We’re back at it: our winter term officially began on Monday, meaning today marks the end of the first full week of classes. The very familiarity of it is intensely familiar: that’s how it feels after a long time doing any work that is as cyclical as teaching, I expect. The familiarity of it also continues to be disorienting for me; that too, in its own strange way, is now familiar.

This is my first term teaching both online and in person – not in the same course, but with one of each. So far I like it, actually. My in-person course is an old favorite, Mystery & Detective Fiction. I haven’t taught it in the classroom since Fall 2018, which feels a lot more than four years ago. I taught it online more recently, with some success, measured at least by the number of students who showed up in my Fall 2022 classes at least in part because (according to them) they’d enjoyed it a lot. I’ve remarked here before about the oddity that this has become my most frequently taught course, because it’s such a popular elective. It’s full again this term, at 64. I am grateful for its familiarity: I hope to be able to relax into it. Usually it sparks some of the liveliest discussion of any of my classes, I think because everyone’s there out of interest (it doesn’t fulfill any requirements, so nobody has been coerced into taking it). We warmed up this week with “big picture” stuff about genre fiction, with an overview of the history of detective fiction, and then, today, with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Monday we start The Moonstone, which I omitted, reluctantly, from the online version. I was rereading our first instalment this afternoon and it’s just such a lot of fun. I hope they think so too!

My online course is Literature: How It Works, which is the same first-year writing course I’ve offered online twice before. I am really glad to be getting more use out of the materials I prepared for it, which took hours and hours, first to conceptualize and then to make. Some of them, of course, have already had to be updated, but I’m not changing a lot of the content for each new iteration of the course because I’m still putting  a lot of thought and energy into the specifications grading approach I’m using. I’ve revised the bundles again this year, simplifying and reducing or rationalizing them further based on my previous experience. The second time I taught this course this way it was already an improvement on the first time, so I’m hopeful that I have ironed out more wrinkles and we’ll all—me, my teaching assistants, and the students—have an even smoother term. I don’t want to reduce the students’ workload to the point that it doesn’t have the desired outcome: I do think that forcing them to just keep writing is, overall, an excellent approach for a writing course. The challenge is finding the line between productive work and busy work, or between work they have time to care about and work that is perfunctory because they are scrambling to get the credits they want.

It’s too early in the term in both classes to have much sense of how they’re going, or going to go, but I can say that I don’t hate going to class first thing and getting energized by the in-person session and then having the rest of the day to do everything else, from follow-up and preparation for the next class meeting to all the various tasks for my online course (mostly emails and introductions, so far, but soon to include a steady flow of discussion posts and journal entries). I’m used to recuperating in my office just long enough to head out and teach my second class, and then needing some recovery time after that class (hey, I’m getting old—pacing around and manifesting enthusiasm while talking a lot and fielding students’ comments and questions is tiring for me!) before I can dig in and get more work done. Today I did a couple of reference letters as well as my course-related stuff, and I reread Monday’s portion of The Moonstone, which I almost certainly would have put off until the weekend if I’d had to show up in person for a second class hour. I like the balance, and I’m perfectly happy not to be meeting my big first-year class in person. (Of all the classes I teach, it’s often the least rewarding to be doing face to face, because what I’m often face to face with is indifference.)

Despite the difficulties I still have adjusting to a reality that seems (still) unreal, I’m glad to be back to the routine. I was quite busy until late in December with work from last term; the time in between then and now was restful in some ways but wearing, personally, in others. Work is a good distraction; being with students forces me out of my head and into a more cheerful space; and I honestly do believe in the value of all of this—that it is worth keeping up, keeping at, even if, as today, I have to take a break from it sometimes to grieve the person whose presence is everywhere in my office, just as it is at home.

It has been a somewhat chaotic time in my classes since I last posted—not in the classes themselves, really, which have gone on much as usual, when they have actually met. But there have been a couple of unanticipated disruptions to the term, as a result of which it feels as if we are struggling to build up any momentum.

First, Queen Elizabeth died. I did not expect this to affect my class schedule at all, but when the day of her funeral was declared a provincial holiday, Dalhousie decided to follow suit, so all classes were cancelled that day. I was not in favor of this plan: it’s embarrassing enough that we still have a hereditary monarchy in the first place, and the university doesn’t close for every non-statutory holiday (we are business as usual on Easter Monday, for example). A lot of other folks still had to work that day, too. However, once the public schools were closing there were certainly pragmatic arguments for making parents’ lives easier, and although it was a pain having to revise course plans with so little notice, once I’d done that I decided just to embrace the extra day off.

