I was struggling over what to write about in this post, which begins the 10th season of my blogging regularly about my teaching. What angle, what big idea, what topic, should I focus on? What do I have to say that’s new? I couldn’t seem to think of anything. And then I remembered that when I started writing these posts, all I aimed to do was report back from inside my classroom, to counter harmful negative myths and stereotypes about what goes on there. It’s partly because I had been doing that for a long time that I began to take up somewhat more general abstract topics — you can see it happening if you scroll through the archive, not all the time, but more and more as the series putters along. But that wasn’t supposed to become an imperative! So without further ado, I’ll just get back to saying a little bit about what went on in my classes this week.

The short version is: not a whole lot, really. After all, it’s only the first week of the fall term, and it wasn’t even a complete week, at that. The most important thing I did, besides distribute the syllabus and try to sort out logistics like class lists and presentation sign-ups, was probably set the tone for what’s to come. Still, in both classes we did move into some content.

I opened Close Reading on Wednesday with a lecture focused primarily on choices: first ours, in the department, to include the course among our suite of requirements; then theirs to take it, which includes their choice to major in English (not something I’ve ever heard of anyone being pressured into); then, moving into the course materials, the choices writers make, from the biggest (to write anything at all) to the smallest (to use this word or that one). My broader pitch is for the connection between aesthetics and ethics; I quote Wayne Booth, which won’t surprise regular visitors here:

[The writer] has made a vast range of choices, deliberately or unconsciously: these characters and their conflicts rather than a host of tempting other possibilities; just which of their experiences to dramatize fully and which merely to ‘tell’ or narrate; which virtues and vices to grant them; which voice to grant the telling to, which metaphors to heighten and which to delete; where to begin and where to end; when to use style indirect libre and when to use actual quotations; which level of style to employ, and where; when to interrupt with commentary revealing the authors’ judgment of events …; and so on and on. It is that chooser who constitutes the full ethos of any work.  It is living with that highly select set of virtues…that constitutes our full experience.

I propose that in our close readings we are trying to understand what that “chooser” is offering us. In the classroom we don’t typically move from understanding and appreciation to judgment, but in our lives, we often do, or should, so I also quote Orwell: “The first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up.  If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be torn down if it surrounds a concentration camp.” It’s harder to know if a work of literature stands up than it is to tell if a wall does, just as it can be much harder to be sure what that literary “wall” surrounds. But I think — I hope — that thinking of their reading as something that at least potentially has ethical implications makes our academic project of becoming good close readers seem more than just an academic exercise.

In today’s tutorials we looked at one writer’s specific choices, comparing Robert Frost’s “In White” to the later, much more famous version, “Design.” You can see the two poems side by side here, if you’re curious. Looking at different versions of the “same” poem is a nice way to provoke discussion about the difference a specific word makes — consider the difference between “dented” and “dimpled” in the first line. (I actually used a reader for this class once that was all poems in various revisions.) It’s not so much about explaining why the later version is better, though in this case it does seem to me conspicuously so. It’s about seeing the significance of the poet’s choices come into focus when you consider what else he might have said. A lot of the changes in the later version really bring out the problem of agency, for instance: if there are “characters,” who is their author? And so on — from the title to the last line, there are lots of things to consider. It’s a small-scale exercise, but I think it was a good way to get us started.

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question,’ Wednesday was for getting organized and today was for establishing some context, meaning I lectured, for the one and only time I will do that in this seminar class. I have found that with students arriving from many different directions, it is helpful if I give everyone a common framework at the outset so I go over some key terms and concepts — some generalizations about the “separate spheres,” the ideal of “the angel in the house,” that sort of thing .Then I explain a bit about women’s education in the period, and about some of the central legal issues with marriage and property — and I also sketch out some of the special challenges of being a woman writer at this time. I try to emphasize that the “woman question” really was a “question,” and that it was posed as well as answered in many different ways, as our readings will amply illustrate.

For Monday we’re reading Frances Power Cobbe’s terrific essay “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors”:

At the head of this paper I have placed the four categories under which persons are now excluded from many civil, and all political rights in England. They were complacently quoted last year by the Times as every way fit and proper exceptions; but yet it has appeared to not a few, that the place assigned to Women amongst them is hardly any longer suitable. To a woman herself who is aware that she has never committed a crime; who fondly believes that she is not an idiot; and who is alas! only too sure she is no longer a minor,—there naturally appears some incongruity in placing her, for such important purposes, in an association wherein otherwise she would scarcely be likely to find herself. But the question for men to answer is: Ought Englishwomen of full age, in the present state of affairs, to be considered as having legally attained majority? or ought they permanently to be dealt with, for all civil and political purposes, as minors? This, we venture to think, is the real point at issue between the friends and opponents of “women’s rights” . . .

