Failure

I think one of my students is going to fail the Shakespeare course. This is a new and upsetting experience; that is, of course I've flunked students before, but they have always been students who were actively complicit in their failure -- the ones who stopped coming to class, or didn't turn in assignments, or turned in a Wikipedia entry as their term paper and didn't even have the wit to claim they wrote it.

This student is legitimately trying. She's also woefully unprepared for an upper-level Shakespeare class and has no clue how to write an academic essay. She managed to scrape by with a D+ on the first paper, since she made a good-faith attempt to follow the guidelines. The second paper, which was supposed to be a summary and response to a critical article, was massively plagiarized, but it wasn't an Internet cut-and-paste job; it was the sort of plagiarism students commit when they don't really understand what they're reading and therefore haven't the foggiest idea how to paraphrase or summarize it. You know, "The author talks of how the subject is interpolated into a preconceptualist paradigm of reality. Also, he say that promotes the use of the posttextual paradigm of reality to deconstruct hierarchy."* That kind of plagiarism.

I highlighted the plagiarized passages on the first page, explained why it was a problem and told her that she would need to add quotation marks and citations or else paraphrase thoroughly, and advised her to focus on putting the parts of the essay she did understand into her own words and not to worry about trying to paraphrase stuff she didn't. And I gave her a week to rewrite for a maximum grade of C. (Honestly, I would be shocked if the final version earned a higher grade than C in any event.)

She said she wasn't very good at English, and the last time she'd taken a comp course was in 1992. Holy fuck. I don't know who advised her that taking an upper-level Shakespeare course would be a good idea. (She is a "general studies" major, which is Misnomer U.-speak for "this student started off in a preprofessional program but wasn't able to pass the qualifying exams; in theory, they are supposed to be taking a study skills seminar and getting some intensive advising, but it doesn't seem to be working in this case.)

I don't know if I did the right thing by giving her a second chance. I'm not sure there is a right thing to do in this situation (it is too late for her to drop the course now, and I don't think she would drop in any case because she said she needs another English course to graduate in December). On the one hand, this is very, very clearly not a student who intended to plagiarize, and we're meant to be educating students, not penalizing them for not already being educated, yes? On the other hand, it's just as clear that she hasn't come close to mastering the academic skills graduating seniors are expected to master, and almost certainly will not master them in the next few weeks. I'm putting this as if it were an academic problem, but of course it's a human one, too. It seems like a cruel cat-and-mouse game to lead a student on for almost two decades, taking her money and pretending to give her an education in return, and at last offering her a nearly meaningless degree. And yet it seems equally cruel to say no, you're not going to graduate after all, we know you tried your best but sometimes that's not good enough.

Ugh. I don't know what to do in situations like this.

* This is not an actual quotation from the essay; I made it up with a little help from the Postmodernism Generator. But you get the idea.

Courseblogging: Is Mary a Girl?

I have an exercise that I like to do on the first day of the Brit Lit I survey. I give the students a handout with Caedmon's Hymn (in Old English and modern English translation), a snippet of the prologue to the Prioress's Tale (in Middle English with glosses), and a couple of stanzas of Mary Sidney's "Psalm 139." And I ask them to pair up and talk a bit about the differences between the three passages, both in language and content. I keep hoping this will keep them from telling me that Chaucer or Shakespeare wrote in Old English (although it usually doesn't). More importantly, I hope it will provide a glimpse of three different ways of looking at the world. I chose these three passages, out of all of the possible early English texts out there, because they share a similar theme -- praising God -- but the authors imagine God, and the speaker's relationship with God, in wildly different terms. Which means they imagine being human in different terms as well. We can get a lot of mileage out of those differences -- usually more than enough for a first day's discussion.

This year, I was somewhat thrown when a student asked, "Is Mary a girl?" (I didn't know, yet, that this particular student specializes in quirky and awkward questions; my favorite, so far, has been "Is the Wife of Bath a cougar?")

"What?" I said, and then, "Mary Sidney's a woman, yeah."

"Oh," she said. "I was just wondering, because there weren't very many woman writers back then?"

I said there were more than you might think, and moved on to something else.

