So, slightly crappy used bookstores in towns where there is a Big Box MegaUniversity? It turns out that they are GREAT if you are collecting secondhand copies of texts that have been assigned many, many times at the Big Box MegaUniversity over the years. I'm now the proud owner of nineteen copies of The Tempest, assorted editions, at an average cost of around $1.50 a pop. Nice.
(And yes, the books are for my students, and no, I don't usually buy their textbooks myself! But I am directing a really exciting Honors project involving The Tempest in performance, and I realized rather late in the game, too late to order textbooks through the usual channels, that it would be a great opportunity to get her and her actors into the Brit Lit I classroom. The fact that the play is apparently subversive enough to be banned in Arizona is a nice little side bonus, although I didn't know about that at the time.)
Plus, I get to show them Helen Mirren as Prospero/a! This is going to be so much fun!
Monday, January 23, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
so it goes like it goes...
So, it's another new semester around here, and new semesters have begun to feel less like an exciting new adventure and more like an endless loop. (This is why I'm such a lousy blogger these days, by the way: it feels like I've said it all before.)
Some notes on the first three days:
-- I'm teaching Brit Lit I for the first time in more than two years. Wow, it's a LOT easier to get people to drop this class than Brit Lit II. Show 'em some examples of Middle English on the first day and have them read 1,250 lines of Beowulf for homework, and a third of the class vanishes. I think I like it. (I now think I need a new strategy for Brit Lit II. Maybe I should hit them with a whopping big chunk of the Prelude?)
-- I'm really liking my Shakespeare class, so far. There are a whole lot of them -- 19, up from 13 last semester -- and they are talkers. I hope they keep up this level of energy.
-- I have seven students in Basic Comp. Six of them failed it last semester. I feel really sorry for the other one, who seems like a nice, responsible kid, and I'm already starting to regret my decision to move toward more peer workshopping in that class. OTOH, I'm glad that we're starting over with fresh assignments.
-- This will probably be my last time teaching Advanced Comp, as we're replacing it with a two-semester freshman comp sequence. I think it'll be a good class. I've got a whole slew of theater majors (they seem to clump together and register for their gen ed courses in bunches), and I always enjoy the theater kids; they are not always the best students, but they're quirky and passionate and interesting, and they tend to genuinely like being in college, unlike the business / pre-nursing / occupational therapy / culinary arts crowd, who are usually just in it for the piece of paper. (I feel a little guilty about stereotyping students based on majors, and there are always ones who defy the stereotypes, but on the whole they hold true.)
Some notes on the first three days:
-- I'm teaching Brit Lit I for the first time in more than two years. Wow, it's a LOT easier to get people to drop this class than Brit Lit II. Show 'em some examples of Middle English on the first day and have them read 1,250 lines of Beowulf for homework, and a third of the class vanishes. I think I like it. (I now think I need a new strategy for Brit Lit II. Maybe I should hit them with a whopping big chunk of the Prelude?)
-- I'm really liking my Shakespeare class, so far. There are a whole lot of them -- 19, up from 13 last semester -- and they are talkers. I hope they keep up this level of energy.
-- I have seven students in Basic Comp. Six of them failed it last semester. I feel really sorry for the other one, who seems like a nice, responsible kid, and I'm already starting to regret my decision to move toward more peer workshopping in that class. OTOH, I'm glad that we're starting over with fresh assignments.
-- This will probably be my last time teaching Advanced Comp, as we're replacing it with a two-semester freshman comp sequence. I think it'll be a good class. I've got a whole slew of theater majors (they seem to clump together and register for their gen ed courses in bunches), and I always enjoy the theater kids; they are not always the best students, but they're quirky and passionate and interesting, and they tend to genuinely like being in college, unlike the business / pre-nursing / occupational therapy / culinary arts crowd, who are usually just in it for the piece of paper. (I feel a little guilty about stereotyping students based on majors, and there are always ones who defy the stereotypes, but on the whole they hold true.)
Sunday, December 4, 2011
musings on the new comp textbook
We're getting a new textbook in Comp next semester. This means overhauling the Basic Comp course, which might not be a bad thing because I don't think what I'm doing now is working very well. (I think I will have them write actual essays and business letters and stuff from the beginning of the class, instead of starting with paragraphs. Because really, who writes a paragraph in isolation? I also think I might scrap most of the rhetorical-analysis stuff, since I'm starting to feel like I don't even know why I emphasize it so much, except that it was what we did in Basic Comp at the University of Basketball. And the students have trouble analyzing how a newspaper op-ed piece works; half of them are at the point where they're still trying to make sense of what it says, and none of them are used to going that meta.)