For a somewhat different perspective, we’re also reading Margaret Oliphant’s essay “The Condition of Women.” (Both are in Susan Hamilton’s excellent Broadview collection, which some person named “Maitzen” calls “an indispensable volume” in her sincerely enthusiastic blurb for it.) And we’re reading the first chapter of Mill’s The Subjection of Women, which we’ll finish for Wednesday.

Usually now when I teach a seminar class I have students give group presentations, and one of the requirements is that they have to engage the rest of the class in some kind of activity — they aren’t allowed to hold forth on their own for more than 10-15 minutes of their time. I always look forward to the creative things they come up with. In previous years, for example, I have played “Who Wants to be a Pre-Raphaelite” and done a “Choose Your Own Adventure in Wildfell Hall” in which we tried to extricate Helen from her bad marriage without violating convention, law, or her character as we understood it. But things don’t have to be so elaborate: I have also had really successful presentations that relied on more conventional but very valuable things like break-out discussion groups that reported back on key themes or passages. The first presentation for this term will be next Friday, so that guarantees me one class where I am not in charge. Hooray! Because I was reminded at the end of my third class hour today that running the show — whether lecturing or coordinating discussion — is pretty tiring.

OK, there we go. Nothing fancy, just another report from the field. Yet, having said that, I continue to believe that in addition to helping me be a more self-conscious and accountable teacher, these posts do, in their own small way, serve a larger purpose.

It happens so gradually at first: there’s a slight chill in the evening air, the sky is a little darker on my morning run, the leaves look just a little less green. Then a faint hum begins on campus: more people are in their offices, the sidewalks are a bit more crowded, signs of arrivals and departures — abandoned sofas and mattresses, extra trash bags, boxes for recycling — appear in the neighborhood. It’s at once depressing and enlivening: summer is over, and soon we’ll be back at school.

It’s odd to reflect that since I started kindergarten in 1972 there has been only one September that wasn’t a back-to-school season for me: that was the fall of 1985, during my “gap year,” when I was working full time in preparation for the 6-month trip to Europe I took with my sister. ‘Imagine,’ I sometimes say to my students now, ‘that this isn’t just a phase of your life, but your whole life.’ The routine has its comforts, especially because the more years you go through it, the more you’re aware of its cyclical rhythms: yes, it’s about to get very busy, and stay that way for four months, but then it will quiet down before starting up again, and so on, over and over. But it also starts to remind you, a bit painfully, of the passage of time, especially as the gap widens between you and the endlessly young students who surround you. (This is a phenomenon I call “reverse Peter Pan syndrome.”)

So, what will I be busy with this term? I have just two classes, both ones I usually enjoy teaching very much and both of which I haven’t taught since 2011-12. The first is English 3000, Close Reading, which is part of our suite of required classes for majors and honours students. They don’t have to take English 3000 in particular: they have to chose one of our ‘theory and methods’ courses, which also include The History of Criticism and Contemporary Critical Theory. The first time I taught English 3000, in 2003, that wasn’t the case: then, it was one of two classes we’d introduced that were to be core requirements for every student in our program (the other was a survey, Literary Landmarks). Then, it had an enrollment of 120; this year, it is capped at 60 and right now has 42 students in it — so, quite a different undertaking. Still, my approach to the class was shaped by thinking about it as something that should be as useful and as engaging as possible to every English student — to every reader, in fact. It is actually the most conceptually interesting class I’ve ever developed (for me, at least) because it isn’t organized around content, the way my classes usually are, but around a method, a habit, a practice.

In addition to working on how to read attentively (including learning precise vocabulary for explaining what we read), I try to focus our attention on why it matters to read carefully, not just for class but for life. In working out my approach, I drew especially on Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep and on the ways he links aesthetics to ethics. My hope is that this connection motivates students to see our work, not as an intellectual parlor game, but as something with vital implications for living an examined life. We’ll be reading a selection of poetry and short fiction, and then really digging into Middlemarch and The Remains of the Day. The juxtaposition of these two very different novels has proven extremely fruitful in past iterations of the course. There is always some grumbling about Middlemarch (“it’s TOO LONG to read in a one-term course,” a student once exclaimed in her course evaluation — which amuses me because of course I always teach it in one-term courses, which are all we offer now, and usually with four other fairly long books). My justification is that if we’re going to pay really close attention to a novel, it should be a novel that I am confident will reward that attention. And we take five whole weeks to read it, so we don’t exactly rush through it.

