This Week In My Classes

This Week In My Classes: Settling In, Stocking Up, Asking Questions

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

broadviewlnfIs it possible that we’ve already finished two full weeks of classes? Well, that time just flew by!

I think one reason it seems as if the term is still only just beginning is that today is also the last day of the add-drop period, which is the bane of my teaching life ever single term. Why in my day you picked your classes before the semester began, you showed up for your classes when the semester began — and then you just kept on showing up until they were over! And it was up hill both ways! Harumph. But seriously, having two weeks out of a single term in which new students may show up at any point and supposedly current students may or may not . . . well, it’s a pain, because along with this “shopping period” often comes an attitude that nothing you might have missed during it should really count, which of course is impossible. I can’t let 1/6 of the term go by and do nothing that matters! And if I did, it would be an insult to the students who have shown up since Day 1. So, I start when the term starts, and if students want to shop around they have to be aware that there are consequences. This is a perennial complaint, and I am in fact starting to explore if there’s anything at all we can do to influence administrators so that the pedagogical insanity of the current system can be ameliorated. At the very least I dream of being able to remove registered students from the class if they fail to show up on the first day (or heck, in the first week) so that I can settle things one way or another for students on the waiting list. Attendance would go way up for the first week of classes, I bet, which would be good for everyone, and students would realize that their behaviour around registration isn’t just an annoyance for professors but can be a genuine headache for other students.

Anyway, enough grumbling. I have done my best to stay calm and just get on with teaching, and in my section of Intro that means we’ve actually almost finished our first unit, on essays. I’m using a new book this year, the literary non-fiction volume of Broadview’s new Introduction to Literature set, and I’m very happy with the selections in it. We started with Twain’s “Advice to Youth,” which I thought would be fun and thus help my campaign to be less intimidating. We’ve also read Swift, Orwell, Woolf, and, for today, Miriam Toew’s “A Father’s Faith,” which I like so much that I’ve added A Complicated Kindness to my TBR list.

I can’t know if the cause is my somewhat revised approach or the different group or both, but class participation in Intro is already more lively than it was most of the time last year, so I’m optimistic that as the term goes on and we get into longer and more challenging material, the atmosphere will stay engaged and collaborative. I use a lot of time early in the term for what I (unoriginally) call “stocking their critical toolboxes,” that is, building up a vocabulary of precise terms for discussing literature. This inevitably cuts into the time we have for talking in detail about the readings, but as we move along I can scale back on technical stuff, so today was mostly about Toews and Monday we should also be able to focus almost entirely on our grimly gripping excerpt from Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.

In Women and Detective Fiction we’ve also started with shorter works, and in a sense here too we began by stocking up on analytical tools, though of a different kind. What questions are illuminating and productive to ask of our readings? What contexts do we need – literary, historical, critical – to talk well about them? Because not everyone in the class has done any previous classes on detective fiction (though a majority have in fact taken the lower-level survey class) I lead off with a lecture on the history of the genre and reviewed some key critical concepts and conventions, and we read a handful of ‘classic’ texts (Poe, Conan Doyle, and Hammett). Then we looked at a couple of early women’s crime stories – Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Long Arm” and Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers.”

marpleFor the last two classes we’ve been reading a selection of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories. This is a group of smart, keen upper-level students, and so it is interesting to me both intellectually and pedagogically that it was difficult to generate much discussion of Christie. It’s possible that two classes on these readings is one too many because honestly, the stories aren’t that interesting. Can I say that? There are certainly many interesting aspects of them, considered in our context – Miss Marple herself is an intriguing character; the stories frequently make little points about how women’s expertise can be overlooked, or how women themselves, if they aren’t young and sexy, are overlooked; there are some class issues; there’s the problem of treating violent death as a puzzle rather than a human tragedy. But there’s not much to be said about language, style, and form, or about other themes. The students remarked how hard it quickly became to tell the stories apart or remember what detail came from which one. The characters are quite 2-dimensional, and the mysteries unfold with a predictable rhythm, right down to Miss Marple’s charmingly self-deprecating and digressive version of the “reveal” scene.  My sense that we were already running out of steam in the first class led me to prepare an exercise for today that focused on precisely this problem (how well do these stories reward close reading?). I asked them to consider what other short fiction they’d studied and with what emphases, and then to consider Edmund Wilson’s infamous essay “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” I explicitly and sincerely told them that I was not setting Wilson up as a straw man. I think he has a good point – several good points, in fact! But I also think a case can be made against his case for capital-L Literature. I thought this might generate some intense debate about literary merit as a concept, but it didn’t, quite. One reason was that it turned out many students had studied very little short fiction! I was surprised. I fully expected that they would all have read at least some of Dubliners, and/or some array of the usual suspects from Katherine Mansfield to Carver or Hemingway to Alice Munro. But no! So asking them what they “typically” focused on when discussing short stories went pretty much nowhere.

The other inhibition I thought I sensed, though I realize I may be misreading or over-reading (both hazards of my training!), was about the whole concept of literary merit: nobody who spoke up, at any rate, championed Wilson’s point of view or took the position that, clever as they are, Christie’s stories are, really and truly, just not as rich, interesting, or worth our time as “The Dead” (or, since most of them hadn’t read “The Dead,” some other work of Literature). I wonder if we have educated them into extreme caution about such value judgments (I do my part in that with my lecture on Christie vs. the Difficult Modernists in the mystery survey class – and, indeed, through the whole way in which I frame the class as a test of the oft-assumed hierarchy between literary and genre fiction). Or maybe they really do see no qualitative difference (which I admit would shock me), or if they are worried about criticizing the assigned course readings, or if they just in some way aren’t ready for that conversation, or if they really enjoyed Christie’s stories and don’t want to feel bad about it, or what. Well, as I remarked at the end of class, Nancy Drew (who we turn to next) is not going to make this question go away but in many respects will exacerbate it.

This Winter Term: Some Small Good Things

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

1005017_10152126924015803_2115018870_nI may have been in Nova Scotia almost 20 years, but it’s no secret that I have not adapted well to east coast winters. I complain about them a lot! It’s not even the cold and damp I hate so much as the stress of driving in snow and ice. If I could hibernate, or just opt out of work, school, appointments, and grocery shopping whenever the roads are bad, I might shut up about winter!

