It has been a long time since I worked through Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë with a class. In fact, the last time I did so was the first year I began this blog series, in the fall term of 2007! In the intervening years, when I have put in to teach a graduate seminar (which is what Victorian Women Writers used to exclusively be) it has been one focused just on George Eliot—which is the course I will be revising next year for this new undergraduate / graduate format.

It is interesting reading through that old post: in its broad outlines, it describes pretty much exactly the same topics we’ve been covering. It is quite broad, and that class is so long ago that I really don’t recall how closely our specific discussions matched what we have been talking about this year. It seems as if we have ranged more widely—but we probably touched on a lot of things then too that aren’t captured in that summary. My sense is that this time around we are paying more attention to the variety of genres and layers in Gaskell’s text, to things like her reliance on extensive quotations from Brontë’s letters, for example, which, as we talked about today, don’t always self-evidently support the characterization of Brontë that Gaskell sets up. For one thing, the Brontë of the letters is bolder, friendlier, and funnier than the timid, shy, sickly little person Gaskell usually shows us in her own narrative. Today we talked about (among other things) what nature means, to Brontë and in Gaskell’s story of her and her family, as in moments like this, in one of Brontë’s letters to a friend:

For my part, I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry-leave, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon.

Copying out that passage, I am struck by its power just as a bit of prose: how delicately infused it is with both the beauty of the moors and the pathos of Charlotte’s grief.

Read right after Oliphant’s Autobiography, with its heartbroken lamentations for her lost children, Brontë’s life story feels like an extension of those lessons in loss, though Oliphant’s narrative itself is fragmented, broken into pieces by each new blow, while Gaskell carries us through the relentless sequence of deaths at Haworth with her own storyteller’s skill. And after they are all gone, each with an ending portrayed as intensely, almost unbelievably, characteristic—Emily fiercely resisting death to the very last, Anne leaving “calmly and without a sigh”—Charlotte (like Oliphant) is left alone with her writing:

She went on with her work steadily. But it was dreary to write without anyone to listen to the progress of her tale,—to find fault or to sympathize,—while pacing the length of the parlour in the evenings, as in the days that were no more. Three sisters had done this,—then two, the other sister dropping off from the walk,—and now one was left desolate, to listen for echoing steps that never came,—and to hear the wind sobbing at the windows, with an almost articulate sound.

“No one on earth,” Gaskell observes, “can even imagine what those hours were to her.” Maybe, but also, maybe not, as there is much that will be sadly familiar about that desolation to anyone who also grieves “the days that are no more.” Honestly, I think it will be a relief, not just to me but to the class, to move on to Villette next week. Not that Villette is a joyful romp! But at least it puts us back in the more familiar analytical territory of fiction, and if we like we can choose to believe that it has a happy ending: as Brontë says, “let sunny imaginations hope”!

We started with Sherlock Holmes in Mystery & Detective Fiction this week. I’m not the world’s biggest Holmes enthusiast, but as I have documented here often enough over the years, I greatly appreciate The Hound of the Baskervilles, which we will get to on Wednesday. Today was “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” with its famous “interpret everything about a man from his hat” set piece, and “A Scandal in Bohemia,” with Irene Adler (“To Sherlock Holmes, she was always the woman”). These are good ones: I enjoy them. I think the class is going fine so far: it ought to be, considering how often I’ve taught it now! One thing I’m noticing is spotty attendance. It isn’t making me rethink my long-ago decision not to give grades for attendance, but it gives me food for thought in other ways, as this seems to be a trend in this class in recent years. Perhaps it’s because the course is an elective for pretty much everyone taking it, so they give it lower priority than their other obligations? Is it that students who don’t take a lot of English classes assume the pertinent course content is exclusively in the “textbooks” (what we call the “readings”!) and don’t expect our class time to offer much “value added”? I know that in some subjects lectures often do simply reiterate content in that way, but of course I’m not standing there rehearsing the plot of The Moonstone. Anyway, I try not to take it personally but it rather baffles me: what is the point in signing up to “take” a class but then not really “taking” it? Sure, you can read on your own (or, sigh, just search online summaries and call that “keeping up”), but unless all you are after is the course credit, aren’t you skipping the good part, not to mention the part you are actually paying for?

