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

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

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

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

I have certainly not kept up diligently with posting about my teaching this year. I’ve posted just twice about it since January, and once was a re-run! I blame . . . well, pretty much everything, including how much of my energy was spent this term on administrative stuff that was at once important and kind of mind-numbing. But really it’s probably as simple as: a habit, once broken, is hard to repair, however much you miss it, or however guilty you feel about it (however irrationally). I was talking with a good friend recently who commented how helpful she’d found the comment “it’s OK to change your interests.” Has my interest in blogging about my teaching just declined? The proof, I guess, is in the posting.

And yet: I have missed it! I continue to believe, as well, that it is a habit that did me good. I became a better teacher because I took regular opportunities to reflect on what I was doing and how it was going. As I approach the end of my teaching career–I don’t know when that will be, yet, but I know it’s coming eventually!–I know I will be glad to have this record of so much of it, as well.

This felt like a difficult term, though mostly for reasons not directly to do with my own teaching. The string of snow days and cancellations didn’t help: I got pretty tired of gaming out revisions to our reading schedules and deadlines. Disruptions aside, I think my two classes actually went pretty well. I was anxious heading into the Brit Lit survey class, because it did not go well the last time I taught it–and that’s even without taking into account that mid way through it, the pandemic broke out and we were all sent home. The reading list this time was pretty much the same, but it all felt very different, in a good way. How much of that was me, doing things differently (better) and how much of that was the unpredictable chemistry of the group, the room, the moment? I loved working through Great Expectations with them, of course, but the biggest treat for me was The Remains of the Day, which was on the reading list for the course in 2020 but had to be cut when everything blew up. It remains a top 10 novel for me, and its insights and impact feel as urgent to me now as they did a decade ago–more, perhaps. And of course the final scene on the pier still makes me weep.

My other course this term was a combined Honours and graduate seminar on George Eliot. I have taught a grad-only version before but this was my first time being able to offer it to Honours students as well. Because many of the undergraduates in the class had read at least one George Eliot novel with me before (along with an array of other Victorian novels), and some of the graduate students had never read her–or much Victorian fiction at all–there really was no meaningful difference in level or preparation, and the discussion was smart and energetic and invested the entire term. Well, OK, it flagged a bit while we were making our way through Felix Holt, which was not a general favourite–but that was also during the worst of our winter weather, so I choose to think it’s not really, or not entirely, Felix’s fault. Silas Marner was a clear favourite, but to my delight and relief, so was Daniel Deronda, which I don’t think anyone in the class was really looking forward to. They were all very happily surprised at how (relatively) fast-paced and provocative and interesting it is. I would have loved to include Middlemarch, but you can only do so much in 12 weeks. (I have put it on the reading list for the Dickens to Hardy class in the fall, as compensation.)

The last time I taught the grad seminar version of the George Eliot class was 2015, and it was interesting to notice some shifts in the interests and questions students brought to our discussions. To some extent this was a function of the critical essays I assigned for the graduate students, which I refreshed to highlight recent developments in the scholarship. But it was still up to them what they specifically brought up in class, and the undergraduates were not doing those readings (or at least were not required to)–and across the board it was clear that disability studies, eco-criticism, and gender were key interests. It’s not that gender wasn’t a central topic of discussion in the past, but the terms of the discussion have evolved: we had as lively discussions about Gwendolen as a possibly “ace” character, for example, as about Maggie’s non-conformity with 19th-century norms of femininity. There didn’t seem to be much energy for talking about empire, even with Daniel Deronda, and my expectation that the novel’s conclusion would provoke controversy about Palestine and Zionism did not really play out.

The spectre haunting everyone’s pedagogy this year was AI. I really tried not to let concerns about it preoccupy me. By and large, I trust my students to want an authentic experience, to be bringing their real selves to the classroom and to the work they do for me. I never had the feeling with any of the work from the students in the George Eliot seminar that it wasn’t truly their own. Could I be wrong about this? Sure. But I got to know them all pretty well, and unless I have learned nothing in 31 years of teaching, there’s not much overlap between “students who want to take an entire seminar about George Eliot” and “students who want to take short-cuts.” I wasn’t always so sure with the online tests in the survey class: some of the answers did have that combination of vagueness and fluency, a kind of unnatural glibness with very little actual substance, that gives off the whiff of AI. Most of the time that meant they also didn’t meet the requirements for full credit, which typically included things like “give a specific example from the reading to support your answer, explaining clearly how it does so.” In those cases I could just give partial credit, noting how the answer fell short without getting tangled up in having to prove AI use. Other times I had to shrug and give credit for a “good enough” answer, even if I doubted its authenticity. Usually I noted that doubt in my feedback, explaining why the answer had made me wonder, in case knowing that was in any way useful to the student.

