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.

Thanks to Dalhousie benefactor George Munro, we have Friday off, which means that I’ve already wrapped up my teaching week. Hooray! Because although we are in the midst of some great books in both classes, I am feeling both tired and distracted, and an extra day or two to get my brain caught up with my schedule is very welcome.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we wrapped up The Hound of the Baskervilles on Monday and started on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd today. I’m not a Sherlockian at all — for me, a little bit of Holmes goes a pretty long way — but I like Hound a lot. There are always students in the class who are very keen on Sherlock Holmes (and, often, on his many reincarnations), so I count on them to fill in extra details about his history and character that aren’t directly presented in our readings. I, on the other hand, can point out the dangling modifiers in Doyle’s otherwise gripping prose: I figure that’s a fair trade. 🙂 More seriously, our discussion tends to focus on the tension between natural and supernatural explanations, which follows nicely on our earlier discussions of the emergence of detective fiction from the gothic tradition and leads nicely into our work on Golden Age mysteries, in which supernatural elements are strictly ruled out by documents like The Detective Decalogue.

I always particularly enjoy the first class on Agatha Christie: I have some fun setting her up as a victim of the modernist preoccupation with difficulty and the related elitism about work that is really popular. It’s not that I actually claim The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a better novel than Ulysses, or even its equal — not in so many words, anyway! But I do try to stir up questions about the idea of “literary merit,” and to historicize some of the presuppositions that often work against genre fiction. I also bring up related points about the literary curriculum (I’m reasonably certain, for instance, that Agatha Christie is never taught in classes on “20th-Century British Literature”) as another way of getting everyone thinking about what books we pay attention to or take seriously, and in what contexts.

In 19th-Century Fiction, we focused today on Chapter 53, “A Rescue and a Catastrophe.” This is such an exciting moment in the novel, not just because it is full of dramatic action, but because it brings so many aspects of the novel into focus, from the real costs and risks of Becky’s climb up the social ladder to the narrator’s role as guide and moralist. “Was she guilty or not?” he asks at the end — and refuses to tell us, an evasion which I think is central to his insistence that the novel is not ultimately about Becky but about us. Chapter 53 also includes this memorable tableau of Becky after her great catastrophe:

She remained for hours after he was gone, the sunshine pouring into the room, and Rebecca sitting alone on the bed’s edge. The drawers were all opened and their contents scattered about — dresses and feathers, scarfs and trinkets, a heap of tumbled vanities lying in a wreck. Her hair was falling over her shoulders; her gown was torn where Rawdon had wrenched the brilliants out of it. She heard him go downstairs a few minutes after he left her, and the door slamming and closing on him. She knew he would never come back. He was gone forever. Would he kill himself? — she thought — not until after he had met Lord Steyne. She thought of her long past life, and all the dismal incidents of it. Ah, how dreary it seemed, how miserable, lonely and profitless! Should she take laudanum, and end it, to have done with all hopes, schemes, debts, and triumphs?

What a moment to incite us to pity! But this too seems to me strategically essential: like all of us, she’s really just another player, after all — just another fool “striving for what is not worth the having.”

I got to do an extra class this morning, making a guest appearance in a colleague’s first-year seminar. I say “got to” because although it was extra work, it was of a particularly pleasing kind, as she asked me in to speak on the role of “Dover Beach” in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. I taught the novel myself an astonishing (to me) nearly 10 years ago, so I had some notes to draw on but, oddly, none specifically on the scene with “Dover Beach,” so that left me some work to do! I am a big admirer of McEwan in general, or at least of his later novels (I have not has as much success with his pre-Atonement works). Atonement remains my favorite, but reviewing Saturday I was impressed by it all over again. In this morning’s class I gave some context for “Dover Beach” then we talked a bit about the poem itself before turning to why it has the effect it does on the various characters, and whether McEwan is using its presence in the novel to assert the value of art against his protagonist’s resolute scientism. Perhaps he’s suggesting that we still need the consolations of poetry, despite our progress in other realms, especially if we (like Arnold’s speaker) don’t have the comforting “girdle” of faith. Rereading the poem in preparation for class, I admit that I felt consoled by it — it made me feel that I need to get more poetry into my own life.

For a short week, it has still been a busy one, then, and next week will be even more so, with paper proposals and midterms coming in on top of the usual class preparation. I also need to finish up the paper I’m writing for the Louisville Conference: I hope to make real progress on that on my day “off” this week. I’m kind of excited about the trip to Louisville, though I dread the travel days, especially with the risk that somewhere along the way everything will get screwed up by winter. Because our panel is on the first day, I’ve allowed a whole extra day so if things go awry with my flight schedules I still have a fighting chance of arriving in time. And if things go smoothly, I can play tourist for a day! Maybe it will even be above freezing there. Any suggestions for things to do in Louisville? I’m thinking about a visit to the Frazier History Museum.