However, this particular winter (though the weather so far has been dreadful) I’m feeling grateful for a number of small things that are making my term easier. If I write them up here that will make it harder for me to forget them the next time there’s freezing drizzle on top of a foot of snow and everything starts looking bleak.

1. This is my first full term with a reserved parking spot. What a relief! Not only can I drop my kids at school without either forcing them to be uncomfortably early or fretting that I’ll arrive on campus too late and be stranded, but I can even leave and come back during the day if I want. Or make a morning appointment off campus and still come in to my office after. This flexibility would have been even nicer when the kids were smaller, but even now it sure feels liberating not to be worrying about this logistical issue every day.

2. This is my first term in many years without a 9:30 class. Happily, I have long managed to avoid 8:30 classes (by nature I’m a night owl, not a morning person), but even a 9:30 class means having very little prep time in the morning, which means knowing you have to arrive on campus basically ready to go, which means often doing prep in the evenings. I’m sure I’ll still do some reading or marking or making up handouts after dinner, but not as often, and at the very least I’ll know I have plenty of time to do things like finalize notes or print and copy materials on campus before I have to head into my first class.

3. And speaking of classrooms, for the first time that I can remember my classes are all meeting in the same building that my office is in. This is a huge break during the winter term! Not only will I save all kinds of time putting on winter gear and trekking across campus and back (and, of course, also miss the unpleasantness of going outside repeatedly in cold, wet, blustery weather), but I don’t have to teach in my winter boots in my usually overheated classrooms. Plus if I forget something, it’s literally right upstairs, so I don’t have to check and re-check the contents of my folders and bags quite so obsessively. Win! This is possible because …

4. I have a very modest number of students this term: only 2 classes, with 30 in one and 22 in the other. Classrooms in this building officially hold 36 students; my classes capped at 40 used to get scheduled in here regularly anyway but apparently the fire marshal has gotten serious and as a result (because they are pretty much always full) I’ve been exiled for them – and classes capped at 60 or 90 (like Mystery and Detective Fiction) of course always have to be elsewhere. So: more intimate groups, less marking, more discussion instead of lecturing, and all in one building. Hooray!

5. Finally, and not specifically teaching or work related, I just discovered Sun Butter. It really does taste just like peanut butter! I used to love peanut butter, but since my daughter was diagnosed with a severe peanut (and tree nut) allergy over a decade ago, we haven’t had any nut products in the house. Sun Butter is completely nut free! (It’s made of sesame seeds.) I always doubted the nut-free alternatives but a friend assured me she even preferred this to the real thing so I finally risked it … and it’s good! I’ve never resented going without nuts at home (it’s actually easier, too, than worrying about cross-contamination — we can all just relax and eat), but it’s nice to have an old favorite so nearly restored to me. And if I get more protein in the morning and that gives me extra energy, that may indeed be a plus for my teaching term.

You see? I said these were small good things*, but they add up! I’ve been surprised, actually, what a difference the first three especially are making to my frame of mind during what is usually such a stressful time. Do you have any small (or big!) changes this term that make your days a little better? Or any that you wish you could make?

*A small bad thing is that the fiction anthology I’m using doesn’t include “A Small, Good Thing,” which is one of my favorite short stories. But you can’t have everything!

Next Week In My Classes: Who, Me? Intimidating?

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

Teaching evaluations (or “Student Ratings of Instruction” as we apparently call them these days) are a notoriously … imperfect … guide for future conduct. Probably because we all spent many, many years being graded, professors nonetheless read them obsessively compulsively carefully and fret about freak out pay special attention to the most negative ones, because at the end of the day, or the term, we want everyone to like us want to get an A hope to improve our pedagogy.

I haven’t seen my evaluations from last term yet, though I’m sure they’ll arrive in my inbox any day now (we’ve recently switched to online evaluations, which has added a new layer of complications and made the results even less robust than before). I have seen last year’s, however, and they were the usual blend of enthusiasm and disdain, gratitude and offense. Also as usual the balance tipped in the right direction, assuming that it is preferable to have more happy than discontented students. And, again as usual, what I’ve tried to focus on in them is not the outliers (good or bad) but any pattern of feedback (I so hate to think of these as “ratings,” as if I’m one option in a giant Cineplex) that teaches me something about how I teach — or at least about how I taught last year.

I did find one, and it was something I hadn’t seen before: a number of comments from students in my section of our first-year “Introduction to Literature” class who felt I was “intimidating.” It wasn’t by any means a unanimous perspective, but enough students used that very word to give me food for thought.

Now, I should say that I don’t consider it an altogether bad thing that some of my students found me or my course intimidating. To a certain extent, that was the effect I was going for, at least at the start of term. This is because I have run into enough Intro students who are taking English only to meet a requirement and fully expect it to be their “bird” course, or at any rate who are strongly inclined to make it a lower priority than their “hard” courses or the ones they see as more important (often, their science courses). There are also a lot of students in first year, including some  who consider themselves prospective English majors, who are more used to “expressing themselves” in English classes than learning specialized vocabulary and using it for well-reasoned critical analysis — who are surprised, that is, to find themselves faced with intellectually strenuous tasks and high standards. There are also, of course, students whose previous preparation — or just whose attitude and expectations — make them quite prepared to work and think hard, but they are typically outnumbered.

As a result, I usually start out emphasizing the stringency of the course. The tone I aim for is cheerful but uncompromising, about the logistics of the course (requirements, deadlines, policies, etc.) but also, and more importantly, about the skills and content it aims to teach. The message I seek to convey is quite simple: It is possible to do a better or a worse job of literary analysis. The goal of this class is to help you do a better job, which means both reading better (a matter of both knowledge and skills) and writing better (again, a matter of both knowledge and skills). It’s hard work, but it’s also fun and creative and important work (because the classroom is far from the only place we read, or write). I take it seriously, and so should you. I am passionate and enthusiastic about it, and I hope you will be too, but at the end of the day it’s not about what you like, it’s about what you learn.

In other words, I want them to take the class seriously and understand that they will have to work to get good results. It’s meant to be aspirational: I hope they will be motivated to rise to the challenge. But it’s also meant to be cautionary: don’t think you can phone it in, don’t blow me off. I mix in some inspiration too (some discussion about the value and beauty of literature), but to open the term, it’s the perspiration I usually emphasize, so that they’ll be ready to put in the work that enables us to have good, serious discussions about literature and criticism as we move through the term.