Speaking of taking classes, there’s one more class in my weekly schedule now: it’s the online one I am taking myself, Introductory Watercolour Painting. We met (via Zoom) for the first time last week and I have been diligently practicing colour gradients and one- and two-stroke leaves for my homework. Also (keener that I am!) I looked ahead a bit in our Brightspace site (yes, I have to use Brightspace now as a student as well as an instructor) and saw some examples of “loose floral wreaths,” which are on our lesson plan for this week, and I couldn’t resist giving it a try. This will be my “before” example, for comparison with the one(s) I make after I learn more about how to make the flowers and leaves fuller and looser, and also more layered and translucent, like the models.

I want to get back in the habit of low-fuss but (potentially, for me) high yield posting about my teaching this term. So without further ado, here’s what’s up this week.

In my Victorian Women Writers seminar, we are discussing Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography. When I was drawing up the syllabus for this version of the course, I included this book without much reflection, as it has always been a staple of the reading list. Preparing for class over the past few days has been a bit rough, though, as the last time I had actually read it was soon after Owen’s death, and Oliphant’s outpourings of grief about the loss of her “dear bright child” Maggie and then her sons Tiddy and Cecco remain unhappily resonant. Students have already commented in class that these are the most compelling sections of the autobiography, sometimes picking out exactly the passages that I quoted in my post about it. I am pretty good at compartmentalizing, and of course it would not be appropriate for me to say in class “yes, that’s exactly how I felt and thought after losing my own beloved child,” so I have managed to keep my own personal feelings in check in that context, but it is definitely a harder job doing that than it was when my relationship to her grief was purely theoretical or vicarious.

It’s such an odd and interesting memoir in so many ways. I’ve always been particularly struck by the conspicuous tension in it between two kinds of stories, one a fairly conventional account of Oliphant’s life and her experiences as a highly prolific writer, the other an intensely personal outpouring of her most private feelings. Her comments about her writing life themselves often signal a further tension between her identity as an “ordinary” woman (a point she makes repeatedly, and perhaps strategically) and her identity as a woman writer and thus a kind of anomaly. They are also interesting for her frequent comparisons of herself with other, more famous or highly praised, writers, especially George Eliot: she often tries to shrug off her sense of inferiority, or to excuse or justify her “lesser” standing on the grounds that she only ever wrote because she liked to and because she needed the money, disavowing ambition or serious literary aspirations—”I am afraid I can’t take the books au grand sérieux,” she says at one point, calling them “my perfectly artless art”—but it’s also clear that she feels both defensive and envious of the writers with higher reputations, making her self-deprecation seem disingenuous.

Critics have often analyzed the fragments and contradictions of the Autobiography as meaningful aspects of its literary form, reflecting the paradoxes and contradictions of Oliphant’s life and, more broadly, of the situation of every Victorian woman writer. That seems reasonable in a way, but Oliphant left her text unfinished, so the fragments are not themselves deliberate formal choices—we are actually reading the raw material of what for all we know might have been a very different, more integrated or unified memoir. This is not to say that this unity would not have come at a cost, particularly of authenticity. I found myself thinking as I was rereading our current installment this morning about the genre of the “grief memoir,” which seems from what I know of it to lean pretty hard into “a journey of discovery / recovery” as its narrative arc, ending with some version of acceptance. Of course that may be true to the authors’ experiences, but it’s hard not to suspect it is also more marketable than the devastating non-ending Oliphant’s memoir offers: “And now here I am all alone. I cannot write any more.” Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, also stops rather than concluding: “And by now I’ve stopped making these notes.”

