I find this hard to believe, but 2012-13 will be the sixth year for my series on ‘this week in my classes.’ I began this series as a straightforward attempt to document and reflect on what goes on in an actual university English class, as opposed to the phantom indoctrination factory some people seemed to imagine we run. Though I still run into occasional examples of ‘bad old English professors talk nonsense and/or ruin all the fun’ comments, I’ve been thinking that there’s a different context now that makes it newly relevant for me to think about what it means to be ‘in my classes’: the much-hyped, much-debated, perhaps much-exaggerated disruption that is online teaching, and particularly MOOCs.

All summer there’s been an endless stream of commentary about what MOOCs can and can’t do, what they’re good for and what they aren’t–and, directly or by implication, about what, if anything, is the special value of actually being in a classroom face to face with a professor. Often, especially on the pro-MOOC side, and sometimes even in pieces that aspire to be even-handed (like this one, just yesterday), there are a lot of casually dismissive generalizations about the so-called “sage on the stage” model of teaching that supposedly dominates the contemporary academy–just for example, that recent piece talks about in-person education as “a classroom-based activity with a tweed-clad professor at a lectern.” I read these comments (which are then used, more often than not, to argue that face-to-face teaching is old-fashioned and overdue for disruption) and wonder whose teaching they are talking about. It’s true there are huge lectures, mostly (but not altogether) in subjects other than English, and that it is a stretch to call such classes “face-to-face” if one of the faces you mean is the professor’s. But it’s also true that there isn’t a lot of nuance in the claims I’ve seen about which classes might as well be scaled up to 10,000, or 40,000. Humanities classes raise significant pedagogical challenges for the MOOC fantasists; for a thought-provoking chronicle of one university teacher’s experience as a student in an online literature class, see here (I’m tempted to add “read it and weep!”). But it’s early days yet and who knows how things will develop.

At any rate, as I head back into my physical classrooms for the start of term, inevitably I’ve been thinking about whether I’m justified in believing that it’s not just more sociable but also pedagogically valuable to spend a few hours a week actually with my students, looking at their faces as they listen and react to what I say, watching them as I listen to them and respond to what they say. I believe it’s possible to build relationships, form communities, share ideas and knowledge, and get work done online–because I have done all these things myself. Maybe it’s because I know how much reciprocal effort and logistical precision is involved in a successful online venture that I can’t imagine undertaking it on a large scale. Or maybe it’s mostly that, as my grandmother always said, I’m a “people person,” which means I thrive on being around, well, people. I flatter myself (or do I?) that my students would (with exceptions, of course) rather be in a room with me–even on the occasions when I do just lecture (which are pretty occasional)–than watching a video of me (heaven forfend!) or posting on discussion boards. But maybe they wouldn’t! It’s probably salutary for me to have in mind that whatever exactly I do in my classes, it should be something more–more interactive, more spontaneous, more attentive, more in-their-faces–then they could get if they weren’t actually in the room. As a good first step, I can honestly state that I have never, to my recollection, worn anything tweed, and that I am rarely, if ever, sage.

As for specifics, this week is mostly about starting up. Last Friday was the first day in this term’s three courses: Introduction to Literature, Mystery and Detective Fiction, and The Somerville Novelists. Everything seems fine so far. The one I’m most preoccupied with is the Somerville seminar, and I will admit I found it unnerving today, in our first discussion of some readings, when I came up shaky on answers to a couple of straight factual questions–such as when, exactly, Testament of Youth was first published! I should have been ready with this detail, and I thought I knew, but in the moment I wasn’t sure I knew (I said I thought it was published in the early 193os, and the precise date is 1933–so I was OK!). This is the kind of thing I know pretty much cold in my 19thC fiction classes, in which I have taught the same two dozen or so novels in different combinations for about 17 years! I guess I shouldn’t expect to be as good at this new material right away, but that disconcerting moment was a good reminder that when preparing for these sessions, I need to pay as much attention to the basic facts as I do to the larger questions I’m trying to raise, because though they are certainly somewhere in my notes, I can’t count on their being cemented in my memory.

The beginning of classes is getting close enough that working on class prep no longer seems like just a way of avoiding more amorphous (and thus more stressful) tasks like research and writing. All summer, of course, I’ve been doing reading and thinking with my seminar on the Somerville novelists in mind, but now I’ve got a draft syllabus including a tentative assignment sequence. I’ve also been working on a prezi to accompany my opening remarks on the first day. At this point my plan is to sketch out the contexts that I think will be most relevant to our discussions of our four main texts: the history of women at Oxford, the suffrage movement, World War I, and modernism. As I work out details for the course requirements (still only provisionally decided) I am trying to balance a more open-ended attitude than is typical of even my upper-level courses with enough structure that everyone feels confident about expectations and standards.