My first question, then, is: since I have always run the class more or less the same way, why was last year the first time I’m aware of that the intimidation factor persisted and became inhibiting? I was aware that the group was not (collectively) very relaxed: I fretted quite a lot last year about the low level of participation, for instance. It wasn’t a disaster — it ebbed and flowed — but compared to other sections of intro that I’ve taught, this was far from the most lively. And my second question is, how much, if anything, should I change?

I have a theory about the first question, which is that last year was the smallest section of intro I’ve ever taught at Dalhousie. Until recently, all of our first-year sections were capped at 55 and taught with one instructor and one TA. Now we have a range of class sizes, including one giant section (360, with multiple TAs), some in the middle, and some “baby” sections at 30 with just the instructor (our Writing Requirement rules mandate a maximum ratio of 30:1). I had a baby section last year that settled down at around 27 students. You’d think that would mean rainbows and lollipops and all good things, and it certainly felt luxurious in some respects, but my standard strategies evolved for bigger rooms and bigger numbers. In a group of nearly 60, the critical mass of both unmotivated and talkative students is bigger, so more students need the chastening “listen up!” approach while more students are present who are willing to join in a class discussion. My professorial presence is also more diffuse (if that makes sense) in a bigger room: in our smaller room, I may have seemed to be more “in your face.” And while in some ways it can be harder to put your hand up with more people around, in other ways you don’t stand out as much, so it can feel like the stakes are lower. I may be way off in these speculations, of course, but my guess is that I need to approach the smaller section (which is what I have again this term) aware that it’s a more intimate group and setting and thus requires a somewhat softer touch. What I don’t want to change is the overall message: that this is not a course to be taken lightly; that it requires attention and studying and commitment, not just showing up; that grades in English are not just a matter of opinion but of expertise and judgment.

So! With all this turning around in my head, as you can imagine I am both excited and anxious about our first meeting on Monday. I have been revising my notes, and I’m making plans for an ice-breaker exercise, nothing too fancy but something to get them talking to each other a bit on the first day, rather than mostly just listening or talking to me. Something I tell all of my classes is that literary criticism is something you get better at by doing — which includes class discussion (at some point I usually explain the concept of “coduction“) as well as both informal and formal writing. I hope that if they all hear their own voices in the classroom on the first day, in a nonthreatening context, it will ease them into the more important conversations to come. And I hope that if I set myself up initially as both professor and facilitator, they will find me less (but not un-) intimidating.

Do you have thoughts or experiences about being either intimidating or intimidated in class? I certainly remember professors I found intimidating, but I didn’t see that as their failing but rather as mine. Often, they were the ones I most admired and hoped to impress. I find it hard to imagine myself as intimidating (I often think of that wonderful line in Middlemarch about our “poor little eyes” behind the “big mask and the speaking-trumpet”) … but I realize we don’t always know how we strike other people, and I have occasionally had other indications that I seem harder, or harsher, than I knew. (I remember one of my own professors saying to me – quite out of the blue, it seemed! – “I always wonder what you’re thinking when you look at me that way.” Perhaps the natural cast of my face is just judgmental?)

This Week In My Classes: Pressing On

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

northandsouthEvery year my rate of posting (never particularly frequent or steady anyway) falls off at this time of year thanks to the rising pressure of other reading and writing — much of it kind of mind-numbing (midterms, for instance) and thus sloth-inducing when it’s done. That’s about where I am this week, with two sets of midterms in (one now marked – hooray!) and various proposals and papers imminent. Still, when I reflect how much I had going on this time last year, especially with the all-new and very labor-intensive Somerville seminar, I can’t really complain: overall, this is a much less hectic term. That’s what makes it possible for me to be at least contemplating getting another review done for Open Letters this month — though my attempts to write it have been going badly so far.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction we wrapped up Knots and Crosses before the latest midterm and we’ve just started on Indemnity Only. In my usual mental game of musical chairs for this course, I’ve starting thinking it’s time to rotate Paretsky out in favor of ‘A’ is for Alibi next time around, just for some variety, but I always enjoy teaching Indemnity Only. As with Rankin, Paretsky has later novels that are richer qua novels, but in both cases these series starters do a lot of useful setting-up work and are more self-consciously messing about with genre conventions, which works well in a survey course. I rattled off way too many ‘opening questions’ in a hurry in yesterday’s class and felt bad about it afterwards: tomorrow I will be sure to slow down, filter the key ones for our particular attention, and allow for a lot more discussion. I think defensiveness about working on an overtly feminist text had something to do with my feeling that the framing issues needed to be addressed so fully, but it’s a mistake to let hypothetical carpers set my agenda. At the same time, though, I think it makes sense to anticipate some potential misunderstandings or knee-jerk responses, and to do some basic things like point out that “feminism” is a word that does not have a single fixed meaning. When we were discussing Knots and Crosses this year I tried to emphasize more than usual that Rankin explores ways in which crime is gendered; we also always discuss the novel’s interest in masculine identity and the cost of living up to certain ideals of “manly” strength, as exemplified by Rebus’s SAS training. I hoped that would make Paretsky’s (and V. I.’s) commitment to challenging gender norms ‘belong.’ But I’m sure there will be some of the usual irritated comments, and that’s fine: we come to discuss the book, not to share its values.

In 19th-Century Fiction we have wrapped up our time on David Copperfield and begun reading North and South. It has been a couple of years since I’ve assigned North and South, and I’m coming back to it with pleasure: it’s always one of my favorites, and happily it is often popular with the students too, as they find Margaret a strong and interesting character (she should be especially welcome after the insufferable Dora and the almost as tedious Agnes!) and appreciate the explicitly political drama. Besides thinking about Gaskell, I’ve been thinking a lot about the assignment sequence I’ve used this term and in last term’s Dickens-to-Hardy class. Some aspects of it do just what I had hoped they would, but the reading journals in particular continue to be a mixed success — successful, that is, only for the students who don’t need special prodding to do them regularly and thoughtfully. I’ve been thinking that I may have to set questions for them that would require them to be up to date with the reading to answer, and that would quite deliberately target issues and scenes I plan to discuss in class — which might increase the participation rate. But while that sounds efficient in those ways, it also stifles creativity and independent thinking about the books, which I do value and want to encourage and even see more of. How to find the right balance between coercion and liberty? Well, that’s an appropriate enough question to be pondering while reading this particular novel, I suppose.

And on that note, back to rereading it for tomorrow’s session.