In Mystery & Detective Fiction, we have begun our work on The Moonstone. I usually really enjoy teaching this novel as I know it well enough now and am confident enough in my own ideas about it that, while I do always reread it and update my notes, I can lead a fairly fluid discussion without worrying that we won’t get where I want us to go. Tomorrow is mostly “talk about Betteredge” day: I’ll start by just gathering up observations about what kind of fellow he is, considering both the things he explicitly says and how he says them—which is at least as important, given the novel’s emphasis on first-person testimony and the way eye-witnesses see according to their assumptions and prejudices. We can build out from there into a sense of the novel’s setting: what kind of world does Betteredge serve, what are the threats to or problems with that world, who in the novel begins to counter his point of view, and so on, which should lead us into Sergeant Cuff and what he brings to the investigation—and then the sources of his failures to solve the crime.

As my teaching posts over the year repeatedly remark, the first part of term is always a bit chaotic as we adjust and class lists are in flux and so on. By the end of this, our second week of classes, we should all have settled into more of a routine, although this is also the point at which the workload picks up as assignments and deadlines begin to arrive. The biggest change I’m noticing this term so far is the physical toll class meetings take on me, something that was already becoming apparent to me last term. I’m just more tired than I used to be when the session is done. It takes a lot of energy to keep the attention of a room full of people and, especially, to give them my full attention so that our back-and-forth is always clear and meaningful. You never know what someone who puts their hand up is going to say, and you are constantly figuring out how best to reply to it, which is precisely what I enjoy about teaching, because it means it is never truly repetitive, but it is also what makes it hard work. (Yes, mental effort is real work too!) And in lecture classes I pace around a fair amount once we get into discussion. When I get back to my office after class I’m not good for much else for a while—this in spite of my increased diligence about going to the gym. It’s a different kind of exertion, I guess.

The broader context of my teaching term is not very encouraging: budget cuts, a hiring freeze, ongoing pressure to do more with less, and over it all the worry that if we can’t somehow get in its way, generative AI is going to be allowed, even encouraged, to overwhelm us (meaning both professors and students). I find I don’t think or care much about any of this when I’m actually in the classroom. Plenty of students still seem pretty engaged, eager to read and ready to talk. As long as they keep on showing up in that spirit, I’m going to keep doing my best for them.

I’ve always loved these lines from Tennyson’s The Princess:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

All those soft sounds: how gentle and enticing! But unfortunately they are on my mind right now because I’ve been feeling so overwhelmed with the start of term: it’s my head that seems full of buzzing bees, and that is not so pleasant.

The start of term is always chaotic, and really overall things are going fine, I think. Maybe it’s age that makes me more aware, in a worried sort of way, of just how many moving parts there are, of how many balls I have to keep in the air at all times just to keep myself and my students on track. I used to trust myself to do it all, but these days my executive function and memory just aren’t what they used to be. Announcements and assignments, lecture notes and handouts, attendance lists and spreadsheets, slides and quizzes and worksheets—oh my!

Actually, thinking about it now, maybe there are more moving parts than there used to be. Once upon a time we didn’t use an LMS, for example, and while there’s no doubt that Brightspace (formerly Blackboard formerly Web CT formerly DIY websites) is a useful back-up system for in-person courses—a storage facility available to your students 24/7 so they can never not locate their syllabus!—it’s also the case that expectations have gone up considerably around our use of them (and students’ reliance on them). Now I post my PPT slides on Brightspace after class, for example, something that requires multiple additional steps, assuming I remember to do it in the first place. (I never used to use PowerPoint, either, and I blame it and Brightspace, which both require incessant mousing, for my now chronic shoulder pain.) I used to give quizzes and midterms in class; now, they are all taken in Brightspace—but that too means many more steps than devising the questions and making copies, setting up all the many features just right and entering the questions in the optimal way. When we were all online, I posted weekly announcements for my classes: it turns out students really appreciated these, so I’ve kept doing them, but they take me (no kidding) hours to compose, both to make sure they are optimally clear and useful and because heaven forbid there’s a mistake in one, like a wrong deadline, that gets fixed in their minds or calendars in spite of any subsequent efforts to correct it! Recently, too, in a departmental discussion around class size and workload, one of my colleagues pointed out ruefully that “there didn’t used to be email” and that is such a good point, especially as our class sizes have gone up even as we became not just teachers but customer service representatives! (And yet somehow, without an LMS and without Outlook and without PowerPoint, we managed to do our jobs. Imagine that. Did we do a worse job? Maybe in some respects—accessibility seems like a key point here—but I really do wonder how much all of this apparatus actually helps, rather than hinders, us in our core mission.)