Right now I’m feeling a bit panicky about this course, to be honest: I am personally very interested in the material, and I’m hopeful that the students will also find it interesting and have enough genuine curiosity and drive to make it work. But at the same time I worry that my expertise won’t be deep enough to support them if their interests take them too far afield, and that what seems enticingly open-ended to me will feel aimless or vague to them. Still, I’m glad not to be doing yet another round of one of my more familiar seminars: even though I could set up and run ‘The Victorian Woman Question’ or ‘Sensation Fiction’ or even ‘Women and Detective Fiction’ quite easily, as I’ve taught each of these seminars multiple times now, it is more exciting and intellectually challenging to be trying something new, and my being fresh has got to be beneficial to the students at some level. As I finalize the organizational details, I’ll keep reading background and critical sources to build up my confidence in the course content. This week I solicited advice on Twitter and got a great list of recommendations for books on World War I, most of which I was able to round up from the library. This week I’ll be adding to my collection of sources on women and modernism, and doing some reviewing of our four primary texts to help me decide on the reading installments for the schedule. And tidying up instructions for the wiki assignment. And … so many other things.

Because I won’t be changing much at all in this year’s version of the Mystery and Detective Fiction class (I shook up the reading list last year), my other main worry right now is my section of English 1000, Introduction to Literature. It hasn’t been that long since I taught an intro class, but most recently I’ve been doing one of our half-year versions, whereas in 2012-13 I’m doing a full-year section for the first time since 2000-2001! The half-year course I did was just “prose and fiction” (there’s a second course on poetry and drama that completes the intro requirement for students). The full-year version is supposed to address all of the major genres, so that’s one difference. The other difference, of course, is just having a lot more time with the same group, which is a great opportunity to develop both relationships and skills. Because book orders were due in the spring, that part of the course planning was already done (and there too I got very helpful input from people on Twitter, especially about choosing a contemporary novel to round out the syllabus). Now I’m sorting the readings into some kind of order and mapping out writing assignments, keeping in mind the various rules for the university’s Writing Requirements and our departmental policies on first-year courses.

The objectives for Introduction to Literature are quite broad and include both literary and composition skills. Aside from having to work on all the major genres, practice writing about literature, and give explicit attention to grammar, punctuation, and citations, what we do in Intro is pretty much up to us–which is nice, of course, but it also leaves every decision pretty wide open. So far I’ve decided to use the fall term for units on essays, short fiction, and poetry, drawing on the anthologies I’ve ordered, and to bundle the longer readings in the winter term. I’m pairing Night and The Road, and doing a poetry interval on grief, despair, and death to go along with them; and then I’m pairing Unless and A Room of One’s Own, with a women’s poetry cluster including Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Margaret Atwood to set that up. We won’t be spending a lot of time on drama, but we’ll be reading one short play in the fall term. There’s time for me to add another one for the winter, but I’ve already discovered that once I set aside time for writing workshops, peer editing, and so forth, there’s not enough time to read all the poetry I’d like to cover, so I’m reluctant to crowd the schedule even more. I know some of my colleagues don’t assign any essays in their intro sections, so I figure I’m following the rules at least as well as they are! I really look forward to teaching poetry, which I don’t typically get much chance to do (last year, with English 3000, was another welcome opportunity). Students often mutter things about not “getting” poetry, or simply declare that they don’t like it–to which I typically reply that they should not, then, be English majors! Though novels are my first love as a reader, I do consider poetry the highest form of literary art.

At 30 students, my intro section this year will be the smallest first-year class I’ve ever taught at Dal: as part of a curriculum restructuring a couple of years ago, we introduced one extremely large section (largely with the aim of guaranteeing our TA allotment and thus funding for our graduate students) and (the silver lining) turned some of the remaining sections into these little baby ones. 30 isn’t really tiny, of course: at Cornell, I got to teach a writing seminar capped at 17, and that’s a size that makes serious one-on-one attention possible. Our sections of 30 will have no TA support, so it will be just me and them–all year long! Though with no TA I’ll have the same marking load as in the formerly-standard sections of 60, I will certainly be able to give them more personalized attention overall, especially during class discussion and workshops.

Demand for these small sections has been very strong: I think they all have waiting lists of at least 20. I hope that the students who get spaces in them appreciate that it is increasingly rare to be face to face with a (relatively senior!) professor like this for a full year. Inevitably I’ve been reflecting on all the hype around MOOCs as I plan my classes this year and trying to understand why it is so easy for some pundits to talk as if a teacher’s personal interaction with her students is an expendable part of the learning process. I know that many kinds of interaction are possible online (given my own range of online activities, I hardly need to be told that!), and for years I have supplemented my classroom time with a variety of technological options, from holding office hours in chat rooms to curating discussion boards or hosting class blogs and Twitter feeds. So much of the inspiration and motivation for students’ learning, though, comes from what happens between us when we look each other in the eye! And I don’t mean just for them: for me, too, it is often critical to be focused completely on the student, which often includes interpreting what they are trying to say, rather than what words are actually coming out. Moving towards understanding is a very fluid, dynamic, interactive process. And I do so much more with their writing than mark things right or wrong–and it takes so much time! With adequate resources, I suppose much of this could be done in some virtual way, but at some point, without that live classroom experience, this would cease to be a job I’d want to do. I guess I feel that way particularly at this point in the summer, when my own energy and motivation is flagging from sheer lack of human contact. When colleagues ask me how my summer’s going, they typically look shocked when I reply that it’s going slowly and I miss the energy of the teaching term (even though I do  rather dread the hectic pace of it!).  I had just this conversation again just yesterday, in fact. But it’s true!

