I have one week left of my sabbatical. That in itself is probably a good subject for its own post: the time is coming for a full reckoning of what I did and didn’t get done in the last six months. But it’s also probably the reason that I have just had my first teaching dream in months! Teaching isn’t actually the first routine chore I’ll be getting back to: I have a meeting to attend next week, technically the day before my sabbatical ends (I’m too good a department citizen to be a stickler about that…), which I have to prepare for by beginning my review of one of the tenure and promotion cases I’ll be involved in over the next few months. But teaching is always the part of my job that I puzzle over the most–as testified to by the amount of time I spend fretting over things like reading lists for the mystery and detective fiction class. With that issue settled for this round, it’s time to turn my attention to my courses in 19th-century fiction. For these, it’s not so much the reading lists that are difficult to decide on: though I do mix them up regularly, the courses are meant to offer something like a ‘greatest hits’ list, and once the most obvious choices are covered, there’s not a lot of room to play around. No, for these classes it’s the assignment sequences that I worry about, partly because I do assign a lot of reading and it’s hard for me to decide how much writing it is reasonable to ask the students to do, particularly as the writing won’t be very good if they have barely had time to finish the novel(s) they are writing about.

I used to do what I think is a pretty standard sequence of one short (3-5 page) paper and one longer (5-7 page) paper, followed by a final short-answer and essay exam. I’ve also done two short papers and then an option of a long paper or an exam. Usually I don’t ask them to do research, or else the research component is deliberately very small–again, I ask them to do a lot of reading and it’s hard enough, IMHO, to come to grips with the complexities of the novels without adding in secondary readings you aren’t really in a position to evaluate if your understanding of the novels is still very preliminary. Even though I usually try to make the essay topics fairly flexible, on the theory that people write best on topics they are genuinely interested in, a lot of the writing always turns out to be quite clearly perfunctory or just plain careless. Some years ago, I read about an assignment that required students to send each other letters early in their work on a novel and then answer them when they were finished–the idea was that students would pick out something that caught their interest and their partner would follow through and explain its significance later on. Not only does this allow the students to find their own angle on the reading, but it makes the audience for their writing clearer and sets them up as a community working together to build their understanding of a range of critical cruxes and problems. I really like the assumptions and expectations of this process, and I developed a version of it for the 19th-century novel classes that ran, I think, quite successfully for a few years. We do a sample letter first, with everyone answering one of a handful of sample questions set by me. Students bring anonymous copies of these first letters to class and we circulate them and discuss them in small groups and then as a whole class, identifying particularly successful strategies as well, of course, as problems–and not just with the letters, but with my sample questions as well. Then over the next three novels they do a letter exchange for each one, each time with a different partner. For the final novel, they have the option of writing a longer, more conventional critical essay with a research component or writing the final exam, which includes answering a question from me about the novel.

I am strongly tempted to do this letter exchange sequence again for both of the 19th-century fiction courses in 2011-12. Because they generate their own topics and write to each other, and because I encourage them to raise issues from their questions in class and to draw on lectures and discussions as they think their way to their responses, it can really raise the overall level of engagement. It also means they are thinking creatively and critically about every novel but often along somewhat unpredictable lines (you can’t predict what their partners will ask about!), and it gets me, too, out of some of the ruts it’s easy to fall into with novels you think you have figured out. The letters are required to be very short (two pages), so they also have to work on focusing what may be a kind of wide-open question and on not wasting words as they answer it. Though I emphasize that a good answer has to be pointed (in other words, they do still need to have a thesis), the letter format prompts (and I encourage) a somewhat more colloquial, personal tone, too. One reason student writing can be so wooden or awkward is that they try to write the way they imagine we do, or they imagine we want them to, and in the process not only do they lose any confidence in their own voice but they end up with tortured constructions and using a vocabulary they are not comfortable with, just to try to sound ‘academic.’ A lot of them relax and become much clearer and more articulate when they have met face to face with their partner (as I insist they do) and then write knowing their job is to tell this particular person something about a topic they care about. (They are still expected to follow standard rules of spelling and grammar!) I have seen some great results.