I've been thinking of this exchange, on and off, as the semester wears on and I start planning the reading list for the second half of the survey. We're not reading many early women writers this semester. A day on Marie de France; another on Margery Kempe; about half a day of Queen Elizabeth I, since she kept getting crowded out by Wyatt; a few poems by Aemilia Lanyer and Katherine Philips, to be read alongside their more canonical contemporaries. That's about all there was time for. It's rather more than we read in any of my undergraduate medieval or early modern lit classes. Sometimes it feels like not enough, especially considering that Misnomer U. is historically a women's college, still has a majority-female student body, and pays lip service to promoting the study of women's issues in its mission statement. Sometimes it feels like too many -- The Second Shepherd's Play got the chop this semester in favor of retaining Kempe; Milton is represented only by two sonnets, and I find both of those tradeoffs uncomfortable. Maybe I should try "Lycidas" next semester and toss "A Description of Cooke-Ham"? Which one will serve them better on the GRE, when they have a boss who likes to quote poetry, when they have their own classes of high-school students to guide on the first halting steps toward interpretation? Which one will they remember when (if?) they have a little space in their lives for reflecting on poetry?

I don't know. On the one hand, I don't like tokenism; I think we should be teaching works because they're good and important, not because they happen to be written by women. On the other hand, who gets to decide what's good or important? And isn't it inherently important that students know that people named Mary are generally female, even if they happen to write poetry?

I don't feel nearly as conflicted about the reading list for the second semester; by the nineteenth century there are plenty of women writers who are genuinely canonical (four out of five of the ones I'm contemplating teaching in this post*, for example, including two of the hyper-canonical ones). One can have one's cake and eat it too. But by the beginning of April, when we get to Virginia Woolf (who is, of course, as canonical as it gets), even the ones who were in my class for the first-semester survey have forgotten that we spent a day with Kempe or twenty minutes with Lanyer, and are inclined to take her parable of Shakespeare's sister as historical fact. I don't know if there's any way to avoid that. Most people forget most of what they learn in their gen ed classes, I suspect, unless they happen upon something that particularly fascinates or amuses or startles them, so it may not matter what ends up on the syllabus anyway.

But I think the student who asked if Mary was a girl was startled (and perhaps her classmates were, too, after she asked the question). And that's all to the good.

* For those who are wondering (and thanks to everyone who weighed in and encouraged me to choose Door B), the winner is ... North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell! Good story, a heroine who's around the same age as most college students and whose shifts in world-view and questions about received wisdom should still resonate, and lots of interesting stuff about industrialization and gender roles and class conflict and (re-)education to talk about. The fact that it passes the Bechdel Test many times over is a very nice bonus.

The runners-up, besides Northanger Abbey, were Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I may get around to giving them all a try eventually; it was hard to choose.

smalltown blues

I am not, in fact, dead. I have been in VAP City over fall break; I went there with a vague idea that I might go to the art museum and maybe the theater, but ended up doing nothing so cultural. I wandered around a lot and gawped at architecture (for verily, VAP City has amazing architecture), and took the bus here and there, and went to a street festival and some bookstores and petted the bookstore cat, and had mini-doughnuts and hot cider with a slug of rum at the farmer's market. You know, city things. I miss those. Oh, and I went to the zoo, because that's always fun. Here are some zoo pics.







I needed to get away, if only for a few days; I think I will continue to need to get away at least once a semester, and for a couple of months in the summer, until I retire and can move wherever I like. It is becoming increasingly clear that I am not a small-town girl by nature. This is an unpleasant surprise, because I'd gone through the first thirty-two years of my life assuming I was the sort of person who could live contentedly almost anywhere, and now it turns out that I'm not, and I'm not sure what to do with that particular piece of self-knowledge. Oh well. Have a baby elephant.



(And no, I'm not applying for jobs in less remote locations; this is more of a vague sort of funk that I don't actually do anything about, the same way I feel vaguely blue about the prospect of never marrying and having children, yet I can't bring myself to put up a profile on one of those online dating sites, even though this would be the most logical course of action under the circumstances. I suck at Life Planning, I think.)

Courseblogging: Economies of Scale

I am holding individual conferences for the Brit Lit I papers this week, which means that it's only Wednesday and I'm already totally, completely exhausted.

I tried this for the first time in the spring, when I had fourteen students in my one and only section of Brit Lit II. It was nice. Holding individual meetings with forty-eight students is totally different.

