

We’re deep into the reading in all three of my courses now. On Monday we ‘wrapped’ The Moonstone in Mystery and Detective Fiction; we’re finishing up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ tomorrow; and in 19th-Century Fiction we’ve moved on from Persuasion to Vanity Fair. Those hours spent in the classroom actually talking with students about these fabulous novels are my favorite hours of the day–better even than the hours spent rereading the novels.

In recent years, and this term especially, I’ve been trying especially hard to make explicit what I think I (we) are doing in our classroom time. In particular, I’ve been commenting explicitly during class discussions on ways I see those discussions as models for the kind of work I want the students to do on their own. I have always thought of my class time as “exemplary” in this way — that is, as providing examples. When I lecture, sometimes I am delivering information and context, but more often I am offering an example of literary interpretation, building observations from the text into an organized “reading” of the text. In class discussion, we go through this process together: I pose questions and solicit the students’ observations and ideas, collecting them in a loose way on the whiteboard, often in the form of lists of words or phrases–and circles and arrows and many lamentable attempts at drawing. Then I encourage them to look over what we’ve come up with and think about what it means. My role at this point is to help the students appreciate the significance of what they’ve noticed, and to lead them to make explicit things they are already more or less aware of. I try to do this in an open-minded and open-ended enough way that it builds their confidence: they are noticing important things, they can discover patterns and connections, they can develop their own interpretations based on careful reading and thinking. At the same time, especially early in a course, I don’t proceed entirely randomly! I ask about aspects of our readings that I know will prove interesting and fruitful to analyze, and in that way I try also to model the kinds of questions and approaches that are appropriate to the class.

But until fairly recently I had basically assumed that it was obvious what we were doing and why. It isn’t, of course, at least not for students who aren’t already somewhat experienced in the process of moving from reading and taking notes about what’s on the page to finding an interpretive framework that makes sense of what they’ve noticed. Gradually (and perhaps I was just obtuse in not having realized this much earlier on) it occurred to me that the mismatch between my expectations and students’ work could be attributed to a mismatch between what they thought I / we were doing and what I understood us to be doing. The more I thought about this, the more I noticed that, for instance, lots of students busily write things down when I’m talking but not the rest of the time–waiting for me to deliver the information, rather than engaging in the process of analysis. In their written work, they often weren’t transferring ideas or practices from the examples “covered” in class to other characters or situations or features of the novel. Often, they were reiterating plot summary in answer to questions about why things are significant, rather than making that move from observing the plot to thinking about what their observations meant. In other words, many of them were approaching our class time as the time when I would tell them what things meant, rather than showing them how to figure out meaning. Of course, sometimes I do tell them what things mean, but the purpose is to show them how it’s done (when I lecture more formally) and to show them how to do it (when I summarize and synthesize their observations during more open discussion).

One factor in making me more aware that it would help to talk more explicitly about method and process was teaching a lot of non-majors in the Mystery and Detective Fiction class. I began to adapt for it some of the assignments but also some of the commentary I use in my first-year classes to orient students in the methods of literary criticism–not just addressing terminology but also things like how you identify what a theme is in a literary work, how you get from the literal words on the page to a reasonable idea about what else the book is about–and how you know when you’re going too far (not that there are strict rules for this, but I think all English professors are used to complaints that we are “reading too much into it,” so it’s helpful to be as clear as possible about how you legitimate an interpretation, about the kind of evidence as well as, frankly, the kind of experienced intuition that leads you to say that this, but not that, is a good “reading”).

I don’t know for sure whether my new meta-commentary is really that helpful, but I hope it is doing at least a little to clarify that literary criticism isn’t really that mysterious a process, and it’s certainly not something that I should do while they watch (and then write down the results). It’s what they are supposed to be learning and doing, as much as they are also learning what the contexts are for their readings and what the books are like as reading experiences.