How are things going otherwise in my classes? So far 19th-Century Fiction seems great (I hope it’s not just me who thinks so!). It’s the Austen to Dickens version this term, and I took the risk of assigning Pride and Prejudice, which as regular readers will know I sometimes shy away from, not because I don’t love it but because it’s too popular! It is so delightful, though, and I figured that given <waves hand around> the state of everything, personally and generally, there couldn’t be such a thing as too much enthusiasm. Good call, is my current impression. There is so much positive energy in the room! Last year in Dickens to Hardy it sometimes seemed like such a struggle, despite there being so many keen students in the class; and it was so discouraging to watch attendance dwindle, especially during our time on Middlemarch, which I had been so looking forward to. I really hope we can sustain the current level of engagement when we move on to Jane Eyre next week. It can be self-fulfilling: if it’s fun to come to class, people keep coming. So that’s my goal!

My other class this term is a section of intro, once again the prosaically-named “Literature: How It Works.” But this time it’s in person, because I was so disheartened by the end of last year’s online version that I couldn’t face doing it that way again. I spent a lot of time this summer thinking about how to revamp my specifications grading model to incorporate in-person components. I feel a bit guilty about the amount of paper I’m using up as a result, but I am hopeful that it will pay off in terms of attendance and engagement and in building skills and instilling confidence so that they realize they don’t need to look everything up online but can learn to do the work of literary analysis themselves and get more out of it in the process. We’ll see! I always start with poetry, and we’ve done some bangers already, including Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” and “The Grauballe Man”; “My Last Duchess”; “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”; and today, “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Judging from our class discussions so far, it does seem to me that not everyone (ahem) is actually doing the reading before class, something I hope the in-class exercises will encourage them to do more consistently. I wonder if the need to do that advance work seems less pressing when it’s “just one poem,” and so it gets shunted aside for “harder” homework.  There are definitely hands going up when I pose questions, though, and it’s early yet: my job here is to make it seem necessary to come prepared but also safe to try out preliminary or uncertain ideas, since so much of the real teaching and learning happens in those exchanges.

It was a bit of a rough summer, so in some ways I welcome the demands and distractions of the term. As it all settles into routine, the buzzing will hopefully subside into a manageable murmur. I have some other things on the go as well, most immediately a review of David Bergen’s Away from the Dead for the Literary Review of Canada—it’s my first time writing for them, so I’d like to do a good job! I also spent a couple of enjoyable hours recently in interviews with some folks who are putting together a documentary on Wilkie Collins for the CBC show Ideas. I’m just one of several interviewees, so I don’t know how much of me you’ll actually hear when it airs, which will be sometime early in 2024, in honor of his bicentenary. I don’t seem to be reading much (except for work, of course) but when I am, it’s either Loretta Chase’s Carsington series for relaxation (Mr. Impossible is still my favorite!) or Claudia Piñeiro’s A Little Luck, which seems likely to be every bit as good as Betty Boo. Maybe this weekend I can settle down enough to finish it, and then write it up properly here, the way a real book blogger should!