But…having said all that, I am also reluctant to do this assignment sequence again. The last couple of times I’ve done it, it has been logistically extremely difficult, for one thing. For whatever reason, a lot more students created problems by not submitting their questions to their partners on time, leaving the other student stranded without an essay topic. In response, I made the rules more and more explicit and worked out contingency plans and penalties and so on–but handling these complications becomes very time-consuming, and chasing people with threats and recriminations about their not meeting their part of the bargain is unpleasant. With forty students involved, there are lots of ways things can screw up technically–students send each other attachments that don’t work, or they don’t use the Blackboard tools that make sure the addresses at least are consistent and reliable, or they ignore instructions about document format and end up with incompatibility issues. They miss required face-to-face sessions. They skip the practice letter (which is not worth a lot of marks but, as I stress, is worth a great deal in terms of preparing them for success in the ‘real’ assignments). They misunderstand the requirements–so that my explanations have gotten longer and longer, tediously so. They want lots of specific guidance on how informal or how specific or how many quotations … the first few times I did these assignments, everyone seemed much more confident about working within the general guidelines, but I’ve felt more and more pressure to try to spell everything out (the tyranny of the rubric!) and to anticipate every quirk or . There have always been some whose questions were terribly disappointing (showing clearly, for instance, that the student had read at most the back cover of the book)–again, my explanations of the requirements have gotten longer, and I give more and more examples and discuss good and bad strategies for formulating productive questions, but the last couple of times there just seemed to be an awful lot of students stuck with unusable questions, and even if the provision is there to mark down the students who provided them, I’m still stuck rescuing their partners. In brief (too late for that, I know!), instead of making the writing (and marking) more fun, in many ways the letter exchanges seemed to make everything more stressful. I still saw some excellent, original, smart work, but the students who accomplished it would have done as well on more conventional assignments, I expect, and the overall hassle would have been less.

So I’m not sure what to do. My goals are: to have the students write regularly, preferably at least once about every novel–though not necessarily in equal detail each time, and exam answers would count; to have the students see their writing assignments as closely connected to our work together in the classroom (too often it seems as if papers turn students’ attention elsewhere, as if they don’t realize that they can and should use lectures and discussions to develop their ideas and as models for the kinds of argumentation and evidence appropriate to the assignment); to have students see each other, not just me, as a resource and as participants in the work of learning; to avoid as much as possible writing that is done only because they had to do it–to have the students feel ‘ownership’ (ugh, I know, but it does matter) of their intellectual work, to feel that it really matters to them somehow; and to do all this within reasonable limits, so that they can give real, sustained attention to their assignments and I can evaluate them with clear eyes and a full heart (!) rather than frustration and annoyance at hasty, thoughtless work. Some combination of informal and formal writing seems optimum (in another recent version of these classes, for instance, we did regular ‘free writing’ in class, which cumulatively was worth about 10% of their grade and was meant to jump-start discussion as well as provide seed material for longer assignments). I like giving an option of a final paper or the final exam–which really helps reduce the ‘writing because I have to but can’t give it my full attention’ problem that arises for so many students at the end of term. Students who choose a final paper are likely to be quite highly motivated for it.

There are students out there, I know. What kinds of assignment sequences do you like? What is the best way, in your own experience, for you to keep your attention on the class readings? What kind of writing gives you the most satisfaction? If any of you happen to have been in one of the classes with the letter exchanges, any thoughts or suggestions about their success? And for the other teachers out there, any suggestions? Resources that have helped you?  I got the letter assignment from Art Young’s book on teaching writing across the curriculum (PDF here–see p. 26 and following).  I attended a workshop once on teaching writing where the main ‘lesson’ was ‘don’t assign any writing you don’t want to read when they turn it in’–that always seemed like easier advice to give than to take! But maybe there’s a way to do that, if I could just figure it out.

I have almost never assigned a “textbook” for any of my classes. Readers and anthologies of all kinds, of course, some including teaching apparatus of one kind or another (author biographies, glossaries, suggestions for further reading, sometimes discussion questions or a sample paper)–but usually I shy away from books that set out to do a lot of the teaching themselves. I figure that’s my job, for one thing, and I (rightly or wrongly) usually think I will do it better, or in ways better suited to my idiosyncratic goals and interests, than the authors of the textbook. Often I don’t like the exercises or examples provided very much, or I think the commentary is too intrusive, leaving students (and me!) insufficient space to think about and interpret the readings on our own. I also have an instinctive recoil from the textbook atmosphere, which seems to me more suited to high school than university. I don’t like to say to my students things like “For your homework, do exercises 1-5.” I realize that these prejudices are not universal: in other disciplines, textbooks are absolutely standard, and in English many people (including colleagues of mine) happily select textbooks that suit them just fine. But I’ve always felt that for me, all that stuff would just get in the way.