My other fall class is an upper-level seminar, The Victorian ‘Woman Question.’ It has 23 students in it, which is actually pretty big for a seminar — it’s going to be a tight fit, for instance, getting in all the student presentations. But if past years are any indication, the discussion should be fairly robust. I’ve done this class with an exclusive focus on fiction, but this year I’m doing my more standard mix of genres. We’ll start with some non-fiction, including Mill’s The Subjection of Women and essays by Frances Power Cobbe and Margaret Oliphant (included in Susan Hamilton’s excellent Broadview anthology Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors), then we’ll read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Mill on the Floss, Aurora Leigh (all of it, hooray!), The Odd Women, and an array of other short poems and stories. From the outset I emphasize that there wasn’t just one ‘question’ about women’s roles, and there certainly, too, wasn’t just one ‘answer.’ I provide some historical context at the outset, including information about women’s legal, economic, political, and educational realities, and then we approach each of our readings to see what terms it sets for the debate: how it poses and answers the ‘woman question.’

Because these are relatively small, relatively advanced classes that I’ve taught before, this isn’t going to be a particularly heavy teaching term for me. I realize how lucky I am in that respect. That said, we used to teach 5 courses a year instead of the current 4, and with all the retirements in the department (and no replacements), we may have to reconsider. I wasn’t in favor of the change when it happened — of course I appreciate the term being less hectic, with more time for other work, but I miss the greater variety we offered as well as the smaller classes, and I worry that we aren’t serving our students as well as we could. I expect, at the very least, that we’re going to have to have some hard conversations about curriculum and priorities this fall: you just can’t do the same things with a department of 14 that you can with one of 22. It’s good in some ways to reconsider curriculum, of course (though we’ve been doing it endlessly, really — I recently recycled a three-inch thick folder of old discussion papers dating back to 1995) but it would be nice to focus on pedagogical principles more and crisis management less.

I had hoped that my promotion case would be settled before I went back to teaching. Last term was quite difficult for me, as I was often distracted and distressed by the way things were unfolding. I did find that classroom time helped a lot, though: not only did it force me out of my own head but it reminded me that I do like my work and that I am good at (at least some parts of) it. I’m sure the same will be true this term. The harder part is dealing with colleagues whose decisions or comments seemed to me unfair or inaccurate: the whole “it’s not personal” line only works when you’re the one saying it, and even then it’s usually just an attempt to deflect your own guilt. Well, I’m pretty sure I can manage polite now, so that’s progress. I hope that the process won’t take much longer, though according to the regulations it could conceivably be another four months before I know how the story ends — yikes. Uncertainty does not bring out the best in me (as my family could certainly confirm).

However things turn out institutionally, I have had a summer of reading and writing that was, by my own standards, very productive. More about that in my next post! And it’s really not quite fall yet. I plan to wander through the Public Gardens today, for example, and enjoy the dahlias. Their brilliant colors will inoculate me against despair at the thought that with fall on its way, winter is, inevitably, not that far behind.

I’ve been roughing out schedules for my 2016-17 courses — even the winter term ones, because before I can order books for them I need some idea of how the readings will fit in. As I consider how best to allocate class time, especially for my first-year class, I’ve also been thinking about a very interesting conversation I had recently with a former student who now works in a Dalhousie office concerned, among other things, with understanding student retention.

My own anecdotal experience, which seems to be supported by data, is that a crucial factor in student engagement (which is key, in turn, to retention) is developing relationships — with other students, but also, crucially, with faculty. These can be hard to establish, especially in larger classes, which is why I try so hard to encourage students to come and see me one-on-one. I have often felt that the biggest difference I make is to students who actually take me up on my offer (as this student had). Not only can a one-on-one conference really help with the student’s understanding of course material or assignments, but it also — not always, but often — creates a stronger sense of commitment and community, a sense that we are both in this together. Some of that is just because it’s a chance for us to get to know each other a bit. Every time a student comes to my office, I open by asking them a bit about themselves, because this helps me understand where they are and what they need most for my course, sure, but also because I’m genuinely interested — I like getting a sense of who they are as people, not just as students. (I don’t mean I don’t always think of students as people, of course! Just that there are ways in which strictly teacher-student interactions, often of necessity, can be limited to practicalities.)

