Freshman freshman composition composition

So, I don't know whether I mentioned this last spring, but until further notice I am NO LONGER A BASIC COMP PROFESSOR! Woo hoo!

What this does mean, however, is that I am teaching two sections of freshman composition for the first time in forever. The last time I had more than one section of anything was in Fall 2009, and it was Brit Lit I. I'd have to go back another year for doubled-up sections of English 101.

I understand there are people who prefer to have multiple sections of the same class, but I have to say that I find it weird. They are back to back in the same classroom, and it makes me feel like I have become stuck in a time loop. Except not, because as always, the two classes are quite different in character -- the students in the first section are chattier and much more willing to play along with the whole "class discussion" thing (which, by the way, students at Misnomer U. often seem to regard as a weird infringement upon their right to sit stone-still for an hour and fifteen minutes). So I teach one class, and then I do the same thing over again, except things don't go as well the second time.

I can already tell the second section is going to be that class. You know, the one that always reminds you that you are not the most awesome professor in the world, and that this is not necessarily the world's best job; the one that, around midterm time, makes you seriously consider just calling in sick on Tuesdays. I'm almost starting to miss the predictability of knowing that Basic Comp was always going to be that class.

So, in just about three weeks, I will be getting my first massive stack of thirty-six freshman comp essays, with accompanying draft work, peer workshop comments, and first attempts at a Works Cited page. Hoo boy.

Summer (re)reading: A Yorkshire Tragedy

OK, so I think I'm going to teach this one in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama next semester. I will admit that I decided to teach it because it's basically a one-act, and therefore easily Xeroxable and ideal for slotting into an already-overstuffed syllabus. But I'm seeing a lot of interesting potential in it.

The play is based on the real-life case of Walter Calverley, who was apparently always something of a gambler and a drunk, and who snapped one day, murdered two of his three young sons, and attempted to murder his wife and his other son. The playwrights don't use real names -- the surviving Calverleys were naturally averse to having the family tragedy put on the public stage, and they were a wealthy family with some political clout -- but it's pretty clearly the early modern equivalent of a ripped-from-the-headlines episode of Law and Order.

The only named characters are three servants who appear in the opening scene, gossip a bit about their masters, and are then never heard from again. Everyone else is nameless: Husband, Wife, Son, Maid, Knight. The servants' dialogue at the beginning is the only bit resembling comedy. It's a stark play, very stripped-down, and makes you realize how overstuffed most full-length plays are by comparison. (I suspect it may be unfinished -- there are references in the first scene to an old flame of the husband's, and maybe the playwright(s) intended to develop all these loose ends, only someone else wanted the play to be rushed onto the stage while it was still topical. At any rate, it's probably fortuitous that they didn't -- I doubt that a comic subplot and a hefty load of moralizing would improve it.)

The Husband is the only character with much in the way of complexity, and you can almost see the playwrights grappling with the same questions you read in newspaper columns today after some apparently inexplicable act of violence: What would make someone do this? Where do people like this come from? Are they like us, after all? The other characters use the words unnatural, barbarous, monstrous, but these don't quite seem like answers. In his more outrageously antisocial moments, the Husband accuses his virtuous wife of adultery and his children of being bastards; at other times, when he seems at once more honest with himself and perilously close to madness, he despairs of his own prodigality and inability to provide for his family: How well was I left, very well, very well! My lands showed like a full moon about me, but now the moon's i' th' last quarter, waning, waning. And I am mad to think that moon was mine: mine and my father's, and my forefathers', generations, generations. Down goes the house of us, down, down, it sinks. Now is the name a beggar, begs in me that name which hundreds of years has made this shire famous: in me, and my posterity runs out. And these reflections lead him to the fatal conclusion that his sons would be better off dead.

I'm curious to see how it teaches. We'll be coming to it after Faustus, and after the revenge tragedies -- I think they will have the whole tortured-antihero formula down. It also seems to raise odd, uncomfortably contemporary questions about crime, media, and notoriety, in ways that (say) The Duchess of Malfi does not, even if you know intellectually that Giovanna d'Aragona was just as much a real person as the Wife of the play. I'm both looking forward to it, and apprehensive about it. We will see.

back from grading camp...

... a.k.a. the AP exam reading, where I read and scored 1,007 exams in seven days. It's oddly soothing. I think this is because you don't have to justify or comment on your scores at all, and also you don't feel EVEN REMOTELY responsible for the students. I kind of take it personally when our own, homegrown students can't manage subject-verb agreement, or when they can't spell words that are IN PRINT RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM, or when they say completely daft things about people in other countries. But when it's someone else's students, far away? Pfft, those things are mildly amusing at best, and at worst not really infuriating.