I’m not at all sanguine about the corrosive effects of AI on teaching and learning, and I don’t kid myself that there is any way to “AI-proof” my assignments. I remind myself, though, that one of my worst teaching experiences ever was the term–not that long ago!–when 1 in 5 of my first-year students was found guilty of an academic integrity offence for literally cutting and pasting material from sites on the internet. AI is worse: more insidious, and at least potentially more widely damaging to the trust I consider essential to my work. I have tried hard over the years to think about plagiarism as a symptom rather than a moral failing and to do what I can to create the conditions in which students neither need nor want to resort to it. The same is surely true of AI, but it’s impossible to ignore how much harder it keeps getting, not just to ward it off (I mean, Copilot is literally integrated in the software they are provided by the university!) but to manage those conditions. Classes are larger, everyone is busier and under more pressure, students’ preparation and expectations and needs vary widely. All I can really do is speak up for and model the value of the process and the work itself. I do feel pretty sure that, whatever complaints they no doubt have about me and my pedagogy, my students can tell I am there for it and for them, that I am genuinely committed and enthusiastic. I hope they appreciate that I continue to prioritize both trust and authenticity on both sides. When I can’t bring that positive energy to the room any more, it will definitely be time for me to retire.

Another January, another new term! I’ve got two classes this term of two quite different kinds. The first is our second-year survey course British Literature After 1800, so its aim is to cover a broad sweep of territory; the other is a combined Honours and graduate seminar on George Eliot, a rare opportunity to zoom in on a single writer—a privilege rarely accorded, in our program anyway, to anyone besides Shakespeare!

I led off the survey class today with what I called “explanations and excuses”: I talked in general terms about the traditional model of the historical survey in literature programs; I gave a potted overview of what the standard story of “British Literature After 1800” would have been, moving from the Romantics through the Victorians to the Modernists and beyond; then I raised some questions about oversimplification, inclusion, periodization, and ‘the canon’; and then I made some arguments in favour of nonetheless looking at things in chronological order, at least some of the time. (Showing my age, I used the example provided by David Lodge in Small World of the student who claims he is doing his thesis on the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare, much to the delight of the hip deconstructionists around him.) Because, if only for my own sake, I like to have some sense of unifying themes beyond chronology, I explained that one thing we would be talking about across the course was what our various authors thought literature was for or should or could do, and I quoted some statements they had made about this, from Shelley’s “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” to Ishiguro saying “I like to highlight some aspect of being human. I’m not really trying to say, so don’t do this, or do that. I’m saying, this is how it feels to me.” And that, besides a bit of logistical stuff about requirements and schedules and getting the books, was that! Friday we get going more specifically with Wordsworth.

Something that was very much on my mind as I prepared for this particular class meeting was the last time I taught this course, which was the winter term of 2020. In early March of that term, we were all sent home; my notes leading up to what turned out to be our last day in person have a number of references to contingency plans, but none of them (none of us) anticipated the scale of disruption. It came on so quickly, too, as my notes remind me. We were part way through our work on Woolf’s Three Guineas on our final day; quite literally the last thing I wrote on the whiteboard was “burn it all down.” I got quite emotional many times while revising the course materials for this year’s version: that term stands out so vividly in my mind as “the before time,” before COVID, which is also, for me, before Owen died. We were still essentially in lockdown, after all, when he died in 2021; we had only just been able to start coming together as a family again. I don’t usually have a lot of emotional investment in my course materials, but it was unexpectedly difficult revisiting these and thinking of how much has changed. Tearing up over PowerPoint slides: it seemed absurd even as it happened, but it did. That said, because of COVID I ended up cutting The Remains of the Day from the syllabus in 2020, and given that it is in my personal top 10, that I rarely have the opportunity to assign relatively contemporary fiction, and that I am running out of years to assign anything at all, I am stoked about being able to read through it with my class this term. If only it didn’t feel so timely!