But anyway: the new book. It's ... different. I'm used to teaching with a no-nonsense handbook, the sort of text that explains what thesis statements are, gives examples of every conceivable citation style, and has a handful of sample essays by strong student writers, but pretty much leaves professors and students on their own as to content. But this new book is kind of a semi-handbook and semi-reader; it has all of these essays on assorted topics by professional writers, everyone from Dave Barry to Amy Tan, and I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with the essays. Presumably they are not meant to be used as models, since the writing is too polished to be a reachable model for most students, and neither the style nor the subject matter resembles a typical college paper. Are the students supposed to be writing about them, then? What are they supposed to be saying about them?
Also, I find myself vaguely distrusting the new book because it has too many colored pictures, the typeface is too big, and there are footnotes defining words like "literal," "ambiguous," "Rubik's Cube," and "horrific." It feels, in short, like a K-12 text and not a college-level one. (This isn't actually a problem in Basic Comp, which pretty much is a K-12-level course, but I feel like it would be vaguely insulting to spring this text on regular freshman comp students. But then, I was the sort of kid who habitually took offense at notes explaining the meaning or pronunciation of words, even when I was in elementary school, and I don't know that this is necessarily a normal reaction.)
Growf. I think I have a hard time coping with change.
But anyway: the new book. It's ... different. I'm used to teaching with a no-nonsense handbook, the sort of text that explains what thesis statements are, gives examples of every conceivable citation style, and has a handful of sample essays by strong student writers, but pretty much leaves professors and students on their own as to content. But this new book is kind of a semi-handbook and semi-reader; it has all of these essays on assorted topics by professional writers, everyone from Dave Barry to Amy Tan, and I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with the essays. Presumably they are not meant to be used as models, since the writing is too polished to be a reachable model for most students, and neither the style nor the subject matter resembles a typical college paper. Are the students supposed to be writing about them, then? What are they supposed to be saying about them?
Also, I find myself vaguely distrusting the new book because it has too many colored pictures, the typeface is too big, and there are footnotes defining words like "literal," "ambiguous," "Rubik's Cube," and "horrific." It feels, in short, like a K-12 text and not a college-level one. (This isn't actually a problem in Basic Comp, which pretty much is a K-12-level course, but I feel like it would be vaguely insulting to spring this text on regular freshman comp students. But then, I was the sort of kid who habitually took offense at notes explaining the meaning or pronunciation of words, even when I was in elementary school, and I don't know that this is necessarily a normal reaction.)
Growf. I think I have a hard time coping with change.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The Norton Anthology is dead, long live the Norton Anthology
So, it appears that yet another edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature is on its way. I'm not too sure how I feel about that. Didn't the last one come out only about five years ago? I remember being taken by surprise when I started my first full-time job and realized the one I used in grad school had been replaced.
No more A Room of One's Own, at least not in its entirety. Hello Mrs. Dalloway, instead. No more bringing the Joan Baez CD to class so we can all listen to Mary Hamilton; no more comparing the lists of women writers included in three different editions of the Norton. I'm sure we'll find some other stuff to talk about with Mrs. Dalloway -- who is, for a moment, very nearly a stranger. I don't even remember whether I liked her or not when I was twenty. I suppose I will find out whether I like her now.
No more "Song: Men of England," another piece with a nice musical tie-in.
No more pairing Brian Friel's Translations with Eavan Boland's That the Science of Cartography is Limited. Both gone from the new edition, I shall miss them both. I remember the first time I taught them together, in a classroom with a neglected set of school maps from the mid-twentieth-century shoved in one of the corners. I remember pulling them out of the corner, on an impulse, flipping from map to map, English and French Colonies, Westward Expansion, and Civil War. Asking students what they noticed about the stories the maps told, and the stories they didn't tell. I will miss the end of Translations, with Hugh reading from the Aeneid as the lights go out: as powerful an argument for why stories matter as any I know.