I'm glad I decided to do this -- I think it's necessary, especially since so many of the students have told me that they've never written a literary analysis paper before, or they've never written a paper this long before (5 to 7 pages). But oh God, I feel like I've had the same conversation about twenty times this week. And it is still, as I said, only Wednesday.

(It doesn't help that I finally broke a long-standing resolution and made a list of suggested paper topics, although I think this, too, was necessary; last year I got some papers on ... interesting topics, of which my favorite was entitled "Is it possible to sell your soul to the devil yes or no?"* So I thought it was only fair to give the first-time paper-writers a little guidance, but it turns out the students collectively homed in on two of the seven suggested topics and ignored the rest. I'm getting heartily sick of The Relationship Between Canterbury Tale X and Its Teller and Is Beowulf an Ideal Hero?, especially since most of the students haven't really got the "anticipating and responding to potential counterarguments" move down, so many of the papers are turning into long lists of Why Beowulf Is Awesome. Personally, I think I am on Unferth's side, if not the Fire Dragon's.)

Anyway, this is the first time my two sections have started to feel like a great deal more work than one, and it's a bit of a shock to the system. (I've taught double sections of comp before, but not lit, and with comp it's obvious much earlier in the semester that you're going to spend your life slogging through massive quantities of paper.)

* The answer, in case you are wondering, is "Yes it is possible because Dr. Faustus sold his soul to Lucifer, in exchange for his body and soul." Who knew Lucifer threw in a free body? Certainly not I.

Early Courseblogging, Series 4: Two Textbook Questions

Well, it is almost time to order books for my second semester lit survey, so some early courseblogging:

1) Has anybody ever used the deal Norton advertises where they package the Norton Critical Edition of your choice with one of the anthologies at no extra cost? How does it work, exactly? Does it make it impossible for students to buy used books, and / or is the bookstore likely to screw the order up?

2) Let's say you're teaching a survey course, pitched at about the sophomore level, for a mixed population that ranges from really bright budding English majors to students who will probably never read another serious work of literature in their lives. Let's also say that you've decided you want the students to read one mid-length novel in addition to the works in the anthology.

Do you pick:

A) a work by a really hyper-canonical author, someone you think everyone with a college education should at least have heard of, and ideally read? (There is a chance students will have already read it in high school and will have a been-there-done-that attitude. It may also not be a totally "representative" work, in terms of being typical of the period when it was written.)

B) a work by a somewhat less well-known author which feels more "representative," in that it hits a whole bunch of themes and concerns that feel pretty typical for the period, and it represents certain historical conditions and trends that you want students to know about. (The author is not super-obscure -- I'd expect most English majors to run across this writer at some point -- but I wouldn't be surprised if a well-educated person in a different field had never heard of him / her.)

(I'm being deliberately vague about the specific authors / books involved, partly because I'm contemplating multiple works in each category, and partly because I'm more interested in how my readers think texts for surveys should be selected in general than how they feel about the individual novels in question.)

Courseblogging: On the Benefits of Chicken-Centered Pedagogy

My Brit Lit classes are gearing up for our read-through of the Nun's Priest's Tale on Friday. This is fast becoming an annual tradition, timed to coincide -- more or less -- with the eve of Talk Like a Pirate Day. Talk Like Chaucer Day? Or is it more like Talk Like a Chicken Day? I do not know. I suspect that I will be the only one with the nerve to make chicken noises to embellish her part. Hey, I'm the only one who can sight-read Middle English with any degree of fluency, so I have to do something embarrassing to level the playing field.

Anyway, the students have been in and out of the office all week to practice their parts: one or two on Monday, more on Tuesday, a small flurry today, and, I predict, a flood tomorrow.

It's interesting to watch them when they're all trying something new and unfamiliar. Some of them have clearly prepared, or perhaps over-prepared; they listen to the sound files on the Harvard Chaucer page and come into the office with their lines written out phonetically. Some (mostly the young men) sail in, brashly confident that they can figure it out as they go along (reading a few lines usually disabuses them of this notion). Everybody makes mistakes, of course. I tell them they're supposed to make mistakes. What's interesting is how they handle them. Some freeze up every time they come to a word they're not sure about, wanting to be told the correct pronunciation. Some correctly generalize after they've been corrected a few times -- once they know that "my" should be pronounced "me," they figure out, without being told, that "by" is "be," "time" is "teem," and so forth. Some remember how to pronounce "my" after only one mistake, but can't seem to generalize. Some plow through line after line, laughing nervously every time I correct them, then making exactly the same mistake in the next line. Some -- and these tend to be my favorite students -- ask questions about why the pronunciation is this or that, and whether you roll your r's in Middle English, and what's up with that Great Vowel Shift anyway?