I am also super stoked about getting to spend the whole term reading and talking about George Eliot with a cluster of our best students—not just our brightest but honestly, I know most of these students from other classes and they are some of the nicest and keenest and most engaged and curious people you could hope to work with. I felt so much good will from them today as we did our ice-breaker (nothing too “cringe,” just everyone’s names and anything they wanted to share about their previous experience, or lack of experience, with George Eliot). I hope their positive attitude survives Felix Holt, not to mention Daniel Deronda! Knowing that a number of them had read Adam Bede and/or Middlemarch with me in other recent courses, I left both of these off the reading list for this one. Middlemarch especially feels like a gap, but on the other hand, I don’t think I could have realistically asked them to read both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda in the same term (unless I didn’t assign anything else), and Daniel Deronda is pretty great. I had quite a debate with myself about Felix Holt vs Romola: just for myself, I would have preferred to reread Romola, but I’ve taught Felix Holt in undergraduate courses before and it is actually pretty accessible. Sure, Felix is so wooden he makes Adam Bede look lively and nuanced, but, speaking of timely, a book about the pitfalls of democracy when the population is not (ahem) maybe sufficiently wise to make good choices seems on point. Along with those two, we will be reading “Janet’s Repentance,” The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. I’m already a bit worried that it’s going to be too much reading . . .

The last time I taught this class was 2015, and then it was a graduate seminar only. I had stepped back a bit from teaching in our graduate program: we get at most one seminar a year, and my favourite classes to teach have always been our 4th-year or honours seminars, so I made them my priority. OK, that’s not entirely truthful: I had also felt increasingly uncomfortable with graduate teaching, both because of my own loss of faith in aspects of academic research and publication (amply documented here over the years) and because it seemed so clear that an academic path was not a viable option for our graduate students and I wasn’t sure what else we were really doing. These reservations made me much happier focusing on undergraduate teaching, though I missed graduate students themselves: we get such lovely ones! Now we mingle undergraduate and graduate students in some of our seminars, which was the model for last year’s Victorian Women Writers seminar—which I thought went really well. (There was at least one student who disagreed, judging from the evaluations, but you can’t please everyone!) I have high hopes for this seminar as a result, which includes a number of the same students, at both levels.

It is a crazy time in the world and has been a pretty difficult time at work as well, with budget cuts and government interference and all kinds of discouraging internal administrative moves. I have never felt so strongly that I might actually be getting tired of the whole thing, that retirement, scary as it is to me for other reasons, might be welcome just so I don’t have to deal with all this nonsense—the persistent devaluing of the work we do, and the degradation of the conditions in which we nonetheless strive to do it well. I have to say, though, that one day back in the classroom with students has made a difference: I don’t exactly like “the job” at the moment, but I really like the work, the part I think of as the real work. The question will be whether the changes and complications and cuts make it impossible for me to do that work, or to do it well, or just start to outweigh the value I find in it.

Believe it or not, I’ve been posting here about my teaching since 2007. At that point I had already been at Dalhousie for 12 years. These posts are a record, then, of almost two decades in a 30-year teaching career (more if you count the teaching I did as a graduate student). In their own idiosyncratic way, they tell quite a history themselves, including the rise and decline of academic blogging, the (thankfully burst) MOOC bubble, the Great Online Pivot of the COVID years, the encroachment of generative AI (may that bubble burst soon). Through it all, my colleagues and I have just kept on showing up to class. It is common, even among academic administrators, to champion “innovation” as a good in itself and to chastise people or systems that continue to work in more or less the same way. The substance of what we do as English professors changes constantly: we are not asking the same questions or bringing the same methods to bear on the texts we study and teach as professors were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. But it is not a bad thing that our pedagogy stays true to some essential practices and values. I wish more people with decision-making powers would acknowledge that sometimes things stay the same because they work. Today I sat with students around a table and talked. I have tried all kinds of things over the years (again, as amply documented here!) from class wikis to Pecha kucha presentations; I have used PowerPoint and recorded videos and done letter exchanges instead of essays and on and on. After all this time I am convinced that there is no better pedagogy for the kind of learning I believe in for my students than sitting around a table and talking. Second best (still pretty good!) is leading a robust discussion from the front of the room. That kind of teaching can’t be monetized, surveilled, or sold to tech moguls, though, so nobody gets excited about it—except those of us in the room. We are fighting to be able to keep on doing it. If you care about it yourself, vote for politicians who don’t dismiss it because it doesn’t clearly serve “government priorities.”

It was just about a month ago that I last posted in this series. At the time, Dal faculty were locked out but we were hoping that a resolution to the labour dispute was close, which, thankfully, it did turn out to be. Still, because the back-to-work protocol rightly included some preparation time, we were ultimately three weeks late starting classes. Another part of the deal was adding a week to the December end of the term, so technically we have lost “just” two weeks of class time, but it has still meant a lot of reorganizing and everything has felt rushed. Some administrative deadlines have been pushed back, but not everything, so all in all, it has been a hectic time.

