Though classes have been over for about two weeks now, of course they aren’t really over until the grades are filed, which in turn can’t happen until the grading is all done. Last week was all about final essays, while this week will be all about the final exams my Brit Lit survey class wrote on Saturday morning–yes, that’s right, while other people were resting all snug in their beds, or bustling out to get an early start on their shopping the Saturday before Christmas, my students and I were stuck in a drafty classroom with really squeaky chairs from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m., counting down the minutes until we could be quite done with each other.

Invigilating exams is actually an oddly otherworldly experience. Because vigilance is, clearly, called for, you can’t just settle in for some serious work but have to alternate brief intervals of reading or writing with probing stares around the room or measured walks up and down the aisles (I use these strolls as opportunities not just to look out for students who have painstaking transcribed the whole of Mary Barton onto their inner arms or something but also to remind them all to double space their answers, offer additional exam booklets, and hand out extra Hershey’s Kisses). This particular room had steeply tiered seating, so I got some decent exercise every time I did this, or every time a student’s hand went up with a question about format or a lament for a dead pen (why anyone would show up for an essay exam carrying just one old ballpoint pen remains a mystery to me, but somehow every time, I hand out at least one spare). Otherwise, though, the atmosphere is one of anxious hush: the furrowed brows and deep sighs bring out all kinds of maternal feelings in me (these evaporate, more or less, once I start marking!). I always do bring some things to putter away at. Saturday I put a few keystrokes in on a writing project that’s in its very early stages, for instance, and I also read about half of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which turned out to be just right: smart enough to entertain but light enough to set aside as needed. More about that later, when I’ve read to the end!

Anyway, the booklets have all been collected, the candy wrappers are cleared away, and now I’m in the final week of what academics on Twitter discuss with the hashtag #gradingjail….and that is actually one of the things I have been thinking a lot about since classes ended and the complaining begin. Why is marking student work often not just unrewarding, but downright depressing, even disturbing? Why do people whose job it is to teach get in such a stew when they see the results of their, and their students’, term’s work? I can only think that something must be wrong–with us, with them, with the work, with the process–when we end up feeling entrapped, imprisoned, by what is, after all, a completely routine as well as absolutely essential part of our professional lives.

To be clear, not all marking is depressing. It’s always exciting to read a good piece of work, especially when you know you have had a hand in developing it. Thinking about the finished essays that gave me the most satisfaction to read this term, I realized that they were the ones in which the students had brought an idea or proposal to me, taken in my initial suggestions, come back after working on it some more, talked it over again, gone off to do more work based on our discussion, and eventually produced a thoughtful argument with which they were clearly engaged and which had flourished with my input and their effort. Now that’s teaching, right? So if that’s the gold standard, not just for results (and in fact, these aren’t all necessarily A+ papers when they are finished) but for the process, why is this not always the way things go? Why does it seem so often that the effort was perfunctory, the challenge was unwelcome, the requirements were simply ignored, the opportunities to learn and grow unappreciated?

There are a lot of answers, I think, and one of the things I hope to do on my upcoming sabbatical is address the ones that lie within my own power to address. I don’t think I can do a lot more than I already do, for instance, about students who just don’t care–and there are definitely some of those; it would be naïve to think there aren’t. There are doubtless a range of reasons why they don’t care, or can’t care right at the moment. But I can only do so much to reach them, if their interests or priorities or needs are somewhere else and they are just showing up (or not!) because that’s what they have to do. Mind you, I have to treat them all as if they do care, because it can be hard to know–that’s one reason marking is emotionally draining, I think: often you suspect you are pouring your effort in only for it to be ignored. (I like electronic grading because at least there are no uncollected papers serving as tangible evidence of their indifference.) But I’ve made the mistake once or twice of being rough on a student for not trying or caring, and it feels pretty bad to realize you were wrong about that.