This Week In My Classes: Moving Right Along!

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

We seem to have passed that tipping point past which we hurtle towards the end of term. I feel as if it was only just the weekend, and tomorrow it will be Friday again! Happily, it will also be the Friday before a long weekend, which will give us all time to catch up, or rest up, a bit.

beckIn Mystery & Detective Fiction it continues to be a good term. For whatever reason, I have one of the most lively groups I’ve had in that class, with 15-20 students who pitch in regularly to discussion. In a class of about 80, that’s a pretty good percentage, especially considering that larger classes can themselves be intimidating. It makes the class time go by very fast, and it keeps me on my toes: the closer I stick to the notes I’ve brought in, the less likely I am to be asked a question I can’t answer easily enough, whether it’s about a detail of the plot or a broader issue of interpretation. In my own rereadings I don’t (I can’t) pay equal attention to absolutely everything, and I’m usually focused on the elements that are most important to what I’m planning to talk about. The more open the conversation, the more likely, in contrast, that I’ll discover what I don’t know, or know enough about. I like it, even if it’s sometimes disconcerting. I hope my having to say, occasionally, “Actually, I don’t know,” or “I really can’t remember — can anyone help me out by finding a relevant passage?” doesn’t undermine my students’ confidence in my expertise. Besides, keeping the plot of The Big Sleep straight is hard enough that Chandler himself couldn’t do it, right? This week we’ve wrapped up our discussion of The Terrorists, and tomorrow we start on Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses. In what’s probably becoming a boring refrain about readings for this class, I’ve been wondering for ages about switching it out for one of his longer, richer ones — but Knots and Crosses is usually a crowd-pleaser, and I do enjoy working through its Gothic twists and turns.

In 19thC Fiction from Austen to Dickens we are almost done our time on David Copperfield. It was a rocky start, but the last couple of classes have felt better to me, not just because the level of participation has been higher but because my own sense of what I want us to get out of the conversation is also improving. It has been feeling like a somehow spongier novel to work with than Bleak House or Great Expectations, and though I thought I had a lot of ideas about it, I haven’t been entirely clear in my own mind about how to bring them into focus. The further we read, though, the clearer Dickens’s own patterning becomes, and that has helped. Tomorrow we will have read up to the end of the amazing chapter called “Tempest,” so I’m going to focus on the three major crises of this installment (**spoiler alert**!): Micawber’s take-down of Uriah HEEP, Dora’s decline and death, and Steerforth’s drowning. We’ll talk about them as things that have to happen for David to complete his development — but why? I’ve got some suggestions about Steerforth and Heep as important examples of “not-David”: reflections of David himself that he has to outgrow or reject, figures of what he isn’t, or doesn’t want to be. (There’s plenty of critical writing about this that has been helpful to me as I’ve thought about this, including Oliver Buckton’s essay on ‘Homoerotic Secrets in David Copperfield” and Tara MacDonald’s on ‘race, sexuality, and Uriah Heep‘). As for Dora, I think it’s painfully obvious that she’s not the mature choice for David (some students have already expressed their shock that he actually marries her, instead of realizing his mistake in time). So we’ll talk about his love for her as evidence of his ‘undisciplined heart,’ I expect; I’m interested in why she’s presented with so much pathos and tenderness, too, rather than satirically, given how bad a choice she is. I expect we’ll tie his feelings for her into his love for Steerforth. There is something precious and beautiful in these mistakes, I think: just because childish love is not right (and may even be destructive) doesn’t mean the world would be a better place if we were all smart and knowing and invulnerable to error. My idea for our final class, next Wednesday (after the long weekend!) is to go through some of the claims made for David Copperfield in the context of ethical criticism, looking especially at work by Martha Nussbaum and Marshall Gregory, so trying to get at the value Dickens places on Dickens’s loving mistakes should be good preparation.

Maclise DickensI will be a bit relieved to be done with David Copperfield and on to North and South, which I know much better, but I do relish the challenge of working up a new novel, and I do think, too, that I should assign it again before too long, because teaching it is definitely a learning experience for me as well as for the students. I like the open-endedness of working through a novel without a strong pre-existing interpretation or set of priorities, but it is also hard to lead a discussion without being entirely committed to a particular direction! The ideal class discussion is a good blend of purpose and freedom: next time I think I will get closer to that.

The other major assignment I had this week was presenting to our graduate students’ professionalization seminar, something I also did last year (which prompted this post on whether graduate students should blog). I think it went fine! I have lots to say, and there was plenty of discussion and, as far as I could tell, interest. One thing I found myself stressing that I don’t remember feeling as strongly about last year was that there is exciting literate life outside the academy. My understanding is that the majority of our current cohort of MA students are not heading into PhD programs, and of course PhD students too need to be thinking about non- or alt-academic routes. Lately I have heard from quite a lot of students that they think about doing at least an MA because they want to continue the serious discussion of literature that they have enjoyed as undergraduates. So a new part of my “thinking of going to grad school?” talk is “but you don’t have to be in school to do that”! I don’t think I would have really understood that myself, despite having grown up among passionate readers, if it weren’t for the time I’ve spent among bloggers and reviewers in the last few years.

This Week In My Classes: Fictions of Development – Brontë, Dickens, and P. D. James

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

oxford jane eyreWe had our last class on Jane Eyre in 19th-Century Fiction on Monday. Reflecting on my own diminishing enthusiasm for the novel, I’ve been thinking that one of my problems is not only over-familiarity but also difficulty seeing the novel anymore — it just doesn’t rise fresh from the page anymore but comes trailing clouds of interpretation. Why is this any different from any other novels I assign? I’m not sure! But somehow Jane Eyre just feels blurry to me now rather than sharp and exhilarating. I’m not saying I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for it, especially during class discussion or while talking through essay ideas with students. And I’m certainly not saying I don’t think it’s a great and important novel. I just think it’s time to put it on hiatus from my syllabus for a bit. Maybe next time around I should take the plunge and assign Wuthering Heights instead. I’ve subbed in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a few times, and it is one of my very favourites to read and to teach, but I’ve never actually taught Wuthering Heights, mostly because I have never liked it. And really, what kind of excuse is that?