From our conversation, it was clear that our office meetings had been important to this former student, which was really good to know. (It was also very nice to hear ways in which our course materials had stayed with him in meaningful ways, including the pier glass passage from Middlemarch, which he said often occurred to him when he was thinking about how best to resolve a problem or answer a question.) In his work on retention, he told me that they talk a lot about identifying “high impact practices”: things professors can do that make a difference. Personal conferences, we agreed, are one such practice.

I have always believed in the value of the one-on-one meeting, so much so that in some small classes, I have made them mandatory, usually as early in the term as possible so that they break the ice in the class itself as well as making it more likely that students will come back on their own when they need help. I particularly like doing this with first-year students, who are usually new on campus and somewhat overwhelmed by the size and complexity of it. I would like to do that this year! But I will have 90 students in Pulp Fiction: even if I gave each of them only 10 minutes (hardly enough for much getting-to-know-you talk), there’s no way I can set aside that many hours in a time frame that would make it meaningful — keeping in mind, too, that the students themselves have very full schedules so it’s not like I can just pick three days and sit with my door open expecting them to file in.

I wonder what I could do instead. I will have scheduled office hours, of course, and as always will be available then and by appointment and (as I always advertise) any time my door is open — which, traditionally, has been almost all the time I’m on campus but not in actually class or meetings. Students only rarely take advantage of the opportunity to see me personally, though, and just waiting and hoping to see them isn’t the point. I could split the meetings up with the two teaching assistants I will have for the course — but their available hours are carefully (and rightly) limited by their contracts, and they also (wrongly) don’t usually have dedicated office space of their own, so committing them to several hours of meetings doesn’t seem fair. I could require email introductions from everyone and undertake to reply — but would that have the desired effect? It might also take nearly as long as meeting in person, with only the slight advantage that I could do my replies at any time. (Evenings and weekends, anyone?)

Ideas for “high impact practices” that would work for 90 students (and be feasible for me)? The goal would be to give them a genuine sense of connection to me as well as to the course.

The painting is Richard Redgrave’s “The Poor Teacher,” which is actually a very accurate depiction of me waiting forlornly for a student to come to my office hours.

Classes ended last Wednesday, and I held my first final exam at 8:30 the following Saturday morning. That seemed hasty to me! Students have a lot going on at the end of term, and two days isn’t much time for them finish other assignments, regroup, and rest up a bit. On the bright side (for me, at least) I don’t have another exam until next Tuesday, so this has given me plenty of time to get that first batch graded. Since the only thing I have left to do for my other exam is copy it, I have a nice little window to sort out my own end-of-term mess and start organizing — literally and mentally — for my summer reading and writing projects. I spent some cheerful time this afternoon filing papers, reorganizing my bookshelves, and reflecting on the year that was.

It was kind of an odd teaching term for me, because I was frequently quite distracted about other work-related business, to an extent that is unprecedented for me. It’s not that I was busier this term than I have been before: in fact, in some ways this was quite a light term for me. It’s just that the business I was involved in was quite fraught, and the stress it caused affected me more than I expected. My concentration was particularly bad, which showed up in my proofreading: there were mistakes in some of my handouts, for instance, and for the first time I can remember I had to make a correction to an exam question during the exam — little things of that sort that I am not usually prone to. I was having trouble sleeping, too, which didn’t help.  I think nonetheless my classes went fine overall, and I was especially pleased as we neared the end of term to find I was comfortable keeping my notes in hand but not right in view, as discussion was steady and I didn’t need a script to keep things moving or focused. There’s something to be said for experience!

Often at the end of term I am full of resolutions about things I will do differently next time. One thing I am almost certain I’m going to change is my use of reading journals in the 19thC Fiction course. I’ve grumbled here before (and more than once on Twitter) about my difficulties making these work quite the way I want: my idea is to coax students into valuing the ongoing process of reading, as well as to give them low-stakes practice with critical writing. Despite my attempts to micromanage the process further, though, I still find that a lot of students push their journals until the last minute, so they get little benefit from what their choices have basically converted into busy-work. The students who do a really steady job of it are often the students who would be keeping up with the reading and seeking advice on writing in any case. It’s true that it’s not particularly difficult for me to keep tabs on this work (or at least it hasn’t been with Blackboard, though who knows what wrinkles our new LMS might introduce), but I will either revamp the structure next time or abandon it and just redistribute the marks across other assignments. I have time to think about this as I’m not teaching 19thC Fiction again until January.