So, if you start on principle from the assumption that most students do care, what gets in the way of their desire to engage with and develop their work as far as they possibly can, and what can I do to turn things around for them and keep myself out of #gradingjail–or at least make it one of those nice minimum security prisons? A few thoughts so far:

1. Time is a major obstacle. Most of my students are taking five courses, many of them writing intensive, most with final essays due at the end of term. Even if they weren’t working part-time jobs (which most of them are) or juggling family responsibilities (which some of them certainly are), they’d have a hard time giving enough time to five final papers to get good results across the board. I have sometimes tried to take this into account by giving an option between a final paper and an exam. It’s true that this means those who write the papers do so in a much less perfunctory “because I have to” way, but those who write the exam do not make quite the same intellectual investment or get the same kind of intellectual reward.
2. Class size is a problem. Except for graduate seminars, my smallest class is 20 students; I find it is just barely possible to do an assignment sequence involving rewriting with that many students while still moving through (and writing about) a reasonable amount of material. And even there, if every student came for the multiple visits (or exchanged the multiple emails) that lead to the kind of results I’ve described, I’d be swamped–not least because one seminar is not, of course, my only course per term. Still, ideally it would be nice to take everyone through proposals and drafts and revisions. I think for a seminar class I should be able to figure out how to do this–there’s a planning project, then, for my fall term seminar next year, to seek out advice and models for assignments that encourage long-term attention and rewriting, and that are manageable for a group that size. But what about groups of 40, 60, or (as I’m afraid we have recently resolved on for our first-year classes) well over 100? There aren’t enough hours in the day, for me or for whatever cadre of TAs is lined up for the really big classes, to give the kind of time and attention to their writing assignments that I believe is necessary for them to learn and improve. At Cornell, I taught in a writing program with classes capped at 17. We could do all kinds of things in a class that small, including lots of one-on-one work–and in fact that may be the last experience I can remember of feeling I was working with individual students, in detail, on ideas and lessons they could (and even would) use on their next attempt. I’ve heard people say you can teach writing just fine to large groups; in my gut, and from my experience so far, I believe that just isn’t true, but again, there’s a project for me, to figure out how people think this can be done, as I’m going to be expected to do it before too long.
3. Preparation is a problem. I have had the feeling quite a lot recently that I am asking things of some of my students that have not been asked of them before, from ‘little’ technical things like correct spelling and writing in complete sentences to large scale things such as close attention to textual evidence or deep analysis of literary ideas instead of recapitulation of plots. Oh, and reading really long books! with footnotes! and characters that aren’t ‘relatable’! The gap between my expectations and their results is, of course, where much of the pain of grading originates, but if they just aren’t prepared to do what I’m asking, am I being fair to keep on asking it? How far should I dial back my expectations? Or, how can I use both classroom time and assignment sequences to move them into a position where they really can be expected to write the kind of essay I want from them? Again, here’s homework for me. Although I do build in components that I think and hope prepare them for larger assignments, perhaps I can do even more.

These are not observations with implications only for #gradingjail, of course, but that’s where I’ve been lately–and will be again tomorrow, and the next day, and probably the next day too–so that’s the context in which I am currently brooding about them. They apply mostly to essay writing, but I think a number of them are also relevant to exams: I’ve been tearing my hair and muttering “weren’t you paying attention?!” a lot, but time, class size, and preparation make a difference to attendance, diligence with class readings, and investment in the course material too, as does the sense that your professor knows who you are (or doesn’t) and has a specific interest in improving your understanding.

So: Those of you who also teach writing, and/or also spend time in #gradingjail, what do you think makes it such a hard place to be? What are your most positive grading experiences, and what do you think makes the difference?

I’ve been thinking more about this passage from May Sarton’s The Small Room that I quoted in my earlier post on the novel, from Lucy’s irate speech to her students on returning their woefully inadequate assignments:

Here is one of the great mysterious works of man, as great and mysterious as a cathedral. And what did you do? You gave it so little of your real selves that you actually achieved bordeom. You stood in Chartres cathedral unmoved. . . . This is not a matter of grades. You’ll slide through all right. It is not bad, it is just flat. It’s the sheer poverty of your approach that is horrifying!