Next up for us in this class is David Copperfield. This is all going to be quite fresh, as I come into it with no stash of pre-existing teaching materials or lecture notes. I’ve been mapping out a tentative set of topics for each of our eight (eight!) class meetings but I also want to defer some planning until I see how discussion goes. Also, given the luxury of so many sessions (it takes time, after all, to read 855 pages) I want to use more class time for group discussion and perhaps some collaborative exercises, in addition to the usual mix of call-and-response ‘lecture’ time. Today I did lecture for most of the time, setting up some context for Dickens himself and also some frameworks I hope will be helpful as they read on. One thing I wanted to address up front, for example, was the question of “excess.” I quoted that bit by Nick Hornby about the current preoccupation with “spare” writing and made some suggestions about what ethos is served by an aesthetic of abundance, from a principle of social inclusivity to an anti-utilitarian joy in the sheer possibilities of language and story-telling.* I also usually start a big novel like this with some suggestions about information management: the idea that Dickens’s novels are often structured as a ‘theme and variations,’ for instance. Motifs that get started right away in David Copperfield include bad husbands and child wives, education, parenting, and childhood: on Monday we’ll have a less structured discussion just collecting lots of examples under some of these headings to get a preliminary sense of what pattern emerges, and we’ll spend time, too, just getting to know the people. I’ll probably leave careful discussion of David’s narration until a bit later, but we’ve worked on retrospective narration as an important feature of Jane Eyre, so we should be ready to think about its effects here too. Oh, how I hope they get some pleasure out of the novel! I urged them today to let themselves have fun with it, which means, among other things, making sure to manage their time well enough that they aren’t reading it in such a rush that its length is just frustrating.

unsuitableIn Mystery and Detective Fiction we are also working on a story about growing up, P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. One of the things I usually emphasize when teaching this novel is the extent to which James is self-consciously working less in the tradition of the sensation or crime novel than of the domestic realists of the 19th-century. She cites Austen in particular as an influence, along with Trollope and George Eliot. Her interest in moral questions is really clear in this novel, which is one of the darkest in this course — not because the crime is necessarily the most violent (though I wonder how exactly we would measure that!) but because, as Cordelia reflects, it comes from something “stronger than wickedness, cruelty or expedience. Evil.” “Evil” is a strong word, and a powerfully moral one. It also has theological connotations, but it’s a strictly, and shockingly, human form of evil that plans and executes Mark Callender’s horrible death. Monday, when everyone should have read to the end, we’ll focus on the confrontation between Cordelia and the murderer, which continues a very Victorian theme of love countering calculation — the language of the killer is explicitly utilitarian, though in the narrowest sense of that philosophy. We’ve been talking about Cordelia’s youth and what will be required for her to grow up into a successful private investigator: will she have to outgrow things like compassion, give up getting personally involved, in order to become professional? Does a P.I. have to be tough? I find James’s exploration of this problem (an ongoing one for female private investigators especially) subtle and interesting. Unsuitable Job is one of my favourite books on the class list — but it is typically the least popular one (well, next to The Moonstone) on class evaluations. I might swap it out next year for something new, not because I don’t think it works well in the course but because of all the books assigned it’s probably the least integral to the overall history of the genre we trace out over the term. If I took it out, maybe I could also take out Knots and Crosses and then replace the two together with a longer, more complex Rebus novel. On the other hand, there is a strong preference among students in this class for shorter books, so that might be risky. (Why am I already thinking about next year? Because we’ve already had to work out our offerings, which means the call for class descriptions and at least tentative reading lists can’t be far away.)

*As an aside, I asked if they had heard of Nick Hornby and they didn’t recognize him at all until I linked his name to a couple of film adaptations of his books. I seem to draw blanks all the time now when I try to make connections from our readings to other books — in class but also one on one with students. This has me wondering, since a lot of my references are not (I don’t think) to particularly obscure writers: what are they reading? Perhaps (as they often say) they don’t have time to read outside of class, but I don’t get the impression that they are much engaged with books in kind of a general way, or with the ‘book world’ reflected through reviews or prizes — much less blogs. This is only a very cursory impression, of course, but it has me thinking about how we could do more as a department to connect what we do with what goes on with books elsewhere, which is of course the ongoing motivation of this blog!

This Week In My Classes: Hunkering Down!

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Ah, the holiday weekend, with its leisure reading! It’s just a fond memory right now … Well, I exaggerate slightly, as I’ve certainly had more hectic terms than this one (this time last year, just for instance, I was teaching three courses, including one entirely new one), but I have been pretty busy with class preparation, grading, and meetings in the last couple of days, and so far I haven’t really focused on another fun book to read in the interstices.

The-Big-SleepToday I finished marking the 75 midterms for my Mystery & Detective Fiction course (which means, in case any students are reading this, that the grades should be checked and posted to Blackboard tomorrow afternoon). In class, we’ve just started working through The Big Sleep. It’s my first time teaching it, after going endless rounds with The Maltese Falcon. I’ve been thinking about making this switch for years but it took me a while to get over my initial aversion to The Big Sleep (soon after that 2009 post, however, I did add The Hound of the Baskervilles to the syllabus, where I have enjoyed it ever since). There are a few things I already miss about Hammett, but I think Chandler is going to give us plenty to talk about, and now that I have the plot more or less sorted out and some interpretive threads to follow, I am relaxing enough into the book that I almost like it a little bit! (Hard-boiled fiction is never going to be my favourite thing, but note to David Gilmour: teaching outside of your comfort zone is good for the brain as well as the character…) Yesterday was mostly warm-up stuff, with background on hard-boiled detection, Black Mask, “The Simple Art of Murder,” and so on. Then we started in with some consideration of the title: how does the gently euphemistic The Big Sleep suit the novel in a way that, say, Stone Cold Dead would not? (“Why this, not that?” is one of my favourite conversation starters for class discussion.) We had time for a few preliminary comments on Marlowe and that’s where we’ll pick up tomorrow: what kind of knight-errant is he, what kind of candidates for his version of chivalry are the Sternwoods, what’s the world like that he moves in, what hope does a lone hero — however untarnished and unafraid — have against the kinds of crime and corruption he’s up against? I would like to be able to talk about Spenser, but there’s just no room for Robert B. Parker on this syllabus: if I were ever to propose a 4th-year seminar on this subgenre, it would be to have an excuse to assign him. Actually, a course like that would be a great complement to the one I already offer on Women & Detective Fiction (coming up next term). Hmmm…something to think about. It wouldn’t play to my own tastes the way the other seminar does (oh, how I’m looking forward to reading Gaudy Night again) — but given how hard it sometimes is to be scholarly and objective about books I really love, that might not be a bad thing.