It was a strange teaching term, at times hard, awkward, and demoralizing, but also at times invigorating, engaging, even restorative. This is true of every term, I suppose, but I really felt this emotional ebb and flow this time, probably because I am still grappling with what it means to carry on with my “normal” life after Owen’s death: I can’t really take any aspect of it for granted, and the more normal things seem in the moment the more vertiginous the return to my new normal. I am also just less stable myself, more susceptible or less resilient, meaning that while the highs are welcome, the lows can drop me, however unreasonably, into the Slough of Despond. I’ve had waves of plagiarism before, for example, but never before have they reduced me to tears or made me wonder how much longer I can keep doing this work.

Some of the challenges of the term (and the year), though, are not specific to me and my grieving. Every academic I talk to is dealing with high absenteeism, unusually uneven levels of student engagement, overwhelming demand for accommodations and support services, and confusion around expectations about what is reasonable, appropriate, possible, responsible—on both sides, for students (from us) and also for us (from students). The consensus seems to be that we are in a transitional period, for better and for worse. Because of the disruptions of COVID, our current student cohorts have had a different experience of both high school and university than earlier generations. One consequence seems to be that they do not recognize or understand (or, arguably, accept) the intrinsic value of showing up to class, of being present for it, tending (not universally of course) to equate “taking the course” with completing the required assignments. While of course we all want our assignments to matter, I don’t think I’m alone in believing that they are not the point of a course and that they are far from the most (or at least not the only) meaningful modes of engagement with the course material, at least not in an English course. The work we do collectively in the classroom is always going to range more widely and offer more ways to think, more questions to answer, more practice at thinking and answering questions well, than any individual component, however ingeniously devised.

I have always worried that students who attend irregularly are missing out on that broader learning experience, and also that sporadic attendance can become a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you just show up occasionally, you might not recognize the value of what we are doing or know how to join in to get the most out of it. The most obvious policy response is to require attendance, and I do believe in a version of “if you build it, they will come”—if you mandate it, they will (maybe, eventually, hopefully!) start to see the value of it. Mandatory attendance creates its own problems, though, from the administrative burden of recording it (especially with large classes) to the difficulty of having and applying fair policies that take accessibility and other issues into account and don’t lead to constant wrangling over what counts as a “legitimate” absence. For many years now I have not required or graded attendance, though I do always take attendance, so that I have some sense of who is or isn’t showing up and can reach out to anyone who seems like they might be in trouble. Before COVID, I also experimented with a range of different in-class exercises for credit, using them both for low-stakes practice at key course objectives and to “incentivize” being present. I think this is the approach I will go back to next year.

Another reason to return to more in-class work is the relentless encroachment of AI. Other people have written well about what it means for those of us whose life’s work is helping students learn to read, think, and write better, and about what we can and can’t, should and shouldn’t, do in response. (See this thoughtful article in Public Books, for example.) My main practical and pedagogical concern is the way its ready availability serves the unfortunately widespread but hopelessly misguided idea that the point is to generate X number of units of “writing” in order to get a course credit, not to learn the things the writing expresses, to go through the mental and intellectual experience of grappling with questions and thinking through answers, of weighing evidence and arguments and reaching conclusions you, personally, understand and believe in. It has always been possible to substitute other people’s writing for your own, and in fact the majority of the plagiarism cases I submitted this term were of the old-fashioned “copied from the internet” kind. Students in these cases sometimes seemed surprised when I emphasized in my statements that the words and ideas they had used came from other actual people, not from some abstract entity called “the internet”—when you Google something, what comes up is (or was!) the product of someone else’s effort to do what you’ve been asked to do. AI is a stranger kind of thing: nobody “knows” what the bot generates. At the moment students seem naïve about the bot’s capacity in ways that help us spot its presence and intervene: “AI wouldn’t make this kind of mistake,” a student in a recent hearing insisted, but in fact the bot makes a lot of mistakes—or, to put it more accurately, it generates a lot of nonsense. I’ve been running tests on ChatGPT and it has offered up some remarkable howlers, including this hilarious answer to a prompt asking it if the narrator of Middlemarch is judgmental about Celia and to give a specific example from the novel (this seems to be a good strategy, btw, to expose its limitations):