When I announced the schedule changes for the “day of mourning,” I commented “Let’s just hope we don’t also have a hurricane!” Well, what do you know: Hurricane Fiona headed straight for us this past weekend, and classes are cancelled again today, as crews clean up the debris and work on restoring power. The storm was not as severe in Halifax as in other parts of the region, where it did really catastrophic damage. Other parts of the city also fared worse than we did in our particular corner, where there were lots of limbs and branches blown off and some trees sheared in two, but no huge trees or poles down. We lost power for about 38 hours; we got it back last night and then lost it again for a short time this afternoon, meaning we are definitely not taking it for granted! Our freezer packs did a decent job keeping the food in the fridge chilled, and luckily the freezer itself wasn’t packed and what was in it stayed pretty much frozen solid. We have a small camp stove we use to boil water and do a bit of cooking as needed. Increasingly, folks around us have generators, and more than one neighbor kindly offered us whatever help we needed; if the outage had gone on much longer, we would have taken them up on it gratefully.

Assuming we are back on Wednesday, that will actually be our only day of classes this week, as Friday is another day off, although this time deliberately so, in recognition of National Truth & Reconciliation Day.

In between these disruptions, we have actually met a few times and I think it has gone basically fine. The energy seems a bit low to me in 19th-Century Fiction, although I blame it partly on our dreary windowless room, and it’s also possible that it seems that way to me because I can’t see students’ faces. I’ve been encouraging them to nod at me the way Wemmick nods at the Aged:

“Here’s Mr. Pip, aged parent,” said Wemmick, “and I wish you could hear his name. Nod away at him, Mr. Pip; that’s what he likes. Nod away at him, if you please, like winking!”

“This is a fine place of my son’s, sir,” cried the old man, while I nodded as hard as I possibly could. “This is a pretty pleasure-ground, sir. This spot and these beautiful works upon it ought to be kept together by the Nation, after my son’s time, for the people’s enjoyment.”

“You’re as proud of it as Punch; ain’t you, Aged?” said Wemmick, contemplating the old man, with his hard face really softened; “there’s a nod for you;” giving him a tremendous one; “there’s another for you;” giving him a still more tremendous one; “you like that, don’t you? If you’re not tired, Mr. Pip—though I know it’s tiring to strangers—will you tip him one more? You can’t think how it pleases him.”

I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits.

I have wondered if stretching out our time on each book (which I did because of the advice we keep getting to ease up on students because of, well, everything) might be backfiring, because we’ve been talking about the same book for so long now. On the other hand, my competing fear is that a lot of them are quite behind in the reading, which could suggest I’m not allowing enough time. Well, we’ll be done with Great Expectations this week, one way or another, and next week we start Lady Audley’s Secret, which (if previous years are any indication) will perk them up, with its lurid and fast-moving plot and utter lack of subtlety (albeit it plenty of ambiguity, some of it, IMHO, evidence of authorial ineptness, not artistic complexity). (I do enjoy the novel a lot, and wrote an appreciation of it years ago for Open Letters Monthly.)

We’ve finished with Agatha Christie already in Mystery & Detective Fiction. I used to allot two class hours to Miss Marple stories, but for all Christie’s significance to the genre, I honestly don’t find there’s all that much to say about them, so I don’t regret having trimmed away one of those hours this year. We had a good student presentation on her, which gave us a productive second round of discussion. On Friday we had our first hour on Nancy Drew; we’re losing an hour on her to Fiona but will get another chance on Wednesday, with another student presentation. I always enjoy these so much: the students are so smart and creative and engaged, and they come up with such good ideas for class activities. Overall the energy in this seminar started off pretty good and seems to be getting better: spirits were high on Friday, partly because Nancy always proves very provocative. She’s just so good, and so good at everything: it’s annoying, I agree!

Personally, I continue to feel somewhat disoriented and unfocused, and I’m struggling to find my rhythm and pace in the classroom, especially (to my surprise, as it has long been my favorite lecture course) in 19th-Century Fiction. I don’t think (I certainly hope!) that this wavering isn’t evident to my students—that as far as they can tell, I’ve got my head in the game. I did mention to my seminar, in the context of one confusion I fell into, that (without going into details) I wasn’t as on top of things this term as I usually expect to be and that they should just ask or set me straight if they notice me getting something wrong. These recent cancellations and the last-minute changes they have required to my carefully laid plans are not helping: I don’t enjoy uncertainty at the best of times, which these definitely are not. Here’s hoping that once Fiona is well behind us, we don’t get any more unpleasant surprises for a while.