I’ve been marking assignments myself (in my more benign moments, I call it ‘evaluating assignments,’ which sounds less adversarial). But that’s not actually what has had the line about standing in Chartres cathedral unmoved running through my head. Instead, it’s our recent class meeting on James Joyce’s “The Dead,” which I know I am not alone in finding one of the greatest pieces of modern fiction: smart, patient, subtle, powerful, poignant. My very smart talented teaching assistant led the class, and as always happens when I hand over the reins, I learned a lot and was reminded why I ended up where I am today, namely, because I loved being an English student. (I had the same treat today because another of our very smart and talented graduate students kindly took over the class on T. S. Eliot. Boy, we can pick ’em!) Because I was sitting among the students, I couldn’t see their faces, so I had less than my usual sense of whether they were engaged or listening, but there was certainly not a flurry of responses in answer to Mark’s questions about the story. Now, it’s not a hugely forthcoming group anyway,  and for that I partly blame both the style in which I have decided to teach the course (basically, lectures, with some Q&A, which seemed to fit the purpose of the course) and also the room we were assigned (quite a formal tiered lecture hall, narrow but deep, which exaggerates the distance and difference between the front of the room and the back and makes the prospect of throwing up your hand to volunteer an idea more intimidating, I expect, to any usually reticent students). Anyway, I sat listening to Mark and looking at the moments on the page he called our attention to and filling up with the old excitement–but also simmering a little at what seemed to me an undue lack of excitement in the rest of the room. ‘Aha!’ I thought. ‘This is what Lucy was talking about! Here they are, in Chartres cathedral, unmoved!’

But the more I’ve thought about that moment and my reaction, the less satisfied I am–not with them (though come on, it’s “The Dead”!), but with myself and with the unfair lose-lose situation I am (silently) putting the poor students in.

The thing is, my classroom is nothing like Chartres cathedral. And I don’t mean just in the look and layout, though here’s a picture so you can imagine the scene for yourself:

No, the dissimilarity I’m thinking about is one of atmosphere. Or, perhaps more accurately, attitude. As I remarked in my write-up of The Small Room, Sarton seems to me to be appealing to “an old-fashioned view of literature as a kind of secular prophecy,” imagining a world in which “the professor’s scholarship giv[es] her the wisdom to speak ‘from a cloud,’ a ‘creative power,’ a ‘mystery.'” I wasn’t–and I’m not–lamenting that this is not my academy. I’m not a secular priest; I have no special creative power, no authority to speak to them from some mysterious height– no interest, either, in evoking spiritual revelations. That’s not my business. We can’t just stand there and emote, after all. There’s not much point in their bringing their “real selves” to their work in the way Lucy seems to want it: what would I grade them on? Failure (or success) at having their own epiphanies, rather than failure (or success) at explaining the concept of ‘epiphany’ in the context of Joyce’s fiction in general and “The Dead” in particular? As Brian McCrea writes,

People who want to become English professors do so because, at one point in their lives, they found reading a story, poem, or play to be an emotionally rewarding experience. They somehow, someway were touched by what they read. Yet it is precisely this emotional response that the would-be professor must give up. Of course, the professor can and should have those feelings in private, but publicly, as a teacher or publisher, the professor must talk about the text in nonemotional, largely technical terms. No one ever won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant by weeping copiously for Little Nell, and no one will get tenure in a major department by sharing his powerful feelings about Housman’s Shropshire Lad with the full professors.

And as I wrote in response to McCrea in a (much) earlier post,

While we can all share a shudder at the very idea, to me one strength of McCrea’s discussion is his admission that marginalizing affect, pleasure, and aesthetic response is, in a way, to be untrue to literature, and that the professional insistence on doing so also, as a result, marginalizes our conversation, alienating us, as McCrae says, “from our students, our counterparts in other academic departments, our families [unless, he allows, they include other professional critics–otherwise, as he points out, even they are unlikely to actually read our books and articles], and, ultimately, any larger public” (164-5). (In Democracy’s Children, John McGowan makes a similar point: “There remains a tension between the experience of reading literature and the paths followed in studying. . . . To give one’s allegiance to the academic forms through which literature is discussed and taught is to withdraw [at least partly] allegiance to literature itself” [65]).