In 19thC Fiction we’re done with Waverley (to everyone’s relief, I think) and on to Jane Eyre, which is always a much easier sell. I’m not as passionate about Jane Eyre as I once was. It’s partly that I’ve gone through it so often (though reiteration doesn’t seem to diminish my enthusiasm for Middlemarch), but this time I’m also finding its relentlessly high emotional pitch tiring and somewhat artless (can I say that? is it heresy, for a Victorianist?). And yet I suppose that’s kind of the point (one point, anyway) of the novel itself — that our passions need to be checked by reason, that rage (however justified) quickly becomes self-destructive. I find myself coaching my students in quite the opposite way than I was doing with Waverley: instead of saying ‘try to throw yourself into it more,’ I’m saying ‘be careful about identifying with Jane too quickly or easily.’ She gives us lots of clues that she herself has grown up since she was thrown into the Red Room for fighting back against John Reed’s oppression. My favourite parts of the novel are the sparring matches she has with Rochester: so much of their dialogue is just so unexpected. By tomorrow everyone should have read through to Jane’s discovery of her inheritance and her relationship to St. John and his sisters: I want to start with some discussion about why she doesn’t marry Rochester (not the plot reasons, of course, but the reasons that marrying him at that point would be risky even if he weren’t already married) — that means looking at the shopping spree, probably, and talking more about Bertha and whether she’s a cautionary tale for Jane, an ally of some kind, or an antagonist. Then we can consider what Jane gains at Marsh End, as well as what risks she faces there, too, to her personal development.

oxford jane eyreI’m feeling a bit mad at myself for not learning the lessons of last term about the assignment sequence I’m using in 19th-Century Fiction. I’m doing reading journals again, and I’m also repeating the strategy of allowing students to choose which of our first novels to write their short essay on. Last time I worried that the journal entries were not well distributed across the term, and I’m seeing the exact same pattern this year — I didn’t change the instructions and rules because the degree of micromanagement required to key credit to specific stages of the reading seemed too much, but I’m not sure I can justify (to myself) doing the same thing again, given what actually happens (as opposed to what I’d like to happen). It’s a process-vs.-product problem again: mostly, they want credit for doing the journals, not the benefit the journals could be to their learning experience. (As always, there are exceptions who are absolutely making the most of the journals.) This term, I’m also seeing really uneven distribution in the essays: fully a third of the class wrote on Persuasion, nobody at all on Waverley, and it looks like the remaining two thirds are planning to write on Jane Eyre, which means nobody is writing on David Copperfield. (They all have to write ‘mini-midterms’ on each novel, though, and then a final exam with an essay question on our last book, North and South.) I want them to write on the books that interest and motivate them, but one effect of this uneven selection is to unbalance my workload. Before I design next year’s 19th-C novels class, I’ll revisit the great coercion conundrum. Maybe I’ll do a different assignment sequence altogether — though at this point I don’t think I can go back to the letter exchanges that I used to like so much. They had just become too much of a logistical nightmare!

But it’s too soon to fret about 2014-15 when 2013-14 isn’t even half over yet.

This Week in My Classes: My Waverley Intervention

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

My sincere thanks to everyone who weighed in, here or on Twitter, with advice about handling the classroom slump brought on by Waverley. Here’s an update on what I decided to do.

highlanderFirst of all, I did decide to do something different, rather than just pressing on with my usual strategies. I had to admit to myself — and I admitted this morning to my class — that if year after year a critical mass of students just isn’t getting engaged by the novel, at least to some extent this is a failure on my part — a pedagogical failure. Dropping Waverley from my reading list was also a failure: some students in Waverley-free years have told me how happy they were to have missed it, but missing out on it was not a win for them any more than it was one for me. As I told my class this morning, it’s a novel that deserves its place on our syllabus, one that is well worth reading for our curriculum, whatever anyone’s personal response to it. But the failure isn’t all mine. To use the analogy I suggested to my class, if you’re stumped by a difficult calculus problem, you don’t blame the problem: you work it as hard as you can, get more help if you need it, and try to bring your skills up to the level you need to solve it.

I decided to approach the class, then, as a problem-solving opportunity: we all, collectively, needed to think about what was going on and what our own role could be in addressing it. I said frankly where I thought I had been going wrong: struggle is part of learning new things, and they needed to be free to talk about their difficulties without my getting all judgmental. I told them that I thought I needed to back off a bit, and listen, so that they could trust me to work with them. But so that we didn’t fall into an unproductive gripe session, I suggested they approach Waverley in the spirit of couples therapy: avoid “you” statements in favour of “I” statements, to stimulate not blame but agency. “Waverley is boring” doesn’t help: you can’t change Waverley, after all! “I am finding Waverley boring / frustrating / confusing” is more constructive because there may be something you (or I, as the teacher) can do differently.

All of this preamble took only a  few minutes at the start of class. Then I went to work on getting out of their way. I’d made up a handout with three simple questions:

  1. How is Waverley going for me? What do I like about it? What specific challenges does it pose?
  2. Given the specific ways I’m finding Waverley challenging, here are some ideas for things I could try to make it go better:
  3. Given the specific ways I’m finding Waverley challenging, here are some ideas for what Dr. Maitzen could do to help:

I gave them about 10 minutes to respond honestly to these questions — the handout was explicitly not to be submitted or evaluated. Then on the other side of the handout they each had one of five different passages I’d picked out, and they got into small groups with the other students who had the same passage. They had two tasks in their groups: first, to talk freely about how they’d answered their questions, then to read their passage aloud and discuss it, considering it in light of their general comments about reading Waverley as well as in the context of the issues we’d been working on in our previous classes. I left the room entirely for the first five minutes of the group work, literally getting out of their way so they would be uninhibited in their discussion.

The room erupted into noise behind me as I went out, and the conversation seemed energetic for the whole period. While they talked over their passages, I went around offering my help and inviting comments on the question about what I could do to help with their reading of the novel. I got some very specific requests: the most frequent was to go over the political / historical factions again, clarifying who was on what side. A couple of people thought a handout listing characters and their affiliations (and their various names) would be great, so I think I’ll do some version of that. Another suggestion was for some straightforward plot summary: because a number of them are really struggling through Scott’s prose, they lose track of what’s actually happening. Plot summary is not usually high on my priorities for class time, but I can see how confusion about the novel’s events would inhibit class participation! So I’ll do that too, though I’m going to think about ways to make it interactive.