I think I need to cultivate the grading-camp Zen feeling during the regular semester. (It might help if my normal employer would put me up in a nice hotel with little bitty baby quail.)

of travel and education

So, as I hinted in my last post, a friend and I are hoping to put together a summer study-abroad course for the Honors program next year, although I won't know until fall whether it's going to be approved or not. Summer programs are the only kind of study abroad we have at Misnomer U.; anything during the regular semester is too long, too much time away from regular coursework, maybe also too scary for our students. So the Spanish program used to do one-month immersion programs in Mexico, until Mexico also became too scary; now they go to Spain instead. And the residential Honors program -- one of the few programs here that isn't run on a shoestring, thanks to a generous legacy from an alumna -- spends a month in various, though most often English-speaking, destinations in western Europe. This is a required component of residential Honors, and it's also totally free for many of the students apart from food and incidental expenses, and heavily subsidized for the others (it depends on exactly which scholarship they hold).

In four years of interviewing applicants for the Honors scholarships, I've learned that this is a huge draw for some of them and a huge source of anxiety for some of the others -- there is usually at least one student in every group who says that they are not interested in residential Honors because the study abroad component scares them. Sometimes my co-interviewers have tried to talk them out of it; I have never done so, since there are always plenty of other students who would love to go on the trip, and I'd just as soon save the scarce slots in this program for the ones who do want them, badly. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the ones who don't want to travel are the ones who most need to do so. God knows, a lot of the fear seems to be passed down from parent to child -- and it was my good luck that I was born to parents who talked me out of being afraid, who took me to Europe and the Dominican Republic when I was a teenager, and then gave me the push I needed to go on that Christmas break trip to the Bahamas with my high school marine biology class (because in Fairfax County, Virginia -- a place that now seems very far away -- even public schools do that sort of class trip).

So I went to the Bahamas, and had a wonderful time. And then, when I was a sophomore in college, I went to Spain for a semester, and hated it for the first six weeks, and loved it for the last eight. I did everything wrong in some ways, being too shy to speak as much Spanish as I should have done or to socialize with strangers, but it was still life-changing. Spain was where I learned how to handle myself -- how to tell if that guy cat-calling you is harmless or scary, how to drink in bars without turning yourself into an obviously-drunk target, how to deal with police and insurance companies after your purse gets snatched, how to be a stranger in a strange land. And it was reading Lorca on the all-night train to Granada, and feeling the hush that falls over people when they're in the presence of Guernica, and going to see El dia de la bestia without English subtitles and wondering what the hell that was all about. And it was orange trees, and lilacs, and little dishes of olives, and fireworks, and dirty city beaches, and a blizzard of pigeons in the square behind the cathedral.

We don't give our students all of that. We don't even give them a new language to dream in. We give them a lot of activities and excursions, and probably not even enough time to feel displaced. We give them, more or less, what my parents gave me on my first whistle-stop tour of Europe -- a glimpse, a taste, a safe space in which to see a little of the world. And maybe it's just as well; maybe that is what they need first, and bigger adventures can come later.

Now this blog is illustrated!

Note the snazzy new title image, intended to answer the perennial question: just what is a porpentine? (I am not sure that the illustrator of this particular one, Conrad Gesner, had ever actually seen a porcupine, but his imagination clearly made up for any deficiencies in this regard. Anyway, I fell in love with this image when I first stumbled across it at the age of seventeen, in a cheap Folger paperback edition of Hamlet, and I thought it was high time that it graced the blog.)

In other news, Exciting Stuff may possibly be happening next summer (as in the getting-paid-to-travel kind of exciting!), although it's not a definite thing yet. Keep your fingers crossed!

Rumpusing

I am back from the annual Rumpus for Medievalists (and discerning early modernists), and as always, I had a most excellent time. I do have a massive scab on the chin, though, due to circumstances involving too much free ale and mead, too many things I wanted to go to at one time, and an ill-advised sprint across the campus.

I was kind of hoping my colleagues would ask me about it at yesterday's all-day department meeting, so that I could make up a colorful tale about my medieval-rumpus-related injury. Perhaps it would involve me saving a nun from a Viking invasion. Or a grendel attacking the mead-room. Or a green giant could have challenged me to a chin-swiping contest. Or perhaps there could have been a demonstration of trial by ordeal, and I could have volunteered to be a witch and get ducked in the swan pond, and one of the swans could have attacked me (because little did we know that they were not regular swans, but 900-year-old enchanted swans who were really people, and they mistook me for the real witch who had transformed them).

It says much about the general character of the Rumpus that none of these scenarios seems all that improbable.

Semester wrap-up, by the numbers

Number of papers graded: 184 (and 24 exams, and 13 presentations)

Number of papers yet to grade: 37 (and 35 exams, and 15 presentations)

Students enrolled in Basic Comp: 5

Students who still have a prayer of passing Basic Comp: 2

Students who will DEFINITELY pass Basic Comp: 0

Applications received for philosophy position: About 150

New colleagues hired in philosophy: 1

Major undergraduate-research events attended: 5

Number of these events that were full-on conferences in other cities: 2

Number of actual grown-up conferences attended: 0, but will be 1 next week.

Pages written on Kzoo paper: 5, plus one page of half-assed notes

Minimum acceptable page length for Kzoo paper: 8, probably.