My classes have been meeting for a week now, and I said I was going to try to get back in the habit of reflecting on them, so here I am, although to be honest I find myself at something of a loss about what to say. Should I just focus on the classroom time, on what we’re reading and talking about, as if it’s just another year? Or should I try to explain how surreal it feels to be in the classroom, talking about our readings as if it’s just another year, and then, when the time is up, to be back in the strange disordered world of grief?

I’ll start with the basics, the way I did in the early days of this series.

In 19th-Century British Fiction From Dickens to Hardy I have done my usual contextual introductions and now we are working our way through Great Expectations. I have mentioned here before, I’m sure, that sometimes I get a bit tired of Great Expectations, which I assign a lot. The last time I taught it was in the British Literature survey course in Winter 2020, right before we all got sent home. In my online courses since then we did Hard Times and Bleak House, and I think stepping away from Great Expectations for a couple of years has been good for me—I’m really appreciating it this time. It has an intensity and also (at least in some parts) a restraint that shows Dickens’s control and maturity as an artist. Today we talked about the novel as a version of a Bildungsroman except that, so far, Pip is developing in all the wrong ways. We talked about Miss Havisham and Estella as (bad) influences, and we looked especially at Chapter XIV as an illustration of the way Pip’s retrospective narration not only makes sure that we see how he’s going wrong but shows us that, eventually, he sees that too. “It was not because I was faithful,” he reports,

but because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain. It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by, and I know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.

It isn’t young Pip who knows to call himself “ungracious,” as he does twice in this chapter; it’s an older, wiser Pip. But (and essentially, for this eventual moral growth) even young Pip knows enough to break into tears when he leaves Joe behind:

I whistled and made nothing of going. But the village was very peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears. It was by the finger-post at the end of the village, and I laid my hand upon it, and said, “Good-bye, O my dear, dear friend!”

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before,—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe with me then.

In Women and Detective Fiction I also began with some broad overviews, of detective fiction as a genre and of some of the questions that organize the course and will frame our readings. For last class we read a handful of “classic” stories to serve as touchstones for the resisting or subversive versions to come: “The Purloined Letter,” “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and, as a sample of hard-boiled detection, Hammett’s “Death & Company,” which is one of his ‘Continental Op’ stories. These give us a good sense of the masculine milieu of so much classic detective fiction, of the habits and practices of their detectives, and of the reductive roles assigned to women, or assumed of the women, in them. Today, as a contrast, we discussed Baroness Orczy’s “The Woman in the Big Hat,” which is one of her stories about Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. It has a delightful “reveal”:

“The big hat,” replied my dear lady with a smile. “Had the mysterious woman at Mathis’ been tall, the waitresses would not, one and all, have been struck by the abnormal size of the hat. The wearer must have been petite, hence the reason that under a wide brim only the chin would be visible. I at once sought for a small woman. Our fellows did not think of that, because they are men.”

You see how simple it all was!

We had already talked about Sherlock Holmes’s condescending remark, “You see, but you do not observe!” and now we could revisit it with observations about how gender affects what you see, or what you understand about what you see, and about kinds of expertise that are typically devalued because they are women’s and therefore considered trivial. This issue was also key to our other reading for today, Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers,” a wonderful story that highlights the way the law fails women, making justice something that can only be achieved by subverting it. We talked about the way Glaspell’s story, instead of offering up a big reveal at the end by the superior figure of the detective, instead allows the story to unfold gradually, the women’s dawning awareness drawing us along with them as our sympathies shift from the murdered man to the woman whose happiness he destroyed. Their solidarity grows partly in reaction to the men, who are lumbering around doing more typical (but, we easily see, entirely misguided) kinds of investigating. Every time they come in and make their jovially condescending remarks about “the ladies,”  we too close ranks against them:

“Oh well,” said Mrs. Hale’s husband, with good-natured superiority, “women are used to worrying over trifles.”

The two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke. The county attorney seemed suddenly to remember his manners—and think of his future.

“And yet,” said he, with the gallantry of a young politician, “for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?”