Here I am, though, to my surprise, seriously considering a textbook for adoption next year, and not even for an intro course (where I have always assumed that kind of support would be most appropriate). I’m scheduled to teach our 3000-level course on “Close Reading,” which is one of a suite of three courses on theory and methods of literary criticism, one of which must be completed by all of our majors and honours students. I taught it before, three times running (2003, 2004, 2005) but haven’t come back to it for a while. Of all the courses I’ve ever taught, this is the one that required the most thought and creativity to prepare, and it remains, in its old form, the course of which I am most proud. I framed our work in ways that I think were both interesting and important, I developed lectures but also course materials (handouts, worksheets, tutorial exercises, assignments) that were unlike any I’d used before but many of which I still look back on with pleasure, and I know the course had a big impact on a lot of students. I can (and no doubt will) reuse a lot of that material, but my experience has been that you can’t capture the energy of a course years later if you just recycle your previous approach. Lecture notes, for instance, can look much less coherent and vigorous when you look at them again after even a few months, never mind a few years: all the connections you used to fill in between what is written down have evaporated, the urgency you felt behind certain questions now eludes you, poems you couldn’t stop talking about stare blankly at you from the page. I’ve been open, therefore, to new ideas for the course, and in particular I’ve been looking for a different poetry reader to use.

Browsing around for options, I came across a book at Pearson called Close Reading. Given my bias against textbooks, I doubted I would ultimately adopt it, but it sounded worth a closer look so I requested an exam copy, and darned if I don’t quite like it, for my purposes. For one thing, thanks to some of the Twitter folk I follow, I’ve been thinking a lot about modeling as a pedagogical strategy, and this book models a number of things I want my students to be able to do–not just extended close readings (though it’s good that there are a number of these included, which could serve both as models and as starting points for discussion, because they aren’t 100% what I’ll be asking for) but the preliminary steps as well: noting interesting details, asking patient and attentive questions, using the right specialized vocabulary to talk about literary forms and effects. The questions aren’t always exactly the ones I would ask, the details not necessarily the ones I find most interesting, but again, this can be a way to start discussion, and the author, Elisabeth Howe, does a good job insisting on the importance of that kind of persistent attention by showing how it illuminates both the craft and the meaning of a poem or story. So far (though I haven’t read every word) I find it clear without being simplistic. There are models of poems or passages with key elements circled or annotated; there are model questions, but there’s also the clear expectation built in that eventually the students will make up their own questions; there are sample analyses, and then prompts for doing your own. Yes, this is the kind of thing I do with my students in class (providing or modeling questions, working up ‘readings’ of our texts), but I think it might really reinforce our class efforts to have samples written out for them like this, and to be able to assign readings and questions from the book instead of just telling them how to do that kind of attentive reading as class preparation. My recent experiences with lower-level courses suggest that students now seem to prefer things to be very explicit, and I wonder if using a textbook (or at least this textbook) would actually improve the overall level of engagement, rather than diminish it as I’ve usually feared. It would be nice, too, not to have to generate all the bits and pieces myself, particularly for tutorials (it’s a large class, or may be, with weekly tutorial meetings).

On the other hand…I also wonder if I am giving in to the high-school-ization of higher ed. And I wonder if students in 2nd and 3rd year, as these would be, would respond badly to using a textbook (though I wouldn’t adopt it, in the end, if I don’t conclude after going through it really meticulously that it is at a high enough level for the course). Are my general prejudices against textbooks shared by any of you, from either a student’s or an instructor’s perspective? Is it infantilizing to assign upper-level students “exercises” for their “homework”? Or am I just projecting onto a new generation of students my own intense commitment to university as an adult endeavor? The other day in the main office I ran into a woman who said she was there to drop off a paper for her son. My first thought was not “What a nice mom!” but “What kind of student asks his mom to submit his university assignments?” (My reaction is even more negative when students blithely tell me they always get mom or dad to “proofread” their papers. No offense to my own much-loved mom and dad, but I didn’t want them having anything to do with my university work, and I’m also quite certain they would have been quite surprised to be asked for their input!) Times have changed, and students seem to see themselves as younger and less independent than I was determined to be when I was in their position. They are also used to a fairly different high school experience, I think, and they seem prone to a great deal of anxiety about what exactly they are supposed to do. Should I insist they discover some self-direction and take some initiative, or should I support them in the manner to which they have become accustomed? I think this particular book may actually help me find a middle ground, modeling what to do and then backing off–and I’d still be the teacher, so I can set all kinds of expectations beyond what’s there. Plus I do plan to assign Middlemarch, as I did when I taught the course before. There’s no way any textbook can reduce the challenge (and reward!) of that, but if it made them stronger going into that work, we’d all be happier.

Any thoughts about textbooks, particularly from any of you who teach or take English courses at the college or university level? Pros and cons? A lot depends, I know, on the particular book and the aims of a particular course.

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.