Going public

So I won this award-thingy, which is nice, I guess. It means my colleagues think well of me, and it will look good when I submit my tenure file (which I am resolutely NOT THINKING ABOUT, as it is not due until January and I have ten million more urgent things to do between now and then.)

One of these things, as of yesterday, is giving an hour-long lecture on "scholarly research or current humanities interests," open to the public. This is one of the obligations that go along with accepting the award (which is why it is a bit of a white elephant, and why people who have already won it once tend to decline all future nominations). The lectures are videotaped, and possibly made available online, and / or archived somewhere forever (I'm a little fuzzy about what goes on after the taping, although I have definitely witnessed the taping). So it is very public. This is precisely the kind of thing I find terrifying. My colleagues in the history department are better at this, since they get called upon to talk to the public much more regularly. One of them was even on TV last February, explaining how Valentine's Day is all about wolves and blood.

Also, most people at four-year schools seem to do some sort of research talk, although some of the presentations at community colleges are more generalist in nature. And I kind of hate my scholarly research. Well, I don't absolutely hate it now that I am at a school where nobody really cares whether you do any, and you're free to work on random puttery little projects, or not, or whatever you feel like. But I truly cannot imagine giving an hour-long public talk about my dissertation (which I haven't even thought about much for the last five years) or about either of the current puttery projects I'm working on. One of them is about a play that almost nobody other than early modern lit scholars has ever heard of. The other one is about a very, very canonical text that everybody has heard of, but that particular project is making me feel like an idiot right now. (I have NO idea what possessed me to take on Hypercanonical Author, who isn't even early modern, but it was clear from the reviewer's comments that I have a lot to learn about "the rich history of Hypercanonical Author criticism," so I've been trying to soak up as much as possible before the revisions are due. So maybe I should talk about Hypercanonical Author, because at least he's inhabiting a lot of headspace right now. But I don't really WANT to talk about something that makes me feel like an idiot, and also this project would STILL take a lot of explaining, because although people know who Hypercanonical Author is, his actual works aren't familiar in the way that Shakespeare, for example, is familiar.)

Honestly, I think I just want to geek out about Shakespeare. I can do that for an hour, easily, and people are interested in Shakespeare. Would it be weird or nonscholarly to just deliver a "here are some random moments that I like in Shakespeare, and here is why they are cool" talk? (Of course I would jazz it up with a proper title, like "Shakespeare at 450: Why He Still Matters" or something. Or "Shakespeare: He's All About Pirates and Severed Heads.")

Two things that fall into the general category of mixed blessings

1) Discovering that the edited collection you sent an abstract off to and then forgot about has, in fact, found a publisher. And oh yeah, the deadline to submit the final version of the essay is in six weeks...

2) Learning that the QEP proposal you wrote six months ago has, in fact, won your university's QEP competition, and you are cordially invited (read: obligated) to join the committee that is supposed to figure out how to execute it. (There is, thank God, a small amount of cash involved. Otherwise, I might be inclined to think of this one as an unmixed curse.)

I am not sure whether I should be celebrating or hiding under the bed.

Huh. That was not so bad, except for the parts that were

OK, so they came and I looked. I seem to have escaped the falling sword, at least this time around; most of the evals were fine and the ones from the Shakespeare course, which I was the one I was most worried about, were positively glowing.

Curiously, the lowest ratings came from the 11 a.m. section of Brit Lit II -- the class that I had personally enjoyed the most and thought went the most smoothly. Three or four students said they thought I was pitching the class toward the English majors too much and ignoring the non-majors. (Hmm, maybe that's because the English majors are the ones who talk and ask questions and seem engaged? You think?) Anyway, I'm not sure what to do with this, especially since the 8 a.m. students -- almost all non-majors -- seemed to have no such complaints.

As per usual, there were a handful of comments about how I was too nervous and fidgety and moved around the room too much and it was distracting. One student expressed the opinion that I might have a disability. Harrumph. Another one -- referring to me by last name only -- wrote something along the lines of "Porpentine does not know how to relate to her students. She kept telling us about things* that she said were only studied on the graduate level. WE DO NOT CARE." Somehow, I don't think my chair will take this as the damning indictment it was evidently intended to be. And there were the usual demands for PowerPoint, and complaints that I asked open-ended questions and wouldn't just tell them the answers, none of which really bothers me.

More worrisome, I think, is the fact that the one question on which I seem to be getting consistently low ratings is "This instructor conducted class in a way that stimulated interest." After three semesters, it's clear that this is a pattern and not a fluke, but I'm not sure what I can do about it, short of getting a personality transplant. I mean, I do show images and video clips, and they say they like that; they say I'm enthusiastic and they like that; and nobody has given me any concrete suggestions about how to be less boring, other than not telling them about stuff they DO NOT CARE about. Blah.

Oh well. I don't think I'm going to get fired for being boring, so it's all good.

* Incidentally, I have absolutely no idea what these "things" might be. I do remember saying something like "Nobody reads the Parson's Tale except grad students because it's a really long sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins," but we did read the Parson's Prologue, so it's not like it wasn't relevant. Other than that, I haven't a clue. Honestly, I think this is the real reason why course evals bother me as a general concept; so many of the comments bear no obvious relationship to anything I remember saying or doing, so it's hard to know what to make of them.

ETA: Please note that I'm dwelling on a handful of negative comments because they tend to loom large in my own head -- this was an overwhelmingly positive set of evals, and I'm not sure they can be improved all that much while still holding students to reasonable standards of college-level work. I thought of deleting this post when I read it over this morning and realized how negative it sounded, but I don't like to delete posts.

a rhetorical question

Is there anything more agonizing than waiting for the e-mail with your course evaluation results? (Besides, I guess, waiting to find out whether you have cancer or something.)

Damocles, I feel for you...

What possessed me...

... to think that ending the comp classes with a collaborative writing project was a good idea in any way, shape, or form?

... to assume that if I paired two C students together, they would somehow magically become able to remedy the deficiencies in each other's work?

... to think that if I paired an A student with a C student, they would make it to the end of the semester without killing each other?

... to decide that I was going to collect the group projects on Monday and have them all graded by Friday; and, moreover, to create a lesson plan that requires me to follow through on this rash promise?

... to teach a contemporary play about a mathematical concept that I can't begin to wrap my head around? Seriously, what in hell do I know about math? I'm not sure I even know anything about contemporary drama.

apparently, I was on crack when I wrote these syllabi

Somehow, I scheduled student conferences with three of my four classes for Monday through Thursday of this week. Yes, those would be the three that aren't the medieval lit class. I shall be meeting face-to-face with all but FIVE of my students, having written copious notes beforehand. Or semi-copious notes. Or screw it, whatever I've got time for.

Luckily, the total enrollment in those three classes is around 45; had they been filled to the cap, it would have been more like 70. What the hell was I thinking?

Oh, and I have a paper for SAA due on Sunday, and an annual-report-thingy for the tenure file due Monday. (As a side note, I have never been to SAA before. Is it normal for the papers to list SIXTY-ONE items on the Works Cited page? 'Cos that's what one of the people in my seminar has done, and I was under the impression that these were supposed to be, you know, works in process, and not necessarily exhaustively detailed and polished pieces of scholarship. Also, I'm not sure I cited sixty-one works in my entire dissertation. It was a short dissertation. But I hope not to completely humiliate myself.)

Blogging will be light while I have a nervous breakdown. See y'all on the other side.