They aren’t standing in Chartres cathedral unmoved. I’m slamming the door of Chartres cathedral in their face. They might well have been feeling all the excitement I could hope for, or at least those who actually did the reading for the day might have. But it wouldn’t be their fault if they thought the CIBC Auditorium was no place to bring it up. It wouldn’t be Mark’s fault either, or mine. We do show enthusiasm and appreciation for the literature we’re covering, to be sure, but it’s not of the viscerally rapturous variety, or even the aesthetically transcendent variety. It’s a heavily intellectualized variety, and while I don’t think that makes it inauthentic, it isn’t something they are quite ready to emulate, not yet. I want them to feel the readings, and to show that they feel them, but there’s really no appropriate way for them to express that feeling in the ways they would find natural.

But what are we to do?  I’m not a fan of the unreflexive response, and taking down the nets would open up our class discussions (at least potentially) to a particularly banal and subjective kind of verbal tennis (“I really like this” / “Can you say more about why?” / “Not really, I just thought it was nice / beautiful / relatable”). Nobody learns anything from that. I usually just hope that my enthusiasm (however peculiar its variety) catches their interest and makes them read more, and more alertly, then they otherwise would. I try to give them tools to notice and think about their more personal responses, too: how they might have been achieved by the formal strategies of the work, and what their implications might be. I was remembering, though, a conversation of my own with one of my undergraduate professors. We had been reading Matthew Arnold, including “To Marguerite–Continued,” at a time when a lot of emotionally difficult things were going on in my life, and after our seminar (in which, as I recall, we talked about things like faith and doubt, and modern alienation, and verse forms, and metaphors) I very tentatively went up to the professor–one of my favorites, a wry 18th-century specialist who always looked faintly sardonic (as is only fitting, of course, for that period). “But don’t you think,” I remember saying (and those who know me now would not, probably, believe how nervous it made me even to stand there and ask this kind but intimidating man anything at all) “don’t you think that life is like he says? that we are isolated like that?” “Perhaps,” was his only reply–that, and a quizzical lift of his eyebrow. Well, what else could he say? What did my angst have to do with his class?

But (I’m full of these equivocations tonight, apparently) I can’t help but think that, for all the gains involved in professionalizing the study of literature, one of the reasons our students don’t graduate and go out into the world and absolutely trumpet the value and significance of the work they did with us is precisely that we have given up that prophetic role. We stood with them outside the cathedral, perhaps, and told them it mattered, and explained its history and architecture and social role and so forth, but left them to stand inside, moved, on their own. To be sure, they might have ignored it altogether if it weren’t for us (how many of these kids would pick up Joyce on their own?), but no wonder they are left thinking that when it came to the things that really mattered, we weren’t there for them.

In the comments to my previous post, a couple of people said they’d be interested in seeing my course outlines for this fall, so I’ve prepared short versions of them (trimmed of the boilerplate stuff about attendance policies, late papers, academic integrity, accommodations for students with disabilities and so forth). Of course, if you’re particularly keen to know what my policies are on attendance or late papers, I can explain them too. There is not one right way to design or run a course; I use readings and assignments (and policies) that have seemed to me to work well over the years, and that suit the kind of teacher and person I am. (Like parenting, teaching is an activity in which I think you can only really flourish if you are yourself in it, playing to your strengths and acknowledging and, as much as possible, guarding against your weaknesses.) That said, I also learn and borrow from colleagues on campus or online: the wiki assignment I’m using in English 2002, for example, is a version of one Jason B. Jones designed and explained at the very helpful blog ProfHacker. Questions or suggestions welcome–there’s always a next time!

English 2002 Syllabus Short Version

English 4205 Syllabus Short Version

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

How many years, exactly, do I have to do this before I no longer feel jittery on the first day?