 In both classes, it feels as if we are still warming up, but all things considered I think participation has been good. We are all masked, and that’s a bit hot and uncomfortable and makes some things a bit harder—since I can’t see people’s whole faces, for instance, it is taking me longer to match them with names, and also I can’t really see people’s reactions, to get a sense of how things are going. It’s worth it, though, obviously, for the risk reduction. Considering how sheltered I’ve been for the last two and a half years, I’ve actually been more relaxed than I expected about suddenly being surrounded by so many more people, and I think the mandatory masking (even it if isn’t everywhere) has really helped with that. 

Other than the masks, nothing about teaching has changed, as far as I can tell, and in the moment I find I still enjoy the things I have always enjoyed about it: the material, the students, the dynamics and demands of discussion. I am relieved that (a few minor hiccups aside) I seem to staying on top of things in spite of being tired, distracted, and out of practice. When I’m not teaching, though, or busy with the other ever-proliferating work of the term, I feel more, not less, disoriented with the difference between the sameness of it all and my new changed reality. It’s a good thing, I know, that I am able to show up and be (more or less) my old self in the classroom, but at the same time I don’t know how to make sense of that or be at ease with it.

It has been a strange, confusing, and exhausting week, with some pretty good moments and some really bad ones. But at least it’s over now, after so much anticipation, and that’s one more “first” I never have to face again: my first week teaching again in person, after.

It’s 15 years now since I began posting regularly about “this week in my classes.” The series was hard to sustain during the past two years of teaching fully online, not because teaching wasn’t taking up a lot of my time and attention but because teaching ansynchronously made the concept of a “week” a lot less meaningful (among other challenges). Under different circumstances, I would be eagerly looking forward to tomorrow’s in-person class meetings. Ongoing concern about COVID (allayed only somewhat by Dalhousie’s decision to require masks in classrooms—but not in other shared spaces) would be reason enough for some ambivalence; add in that I am still grieving, and that campus is saturated with memories, and the result is a complex mixture of anticipation and anxiety, relief and sorrow. I have always loved teaching, so I do expect the demands, distractions, and rewards of being back in the classroom to be good for me, as it has been in the past. Those of you who have also experienced difficult losses will appreciate, though, that I have mixed feelings even about that.

Just as it hasn’t been possible for me to keep Owen’s death away from my reading or out of my writing, I expect it will come up as I reflect on my teaching experiences this term. In fact, because one of my ongoing challenges is finding ways to integrate his loss into my life, compartmentalizing—which has its uses for my day-to-day functioning—can also be counterproductive, not to mention painful and artificial, as an overall strategy. I don’t really know at this point what it’s going to be like for me this term, or, in a way, who I’m going to be. Maybe what I’ll discover is a healing continuity; maybe I’ll realize ways in which I have changed, or need to change. One of my worries is that, because of the strain I am under myself, I won’t have the emotional capacity to support my students as much as I usually aspire to—but perhaps exerting myself to meet their needs will be a useful counter-measure to the exhausting self-absorption of grief. In any case, I’m about to find out, and as I have always found posting about my teaching valuable for me pedagogically as well as personally, I’m going to try to return to it as a regular routine, so if you’re a regular reader, you’ll find out too.

So what exactly lies ahead? I am grateful that my department allowed me to change some course assignments around so that I have two upper-level classes this term, both of which are among my very favorite ones to teach. One is The 19th-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy; I have assigned Middlemarch as one of our readings, and allowed a relatively luxurious five weeks for it, because I can’t think of any better way to remind myself why my work matters to me (and, I hope, to my students). The other is Women and Detective Fiction, which has always prompted really high levels of student engagement. This week’s class meetings are primarily warm-ups: introductions to the courses on Wednesday, with an emphasis on broad framing themes and questions; and then on Friday in both classes, background lectures (on the ‘rise of the novel’ in 19thC Fiction and the history of detective fiction in the other), to make sure everyone has something like the same preparation for the readings and discussions to come.

I’ve been doing this for a pretty long time now (27 years, thanks for asking), so ordinarily I’d feel quite confident at this point. Practically and logistically, I’m well prepared—though it will be interesting to see how more than two years of working from home on a very flexible, if still often very intense, schedule, plus the psychological upheaval of the past 8 months, have affected my executive function. “To-do lists are your friends,” grief experts say, and I believe them. I have a new planner and good intentions; we’ll see how far they get me. This may be the term I feel most acutely the truth of this observation from Middlemarch‘s wise narrator, though:

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.

Behind my (hopefully adequate) Layfield KN-95 mask, there’s going to be a lot of emotional turmoil, more or less under control.