You learn stuff about your students this way. It's interesting. That's partly why I do it, to be honest -- I'm not expecting any of them to learn to pronounce Middle English particularly well, and even if they do, it's not like this particular skill is good for anything except a very nerdy party trick.

I do it, also, because it gets them into the office, and requires them to try something new, and forces them to speak up in front of their classmates and risk making mistakes (in a low-stakes context -- everyone gets at least a B on this assignment unless they totally half-ass it and don't even make an attempt at the Middle English pronunciation). Besides, the final product, the read-through, is as collaborative as it gets -- everybody has a part, and we all get to hear the play of voices as the foxes and chickens and narrators read in turn. And I think all of these things are desiderata, especially at this point in the semester.

And the whole endeavor is a bit of a journey -- a journey that involves lots of stumbling and wandering by the way -- and it's just occurred to me that this is a nice parallel for the Canterbury Tales as a whole, since it's all about this group of flawed human beings quarreling and distracting each other and yet struggling, perhaps without fully realizing it, toward transcendence.

A couple of students made startlingly brilliant observations in class this week; I always like it when they come up with interpretations that hadn't occurred to me. One of them was in the 11:00 class, which is full of Startlingly Brilliant Folk. We were talking about the Wife of Bath's Tale, and I said something about how this was one of those cases where the tale seems wiser than the teller (because you don't expect the Wife of Bath to come up with that eloquent bit about gentilesse, not from what we've seen of her so far). And one kid said maybe she becomes wiser in the course of telling the tale -- she is on pilgrimage, after all, and presumably in search of enlightenment.

And that was lovely. But the other moment floored me (partly because it was in the 8:00 section, and I admit I've already started to expect less from that class). We were discussing the Pardoner's Tale this morning, and the way he goes into his sales pitch at the end, but nobody's buying his pig's bones and old pillowcases because he's already confessed he's a total fraud. Now, I tend to read the PT as an exploration of the power of storytelling, for both good and evil, but I suggested that his failure to land a sale meant this power has limits.

No, said one student, it means the tale HAS done its work -- it's taught the audience the lesson they need to learn, even if it's not the one the Pardoner intended to teach. They make the right choice, after all. The tale is getting the better of the teller.

Man, I love Chaucer :)

Courseblogging: Why

The students have been getting their feet wet with Middle English for the last week or so -- first a selection of lyrics, then the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. On Friday of last week, when they'd just gotten their first taste of Middle English poetry, I invited them to write down their questions. (Not to ask questions, as I would have done back in grad school; for if I have learned nothing else, I have learned that about two-thirds of them never will raise their hands, not even if I invite them to swap papers and ask someone else's question instead of their own.)

The questions, as always, were excellent. They ranged from the very specific (What does "grislich" mean? What is meant by "hevene queene," is that Mary?), through the shrewd generalizations and observations (Why do so many of the words start with y? Why is April spelled "Aprille" in one poem and "Averil" in another?) to the very broad (How many people spoke this kind of English? Does anybody speak this language today? What made the old kind of English change into the language we speak today?) (Alas, I had no answer for this last student; all I could do was refer the whole class to my medievalist colleague's History of English course if they wanted to know more. Who knows, one or two of them might even enroll.)

And then there were the "why do we have to study this?" questions: Why is it important to know middle English? What is the relevance of Chaucer to today's society?

Like a lot of early English lit folks, I tend to cringe at the word "relevance" (and its evil twin, "relatable"); The Rebel Lettriste has an eloquent post explaining why. But at the same time, I've got to acknowledge that the question is fair play, at least when it comes from the aspiring nurses and chefs and accountants who fill the gen ed classes. And it's a question I can't answer for them. They have to find their own answers. I told them so, at the beginning of the next class period; but not before I played them this.

That blows my mind, I said. That people are still recording and performing this song, some five-hundred-odd years after it was written. That this is still living literature. For me, that's why.