My first classes meet tomorrow. Then things get progressively busier and busier and busier…until they stop after December exams are marked and grades submitted. I have done everything I need to prepare for tomorrow except download my class lists, which I have learned to leave to the last minute because of all the adding and dropping going on. (Pet Peeve #873: Dalhousie’s long add-drop period, which is designed for the convenience of the customers students, with no regard for the pedagogical chaos it creates as students appear and disappear quite at will for the first two weeks of a term that’s barely twelve weeks long anyway. Just how far backwards is one supposed to bend for a student who has missed the first six or eight class meetings and so has no idea about the books, the assignments, or the attendance policies?) (Oh, and there’s also Pet Peeve #781: students who register for your class but don’t show up for several days, or maybe ever, but don’t drop the class so that you know there’s a spot available for someone on your waiting list. If only we were empowered by Customer Service the Registrar’s Office to remove students from the course if they missed, say, the first two class meetings. Imagine how attendance, and thus engagement, would improve!)

Anyway, it’s the time of year when academic work becomes a lot less academic (in that other sense of the word) and practical concerns press heavily on us all. Herewith, therefore, an idiosyncratic round-up of relevant tips or sites for students and professors alike.

How to E-Mail Your Professors. The guidelines in this post seem entirely sensible to me. Even if (like some of the commenters) you quibble with the details, I think everyone would agree that you should approach any communication with your professors (indeed, with anyone you hope will take you seriously) responsibly and professionally. Above all, never forget the First Law of Electronic Communication: once you click “send,” you can’t get it back. (The same goes for posts on your blog and status updates on Facebook, just btw.)

Dear Students… There are my own somewhat snarky (but still well-founded!) suggestions from this season last year.

I Worked So Hard! In her inimitable style, The Little Professor considers the relationship between effort, ambition, and success. See also her piece on Dealing with Professors. I especially like the reassurance that “most of us … are not necessarily evil.” True: in my own case, it’s a lifestyle choice. He he.

On Teaching Evaluations. Professors: remember, it’s impossible to please all of your students all of the time. Students: remember, not everyone is just like you, so perhaps what the professor should do instead of whatever you don’t like is not as obvious as you think.

Did I Miss Anything? This poem by Tom Wayman remains the best response I know to a professors’ most hated question, though this year I think I’ll go with “you’ll never know, will you?”

ProfHacker. This newly launched site, established by Jason B. Jones of The Salt-Box and collaborators, is already a goldmine full of nuggets of advice about pedagogy, technology (yay, help with wikis!), and academic business (for instance, ideas for reforming bad meetings)

Confessions of a Community College Dean. This blog always has thoughtful, and thought-provoking, discussions of administrative and pedagogical issues. Dalhousie faculty wondering how the university’s policies on “Academic Continuity” in the event that the campus is hard hit by the H1N1 virus will affect their plans and policies may want to look at this post and its comment thread.

OWL. Purdue’s Online Writing Lab remains one of the best online writing resources I know.

Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum. I like a lot of things about this book; I’ve adapted the letter-writing assignment described on pages 30-34 for my 19th-century fiction classes and will be using my version of it again this year, after reverting last year to more traditional papers.

More as occasions warrant. In the meantime, time to go test the PowerPoint slides and double-check that all the links on Blackboard are working as planned.

At least, it might. Pretty soon I have to finalize book orders for a new course I’m teaching in the winter term, a second-year survey of “British Literature Since 1800.” I feel strongly that despite the pressure it will put on the very limited time I have available to cover a vast range of material, I can’t teach such a course without including at least one 19th-century novel and one 20th-century novel–but picking just one puts a lot of pressure on each choice! I’ll be using the second volume of the Norton “Major Authors” anthology, which will take care of poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction. I’ve been thinking that if you’re going to showcase a single Victorian novelist, it simply has to be Dickens, and as we have at most two weeks and I will mostly have students without much literary experience, I’ve been thinking it has to be one of the shorter Dickens, meaning basically Hard Times or Great Expectations. Before I put the order in, though, I thought I’d see how many people agreed with me and how many would consider someone else the “must read” author of that century, or another book a better choice. So I’ve put a little poll at the side; feel free to place your vote there and/or to put a suggestion in the comments. For what it’s worth, my underlying theme in the course will be something like “what do people think literature is for, and how do they use literary form to get this done?” And the 20th-century novel I’ve almost decided on is Atonement, for lots of reasons, one of which is that it is kind of a two-for-one deal, given its engagement with Woolf-ian modernism (which we will address through readings from the anthology too).