I am still finding it challenging to think in what were once my usual ways about what happens “in my classes” every week, because of the diffusion effect of asynchronicity. Another change from the Before Times is that it sometimes seems that teaching is now all about logistics, from setting up the Brightspace sites to … well, actually, the Brightspace sites are where it all begins and where it all ends!

It feels a bit less like that this year than it did in 2020-21, because one of my classes is a repeat, meaning a lot of the logistics were already in place and I just (just!) have to revise and update and improve it. Also, my other class, while a “new prep” as an online offering, leans heavily on the structures I developed for my most similar courses last year, so while it is definitely laborious putting them all in place again – adjusted to reflect the lessons I learned about reducing and simplifying expectations – the exercise is much less baffling and moderately less tedious.

The fun part of online teaching remains conceptualizing and preparing actual course content, and happily, the easing of pressure around logistics means I really am able to focus more of my energy there this term and to feel at least a bit more in the moment. Even responding to students’ discussion posts seems more like actually teaching and less like desperately trying to keep up!

So what have my classes actually been about this week, then? Well, in my introduction to literature class, we have moved on from Module 1 (What words?) to Module 2 (Whose words?). The course overall is designed to keep complicating students’ engagement with the readings, so we start with the most basic (diction, connotation, denotation, etc.) and then add layers, this week some issues about voice, point of view, irony, and unreliability. Our readings feature speakers whose positions are worth interrogating: Tom Wayman’s “Did I Miss Anything?”, Aga Shahid Ali’s “The Wolf’s Postscript to ‘Little Red Riding Hood,'” and Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” (Our reader is the concise edition of Broadview’s Introduction to Literature, so all of our readings are chosen from their admirably varied selections.) Next week we move on to “About What? Subject and Theme.”

I have always begun my introductory courses with poetry (unless they were specifically “prose and fiction” offerings). I do wonder about this approach sometimes, because students often don’t like poetry, or maybe more accurately, don’t trust themselves as readers of poetry, and this skepticism can come between them and the fun I always hope they’ll have as we warm up as close readers. Poetry is the most condensed literary form to work with, though, and also the form in which individual words tend to matter the most, so for lessons in the rewards of really paying attention to every detail, it nonetheless seems like the best place to start. Also, with fiction there is a strong tendency to resort to plot summary, so I like to put it off until they are a bit more used to being asked to stop and question what’s on the page and what it does.

In the 19th-century fiction class, which this term is the Austen to Dickens option, we are wrapping up our work on Persuasion, or we will be as more students get to the end of the module and submit their discussion posts. Anne Elliot can be a bit annoying in the first half of the novel, with her tendency to martyrdom and her inability to reach out and claim what she wants. I always find it interesting that so much of the novel’s resolution continues to be cautious, even reticent: this is not a novel celebrating impassioned outbursts, rebellion, or (to a point anyway) self-assertion. That will make Jane Eyre a dramatic contrast when we shift to Brontë’s novel next week, something I have been thinking about a lot because of course I can’t wait until Monday to start working on Jane Eyre but have to have my recorded lectures ready to go—which I do! I have discussed Jane Eyre with so many classes over the past 25 years that it hasn’t been hard to decide what the lectures should address, but it has been extremely hard to figure out how much they (I) should actually say. The model I have in mind is that they should include the equivalent of the opening comments I typically make in class, to set up the discussion to follow; explain any key critical or theoretical or historical contexts that I think are helpful to analyzing the novel well; and then prompt students to think about various elements of the novel in light of what I’ve said, rather than trying to cover what could be said about those elements. I pick some specific examples, but then I try to get out of the way, and then I show up in the online discussions to poke and provoke and steer as seems useful.

Oh dear: I’m back to logistics again! I do miss the simplicity of in-person teaching. In 2019-20, I had actually been working deliberately on weaning myself from more detailed lecture notes (not from lecture plans, just notes) and, trusting to my long experience, letting the discussion in class be more free-flowing. It was going well. I remember especially clearly the last class meeting for the Austen to Dickens class on March 13, 2020. We knew classes were going to be cancelled the next week, but we had a robust discussion of Mary Barton nonetheless and wrapped up not realizing that we would not meet again in person. I know that I could be back in person right now if I’d made that choice, but it would not have been a real return to that kind of ease and energy. I think I chose right, for me, for now, but that doesn’t make everything about this easy. I do still get the same satisfaction from engaging with students’ ideas and especially from being able to be present for them, albeit virtually. And on that note I guess I should go check on what new submissions are waiting for me!