That said, it has felt really good to get back to class. I have noticed other professors commenting on social media that students seem very engaged this term, and I have the same feeling, that in spite of —or perhaps because of —the forces arrayed against us as we all try to carry on being curious, rigorous, and enthusiastic about literature, they are bringing their best selves to the room. Students IRL are always such a different thing than the abstractions or generalizations that often circulate about them. I mean, of course there are exceptions, but especially in upper-level classes that not one of them has to take, they are there for good reasons and working in good faith. While I am sure some of them can feel the temptation of AI’s false promises, I am even more sure that what they really want is authenticity; if anyone wavers or wobbles, it will be (as has always been the case for ‘shortcuts’) because of time, pressure, or anxiety. What I need to do is not police or surveil them more intensively but work explicitly on process, as I have always tried to do, and then do my best to model for them the kind of reading, discussion, and analysis that I believe is intrinsically valuable, not to mention enjoyable!

Noble aspirations, and already ones I have had a few stumbles living up to, but I have resolved not to spend the twilight years of my career in the classroom assuming the worst and chasing demons. After all, the highest incident of (discovered) plagiarism I have ever had was the dismal year that 1 in 5 of my intro students ended up in a hearing (with a near 100% finding that they had committed an offence)—and this was all cut-and-paste plagiarism of the most discouraging kind (much of it on pass-fail exercises, including supposedly personal writing like reading journals! I still can’t get over that!). Yes, AI is a game-changer, but I refuse to play, and I especially refuse to dedicate a single minute of precious class time to “training” students how to use it “responsibly” (as if there is such a way) instead of using our time on what they and I are actually there for.

Ok, enough of that, but clearly it is on my mind, as it is on everybody’s.

So what have we been talking about? I am on a reduced teaching load this term because I am our ‘Undergraduate Coordinator,’ meaning I chair the committee that oversees our undergraduate programs and also serve as Honours advisor. This means my only class this term is 19th-Century Fiction from Austen to Dickens. We started with Persuasion and are now getting well into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which I have not lectured on since the winter term of 2020, the term in which we were all sent home. I actually have found going through my lecture notes for courses from that term quite emotional—next term I am teaching the Brit Lit survey course that I was also teaching that term, and my ‘announcements’ notes for mid-March bring up a lot of difficult memories about the “before” times, before the pandemic began and also before Owen’s death, two long-running catastrophes that tend to bleed together when I cast my mind back.

I have taught the Austen to Dickens class since then, but I assigned Jane Eyre. Much as I love Jane Eyre, I think I enjoy teaching Tenant more: its structure is so smart and complex, and the problems it tackles are, sadly, still so timely. I also appreciate that Anne Brontë’s attention is more clearly on social and systemic problems and solutions, while Jane Eyre is relentlessly personal—which is not to say, of course, that Jane’s story isn’t embedded in wider contexts, but her first-person narration focuses our attention constantly on what it is all like to her, on her individual feelings and values and decisions.

Because it has been so long since I taught Tenant in a “lecture” class (I have assigned it in seminars more recently), my old notes still reflect the more controlled (or controlling) approach I have lately been working self-consciously to change, weaning myself off more scripted lectures and trying instead to steer class discussion at once loosely and effectively enough to still hit all the things I think are important. I did always aim to have discussion, of course! It’s about shifting the balance. This term I am also incorporating some very low-key, low-stakes in-class exercises to make tangible the ways I have always wanted students to be engaging with our topics. For example, yesterday I gave them a handout with two columns, one for 1827 and one for 1821, and I asked them to generate some notes about Helen in both timelines so that we could talk about what we are learning, as we go back in time to her diary, about how she became the isolated, prickly, but still passionate woman we (and our ‘hero’ Gilbert) meet in his framing narrative. They then have the option to do a follow-up response that focuses on a specific topic or example. My impression so far is that this is proving a good way to warm up for discussion as well as a useful way to plant the seeds for future work. And of course it has the non-incidental effect of encouraging attendance. 🙂

One of the biggest tasks I have underway at the moment as Undergraduate Coordinator is drafting a first attempt at what next year’s slate of classes will look like. As I pencil in my own courses (or whatever the Excel equivalent is of that!), I find myself reflecting that I won’t be on the timetable for that many more years. When I’m tired and grumpy, I feel some relief about this, but when I have just been in class and riding that adrenaline rush, I feel wistful, even bereft. What will make up for the loss of that energy, of that sense of purpose, of being on the front lines of something that matters, of being pretty good at something? I know there are other things that matter and I am trying to figure out what else I might be good at. Still, this is something that actually causes me more work-related stress than AI. I will try not to make these posts a dreary refrain about either of these topics! And on that note, we have two more weeks to spend on Tenant and then we are on to David Copperfield, and then, thanks to the added week in December, there will still be time for Cranford: hooray!