As for things that they could do, a couple of students said that reading the passages out loud helped their comprehension, so that might be something they’ll try on their own (we talked about the audiobook option, though sadly there doesn’t seem to be a really good one available). I showed them the e-text available through the University of Adelaide, which might help anyone struggling with the small print of our Oxford edition. I think others realized that looking more words up in their dictionary will help, and I continued to urge them all to get started trying to write about the novel. It was clear that not everyone had the same issues, and not everyone even had any problems with it — I hope the students who were already getting along fine don’t feel the class was wasted: I think we will all benefit if our remaining two sessions go better.

However it goes on Wednesday and Friday, I won’t regret having tried to change the dynamic that was developing. Lecturing more is one way to get through a slump like this, but it isn’t the best way, since (as I often remind them) the objective of an English class is for them to be better readers themselves: the process of reading and discussion is not just important, but in some ways it’s the whole point.

This Week in My Classes: In which I return to Waverley after many years.

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

waverleyIn class this week one of my students asked me when I last taught Waverley. “2006-7,” I promptly replied — I knew this because I had gone back to my old files to see what notes and handouts I had in reserve.* It used to be a fixture on my syllabus for The 19thC Novel from Austen to Dickens — but it was also, without fail, the least popular book on the syllabus. While I don’t typically let such considerations steer me in choosing assigned texts (a literary education is about challenging and extending our existing taste and skills as readers, after all), it did get to be a drag coaxing and cheerleading and exhorting the students to get any kind of discussion going. Sure, Scott is probably the most popular and influential author of the early 19th century: all of our other novelists read him (mostly, with passionate affection) and learned from him. And sure, Waverley itself is heaps of fun if you can get into the spirit of things, and if you can get past the garrulous, curmudgeonly, oversharing, occasionally pedantic, highly self-conscious narrator … and sure, there’s all kinds of metafictional proto-post-modernist fun to be had with that narrator, too, if, again, you can get into it. But when at least 75% of the students really can’t get into it, then their boredom and resentment infects the classroom atmosphere, and not necessarily just for the two or so weeks spent on Waverley itself. So I stopped assigning it, and have been teaching Austen to Dickens with no Scott at all since then, except for “The Two Drovers” in a recent summer session of the course.

But I’ve missed Waverley: unpopular as it was, and its intrinsic merits aside, it provided an infinitely valuable touchstone for interesting features of our other novels. As I was already tilting this year’s incarnation of the course towards the Bildungsroman by including both Jane Eyre and David Copperfield, I knew I was going to miss it even more. So it’s back  — and, judging by the last two class meetings, so is the stupified resentment it inspires. Not, by any means, among all the students — but even those who are writing smartly in their reading journals seem uncharacteristically reticent in class, and I have numerous indications that a lot of students are falling behind in their reading as well as in their appreciation of the novel. And so I’m back wondering, as I was in 2006-7, what I could be doing differently to make things go better, or whether it’s just not worth the effort.

My basic approach is a ramped-up version of what I do with every assigned novel, which is to present the novel as enthusiastically as I can, front-loading our time on it with a lecture or two clearing up historical information and setting up some interpretive frameworks which then, in theory, enable everyone to read on and consider how the particulars of the novel fit into those broader patterns. There is a bit more context to be established here than usual, but as Scott himself says,

I beg pardon, once and for all, of those readers who take up novels merely for amusement, for plaguing them so long with old-fashioned politics, and Whig and Tory, and Hanoverians and Jacobites. The truth is, I cannot promise them that this story shall be intelligible, not to say probably, without it.

If that was true in 1814 (or 1805), it’s even more so today, when there’s barely any chance at all that those terms will mean anything, even to a History major. But once you see what the stakes are, it seems to me that it’s not impossibly difficult to follow the story! It takes patience for a modern reader to settle into the prosy narration, but it’s great stuff once you do, and there’s as much “action, laffs, and romance” as in any Captain Underpants novel!  So once we’re launched on the more discussion-based classes, I start from my stock of open-ended questions (“What kind of a fellow is Waverley?’) and then draw us along into analysis of the answers (“What’s the value of such a ‘wavering’ hero in a novel about civil conflict?’) — focusing, along the way, on particularly fun or revealing scenes. An early episode in Waverley that’s good to discuss, for instance (in theory) is the banquet at Tully-Veolan that ends in a drunken brawl at Luckie Macleary’s inn. In addition to being a great comic scene and one that illustrates Waverley’s uncanny (and symbolic!) habit of falling down in times of crisis, it shows the living importance and potentially violent results of the broad political conflicts we’ve gone over: the fight begins with “a toast which seemed . . . to have a peculiar and uncivil reference to the government that [Waverley] served.”

bustofscottAgain, this is all standard classroom procedure — lecture mixed with discussion prompted by questions designed to build interpretations out of observations. But it just doesn’t go well with Waverley, though there are always a few stalwart souls who put their hands up (thank you!). I’m always a bit puzzled by the conspicuous collapse: the novel doesn’t strike me as that opaque, especially once we’ve done our warm-up sessions. On the assumption that incomprehension is a problem, though, my first response is usually to step up what I think of as the ‘modeling’ component of class — that is, walking the students through those key episodes and showing them what’s in there to notice, enjoy, and work with. Then I try backing off again — but still with lackluster results. Is it me, I wonder? Perhaps I come on too strong: if they are feeling bemused or bored, then my enthusiasm, rather than ‘selling’ them on the novel, may just alienate them from both it and me. Also, sometimes I catch myself hectoring them: this week, for example, I gave them a heads-up that we’d be discussing three particular incidents, and when hardly anyone seemed prepared to do that, well, I did take them to task! But that backfires too, I bet: rather than feeling challenged to do better, they probably just feel defensive.

I really want them to rise to the challenge of this novel. I really don’t think it’s an impossible task. But for many of themI think it does require letting go of the expectation that class reading will be immediately accessible and ‘relatable.’ It’s a class , after all: you’re supposed to learn from it — cue the speech about this not being a book club! Last class I urged them to get started writing about it, if they hadn’t already: they’ve got study questions they can use as prompts for their journals, plus the questions we’ve been working on in class. Active engagement of that kind is a good way to learn, and Waverley is a genuinely interesting novel to write about even if you aren’t finding it a treat to read. But I’m stumped about what else to do, and about what attitude to take in class. I should probably just go on as usual and try not to make a big deal out of the slump we’re experiencing — but that’s easier said than done.