My only other real take-away from this year’s teaching is that I’m not in any hurry to teach another graduate seminar. It had been a few years since my last one, and though I had a lovely group of keen, cheerful students this time, I still found myself puzzling over the purpose of the whole exercise, and especially over how to approach it given my own alienation from standard kinds of specialist research. It doesn’t help that the dispersal of the undergraduate curriculum means that the graduate students themselves often arrive in these seminars as relative beginners: add unfamiliarity with the primary materials and their basic contexts to the challenge of making sense of complex critical and theoretical arguments about them and you risk running everyone into a frustrating muddle. Undergraduate teaching just seems a much more straightforward business to me right now.

As for next year, I’m glad to be taking a break from the Mystery and Detective Fiction class: I always enjoy it, but I’ve taught it almost every year since 2003: though I’ve changed around the book list pretty often, it still feels a bit repetitive to me at this point. The good side of this is that I feel well prepared for every discussion — but that in itself becomes something of a risk, as it means I get tempted not to refresh or rethink or even (occasionally) reread. What will I be teaching? In addition to the 19thC Fiction (Dickens to Hardy version), I get to teach Close Reading: it’s a class I put a great deal of work into conceptually when I first offered it, and I think the results are more interesting than you might expect from its generic title. I’m doing an upper-level seminar on the Victorian ‘Woman Question,’ another one that’s in my regular rotation but which I haven’t done for a while. And in the winter term I’m doing our first-year “pulp fiction” class, which I’ve already written about here a couple of times. Because it’s new for me, this is the one that I expect to do the most work on over the summer: as well as choosing my readings (definitely still a work in progress), I need to decide how to frame it for the students — and because I’ll be teaching in at least two genres I haven’t taught before (Westerns and romances), there’s lots of reading to be done in both primary and secondary materials. I like that work of exploration and then synthesis: I’m looking forward to it! In fact, it’s already begun: I’ve just finished reading Sarah Wendell’s Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels, and once I wrap things up here I’m off to the library to pick up Louis L’Amour’s Hondo.

When it’s quiet over here at Novel Readings, that’s generally a sign that I’m busy elsewhere, and that is more or less what’s been up this week. After I got back from Louisville, I had some catching up to do, especially with midterms that needed to get graded so we could all move on to the next thing. Don’t you find, too, that a break in routine throws you off when you get back? I felt really off my teaching game last week, though I hope it didn’t show too badly in the classroom. There are non-teaching things that have also been taking my attention away from teaching more than is usual during the term: our workload is usually described as 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% administration, but for me the distribution during a teaching term tends to be closer to 60-20-20, with the summer months bringing things back into alignment. For various reasons the balance has been different for me this year — not, perhaps, officially, but at least in where my attention is. So I don’t think I’ve been at my best in class.

Still, we are moving along. In Mystery & Detective Fiction we’ve wrapped up our discussions of The Big Sleep, and in 19th-Century Fiction today was our last day on Jane Eyre. Next week we start Mary Barton, and I’m looking forward to it partly because it’s not a novel that’s well known, in itself or through adaptations. I mentioned before the challenge of teaching a book as beloved as Pride and Prejudice; Jane Eyre isn’t quite as much of a general favorite, but it definitely still a personal favorite for many students — which, again, is great in some ways but occasionally challenging. I don’t think anyone has any preconceptions or cherished readings of Mary Barton (well, except me, and that kind of goes with the territory!). I began my own rereading of it while the students were writing their Jane Eyre “mini-midterm” today, and I felt a momentary pang that I’d chosen it over North and South (my usual Gaskell), but then I started to get drawn into both its personal stories and its class politics. It isn’t as neat and artful as North and South, but that very untidiness can be something of an advantage for discussion.

I’ve been doing some reading outside of school, but the two books I’ve finished are both ones I’m reviewing elsewhere, so I didn’t want to blog about them. (In case you’re interested, they are Dan Vyleta’s Smoke and Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon; details about the reviews will be forthcoming if all goes well.) I guess if you want some nice fresh book writing you’ll have to go to Open Letters instead, where the March issue — our 9th anniversary issue — is full of good things, from Sam’s review of A. O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism to Steve’s happy appreciation of a gorgeous new book on frogs. But come back soon! Because I’ve got Valdez is Coming to read this weekend, and I promise to post about it.