Actually, I kind of love the idea that the novel’s narrator “would rather have tea than everything else in the world” (me too!)—but of course this is absolutely not a passage from the novel; it’s just a jumble of nonsense. Students are already willing to put in a remarkable (to me) amount of effort “hiding” or “fixing” material they have copied from other sources, to conceal their reliance on it, but I doubt most of them are up to the task of getting crap like this into passable form. Mind you, to know it’s crap, they would need at least some familiarity with the novel: what shocked me with the ChatGPT cases I had this term was that they included quotations that were simply not in the actual assigned text, and the students didn’t even notice. As students get more familiar with the bot’s limitations, they may (may!) find it is actually less work (and less risk) to just do the reading and assignment themselves.

But of course the real answer to this kind of subversion of our teaching and learning goals is to convince students of the value of the work itself. Lots of folks giving advice about ChatGPT emphasize this. I couldn’t agree more, but I think it’s naive on their part to just say this, as if, however good our intentions, our circumstances don’t militate against it. Good writing pedagogy alone, without even worrying about plagiarism, ought to be reason enough for small class sizes that would enable real working relationships between professors and students, that would make process work (outlines, drafts, revisions, portfolios) feasible and meaningful. For the last few years my first-year writing classes have had 120 students in them (up from 90, which was up from a longstanding norm of 55). One good result of some otherwise very unfortunate budgeting issues in our department may be that these caps come back down, maybe even by half. That’s still a far cry from the caps of 17 in the writing seminars at Cornell where I trained, but a lot of things are possible with 60 students that aren’t with 120—and I don’t just mean logistically, although that matters too. With 60 students you can see all of their faces and learn all of their names! If I’m going to convince at least most of them (some of them will never believe this, or care about this) that reading and writing well is exciting and important, that poems and stories are worth their time, that Virginia Woolf is worth their attention (it was crushing how many students copied and pasted material for their journals and discussion posts about “The Death of the Moth”) then making our classrooms even a little bit more personal is surely an essential first step.

This post has already gotten pretty long and I haven’t said anything very specific about my actual classes this term! I think that reflects the kind of term it was for me: one in which big questions about the job, about pedagogy, about how and why to do all of this really dominated. Still, for my own sake I think it’s also important for me to note, so that I don’t forget, that there were some wonderful students and some really rewarding moments in both classes. I think specifications grading went reasonably well in the first-year class: as before, a number of students have commented explicitly on ways in which they found it effective and supportive. Although attendance was the worst I’ve ever seen in Mystery & Detective Fiction, it settled in to a pretty consistent group, and we had some excellent discussions; I think these students did see that there was more to “taking the class” than paging through the books and completing the basic requirements, and it was heartening that several of them told me on the last day how much they had enjoyed the class. Some of them are even coming back to read more books with me next term!

Next term: what a thought. A year ago the very idea of being back in the classroom was completely overwhelming. It seemed impossible, unthinkable. “How do they do that?” I puzzled as I reflected on all the other sad people I knew were around me:

I don’t imagine that it feels easy to any of them, or that they are “over it” or have “moved on,” but there they all are, carrying on with their lives while also somehow carrying their grief.

I know now how easy the answer is, though the reality it reflects is so difficult: they just do. We just do. We have to. “You don’t get over it, you just get through it” is one of the many clichés about grief that turn out to be exactly true. Getting through it is pretty hard work, I find, and I am so grateful for the help and support I have had and still have, from friends and family—my elephants—and from the excellent therapist I had my first appointment with last May, whose compassion, insight, and expertise continue to be invaluable. I am also truly grateful to the many students who showed up, in person and online, to engage with me about our readings, and whose curiosity, hard work, and good will helped me resolve that yes, I do want to keep doing this job: they make the endeavor worthwhile, and I hope I managed to convey my enthusiasm and commitment to them in spite of the term’s challenges.

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.