OK, I’m not really drowning, as this is my ‘light’ term and I’m also lucky enough to have a TA to share the essays with in my larger class. But working through papers and exams is really sapping my psychic energy right now. I hope–no, plan!–to have the last of the essays done tomorrow. Then I’ll be back! There’s nothing like being immersed in student writing to make you question your teaching and assignment strategies, and so Mark Bauerlein’s provocative post on his own decision to assign “all summary, no critical thinking” in his freshman comp class next time is timely and may provoke me all the way to a post of my own. I’m certainly wondering if the ‘critical essay’ will continue to be a standard part of my assignment sequences, even for upper-level classes. Marc Bousquet’s equally provocative post “Robots are Grading Your Papers!” is also timely: though I’m not (happily) teaching in anything like the kind of mechanical context he describes, and I’m not sure that working with students to produce writing that is more academic is what I want to do, I will be thinking about how to change my assignments to increase the amount of genuine engagement, not just between the students and the material, but between me and the students. I have the very strong feeling this term that I was asking students to do too many things at once that were new, difficult, and poorly understood, and that my own expectations about how they should prepare for and accomplish these things were not congruent with their own habits and expectations. This may be just the usual slump that comes from working through a large pile of assignments in a short period of time, but at this point my own level of dissatisfaction is high enough that I’m pretty motivated to think about how else to proceed next time.

First, though, I have ten more essays to mark. And one revised thesis chapter to attend to.

It’s too late now to do anything organized about this problem this term, but as I work my way through the next-to-last assignments my students are doing I’m puzzling over why so many of them seem not to have learned much from the assignments they have already turned in and had returned. It seems a no-brainer to me that you would scrutinize a returned assignment to learn how to do better next time: that’s the point, that’s why this is called ‘education,’ that’s why I write comments and corrections on it in the first place–that’s why I hold office hours, too, so that if my written comments don’t give you enough to go on, you can follow up in person. But I’m not the only resource, and for some problems (apostrophe errors, for instance) I’m not the best one to turn to, not because I can’t explain apostrophe errors, but because you can look those up easily on your own and save our inevitably limited one-on-one time for higher order things. Obvious as it seems to me that you don’t just note the grade and file the assignment away (or recycle it), though, I’m convinced that many of them simply put finished work behind them and move on to the next task as if it is unrelated.

It’s possible that a lot of students are actually diligently following up on my comments and just making very slow progress. It’s possible, too, that a lot of the problems I see are the result of haste rather than ignorance, and that they persist because the students get no better at time management as the term goes on, and even get busier, making proofreading an even more unlikely process. And it’s also possible that many students are happy enough with the grades they are getting that they can’t be bothered to strive for better–professors, themselves relentless and incurable “A students,” have a hard time understanding complacency in the face of a C, or even a B+, but that’s our problem. Whatever the reason, though, it is frustrating to get the sense on assignment after assignment that some students are endlessly and needlessly reinventing the wheel, opening a new document and just starting in (probably late at night before the due date!) as if there’s no connection between this new task and what they’ve already done.  I always urge them, as a new deadline approaches, to review their past work, but I’ve been thinking that I should actually build that into the structure of some classes as a requirement.

On Twitter the other night, when I was complaining about this issue, @rwpickard noted that he asks “for a commentary on the last paper’s grade & comments before I accept the next paper,” which sounds like a great idea. I remember that in my own first-year English class, we had to turn each essay back in after it was returned to us, making corrections or revisions on the opposite side of the page in response to the professor’s comments.  (I actually have a vague memory of having required something like this in my earliest sections of English 1000 myself, back in the dark ages.) My only concern is that with relatively large classes, such measures add a potentially onerous, or at least tedious, further step for me–but on the other hand, telling someone on three papers in a row that they haven’t stated a thesis but only announced their topic is also tedious, as is endlessly circling incorrect apostrophes. I have a small first-year class next year, the smallest I’ve ever had (30 students): I think this is a good chance to try something like this, as it clearly does not go without saying (and does not happen, by and large, without the element of coercion). Still, I am a bit anxious about the additional 180 items that will need to be submitted and returned across the year (we have a departmental requirement of six essays in our first year classes).

I’d be very interested in ideas from other people about how to encourage students to follow up on the feedback they get, and particularly about strategies that are fairly easy and efficient to handle with larger groups. Even with my nice small class of 30, I will have two other classes going on at the same time, adding up to about another 100 students, and no TA support: there’s only so much paperwork I can do and keep track of. Also, in classes where writing is meant to be a supporting issue, while literary content is the chief class objective, it’s tricky to know how to balance demands that they write clearly and correctly against the other aims of an assignment.