Any tips? Teachers, how do you handle it when you think you’re losing your students and, as a result, they’re missing out? Students, what tactic is most effective, in your experience, at motivating you to get on board with something you don’t find immediately compelling?

*2006-7! That means it was in the era Before Blogging, which is why I have never blogged before about the pleasures and perils of teaching Waverley.

This Week in My Classes: Processes and Products

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Bookworm's Table (Hirst)The second full week of term has gone by already: it’s amazing how time seems to accelerate when things get busier. In both my classes we have moved from throat-clearing and context-setting to richer discussions about our readings: in The 19th-Century Novel from Austen to Dickens, we’ve wrapped up our work on Persuasion, and in Mystery and Detective Fiction we’ve got only one more class on The Moonstone. Starting the term with these two novels eases the transition from summer’s languors to fall’s stresses because both are so delightful. At least, I think so — and it seems as if a lot of students are enjoying them as well. Discussion in the Mystery class has been particularly good so far this term, especially considering it’s a big class (capped at 90), which can sometimes be inhibiting. I hope they keep putting their hands up!

academicselfOne thing I’ve been thinking about as our work gets underway, and as I contemplate my own non-teaching ambitions for this term, is trying to make the process as meaningful and rewarding as possible, shifting some emphasis away from the product — which for students is often the course credit or the grade, and for me is the finished piece of writing. I’ve been reading Donald Hall’s The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual (thanks to @MsEMentor for the recommendation!) and while I have some doubts about whether I want to be an ‘academic self’ of the kind he describes (more about that, perhaps, in another post), I have been struck by the wisdom of his emphasis on this process / product distinction, partly because I have found myself caught up in just the kind of results-oriented moping he describes (if not for exactly the same causes):

We all know (or should know by now) that we may complete professional tasks to the best of our abilities, “play by all of the rules,” so to speak, even overachieve and push ourselves to extremes, and still be denied the book contract we have been working for, the position we have applied for, or the raise that we feel we deserve. If we tie our sense of professional payoff only to a desired reception of the end product of a process, then we are setting ourselves up for disappointment, perhaps even a state of bitterness or burnout.

As he discusses, there are lots of reasons, some of them good ones, to be fixated on achieving particular goals, but “we simply do not have to have a specific reaction to the products of our processes for those processes to have been worthwhile.”

I think there is actually a close relationship here between my students’ situation, as they strive for grades and credits, and my own difficulty dissociating the worth of my work from the reactions or results it gets. After all, I spent a great deal of my own life as a student, and in many ways academics carry forward the mental habit of waiting for affirmation from other people’s evaluation. How different, too, is the hiring process, the tenure process, or the promotion process from being graded? Or, for that matter, the grant application process or the article submission process? Well, OK, of course there are differences, including the presumption that for most of these professional matters we are being evaluated by our peers, and the not-insignificant point that our success in some of them (hiring in particular) really shouldn’t be understood as measures of our merit so much as of our great good fortune. But these things all feel a lot like handing in an essay used to, and I’m someone who once locked herself in a bathroom in Buchanan Tower to weep over an A- from a professor whose approval I really wanted — which is to say, I’m someone who (like a lot of academics) has a hard time believing in my own judgments of my work, and a hard time separating judgments of my work from judgments of me personally. I am making progress on this front, I’m glad to say, but I still find myself waiting anxiously for external validation when, for instance, something of mine is published online. There’s still that part of me that is waiting for my grade, for the internet equivalent of an ‘A,’ whatever exactly that is.Grade A Plus result vector icon. School red mark handwriting A plus in circle

I know, I know: there are so many things wrong with this, and I don’t just mean that it’s kind of pathetic in a grown woman more than two decades along in her professional career (though that is certainly true). Having become self-conscious about it, I do at least now work consciously against it, and one way I do this is simply by rereading my own work, which (I am learning to assert, on my own behalf!) I think is pretty good! Why shouldn’t I be able to tell or say that, after all, considering it’s actually a big part of my job to evaluate writing? But the other thing I want to do is give more weight to, or feel more positive about, the process of doing the work. As Hall says,

I cannot know if the words that I am writing at this moment will ever appear in any form of print other than that which comes out of my computer. . . . But I can decide that this act of creation, this thinking through of ideas as they move from conscious and subconscious thought through my fingers and onto the screen is enough to satisfy and sustain me, even if the unfortunate were to occur.

He isn’t advocating that “we dispense with highly concrete goals” (as he points out, that would be “to court disaster” professionally, as well as to shirk other dimensions of our research and writing lives by not aiming to get our thoughts “disseminated”). But he’s right that “those processes . . . . must be more explicitly valued, must be recognized as professional ‘goods’ in and of themselves.”

To bring this discussion back to my teaching, I have realized that some of the greatest frustrations I’ve run into as a teacher have come from student priorities and behaviors that are results-oriented without due attention to the intrinsic value of the processes we go through (as well as to the benefits that careful attention to process can bring to achieving desired results). A simple example: papers that are clearly (or on the student’s own admission) started and finished the night before the deadline — I’m sure many other professors have had those dispiriting conversations that begin “I’m going to work on my essay tonight” and you cringe, knowing that means they won’t have time to rethink or revise, just as they very nearly have run out of time to consult. The essay-writing process matters less to that student than getting the credit for the finished essay. Or there are students who don’t finish the readings until they are studying for the final exam, or who never read them at all (I’ve had students note on their evaluations, almost as a point of pride, which books they never did actually read) — they too are circumventing the process (which is where a lot of the real learning can take place) and focusing only on the final product. I’m trying, increasingly, to disrupt these habits by building incentives to good process into the course requirements (reading journals, paper proposals, short tests). I’m also taking more time to discuss the relationship between our processes in class and the overall goals of the course, in terms of learning and practicing skills as well as in terms of getting good grades. Yes, students should aspire to earn good grades, and I should enable and support those aspirations. But the learning doesn’t take place at the moment I return the essay or exam: it takes place while we’re doing everything else, and especially while they are doing everything else. They should try to take a lot of satisfaction from those processes — from their own “thinking through of ideas.” Then even if they don’t get the grade they hoped for, they’ll be able to dry their eyes and come out of the bathroom a little bit sooner and a lot more confident.