My current Brit Lit II class seems to be left cold by most of these texts, by the way. (They were even left cold when I tried to repeat the map trick; maybe it has to be an ad hoc thing.) Maybe that's just as well; I would have liked my last time teaching them to be filled with fireworks and spark, but this way, I may regret the loss less.
No more A Room of One's Own, at least not in its entirety. Hello Mrs. Dalloway, instead. No more bringing the Joan Baez CD to class so we can all listen to Mary Hamilton; no more comparing the lists of women writers included in three different editions of the Norton. I'm sure we'll find some other stuff to talk about with Mrs. Dalloway -- who is, for a moment, very nearly a stranger. I don't even remember whether I liked her or not when I was twenty. I suppose I will find out whether I like her now.
No more "Song: Men of England," another piece with a nice musical tie-in.
No more pairing Brian Friel's Translations with Eavan Boland's That the Science of Cartography is Limited. Both gone from the new edition, I shall miss them both. I remember the first time I taught them together, in a classroom with a neglected set of school maps from the mid-twentieth-century shoved in one of the corners. I remember pulling them out of the corner, on an impulse, flipping from map to map, English and French Colonies, Westward Expansion, and Civil War. Asking students what they noticed about the stories the maps told, and the stories they didn't tell. I will miss the end of Translations, with Hugh reading from the Aeneid as the lights go out: as powerful an argument for why stories matter as any I know.
My current Brit Lit II class seems to be left cold by most of these texts, by the way. (They were even left cold when I tried to repeat the map trick; maybe it has to be an ad hoc thing.) Maybe that's just as well; I would have liked my last time teaching them to be filled with fireworks and spark, but this way, I may regret the loss less.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Burnt out on Basic
I know I suck at blogging lately. I think this is just not going to be a very good year. For the first half of the semester, I had five different classes to juggle. Now I have only four, but one of them is a section of Basic Comp with twenty-five students. This class is a complete time-and-intelligence suck, and I don't feel like I'm even doing anything useful. Mainly, I am repeating myself over and over for the benefit of people who cannot seem to figure out the bleeding obvious.
(For example: You should staple or paper-clip your papers instead of turning in a bunch of loose sheets. You should put your name on your paper. You should turn the paper in at the beginning of class on the day when it is due. You can find out when it is due by checking the syllabus. If you don't have the paper with you during class on the due date and you decide to bring it by the professor's office two hours later, only to find that she is teaching another class, DO NOT INTERRUPT THAT CLASS. Don't be rude to the person who gives out grades. Do not put your head down on the desk and suck your thumb during class. Do not type your papers in ALL CAPS. If the assignment asks you to evaluate an op-ed article from a newspaper, addressing how effectively the author makes his or her argument, and we have spent the last three days of class talking about what this means and looking at examples of possible thesis statements, do not simply summarize the article. Do not write about an article with words you don't understand in the title, unless you are prepared to look them up. Do not write about a news article that does not take an argumentative position. Do not write about an evangelical Christian web site. Do not write about a blog entry about a culinary gadget that electrocutes lobsters.)
Seriously. I feel like I'm spending my entire life telling people what not to do, and if I do this for another fifty years I still won't hit all the things they shouldn't do. I mean, it would never in my wildest dreams have occurred to me that someone would try to turn in a paragraph about a lobster-electrocutor. (Cue this classic bit of snark from Rate Your Students. This, friends, is Basic Comp in a nutshell.)
So, yeah, feeling pretty burnt out right now. (It will be better in the spring, when this class is tiny and I usually get to know the students well enough to be generous with them. It takes time to be generous.)
(For example: You should staple or paper-clip your papers instead of turning in a bunch of loose sheets. You should put your name on your paper. You should turn the paper in at the beginning of class on the day when it is due. You can find out when it is due by checking the syllabus. If you don't have the paper with you during class on the due date and you decide to bring it by the professor's office two hours later, only to find that she is teaching another class, DO NOT INTERRUPT THAT CLASS. Don't be rude to the person who gives out grades. Do not put your head down on the desk and suck your thumb during class. Do not type your papers in ALL CAPS. If the assignment asks you to evaluate an op-ed article from a newspaper, addressing how effectively the author makes his or her argument, and we have spent the last three days of class talking about what this means and looking at examples of possible thesis statements, do not simply summarize the article. Do not write about an article with words you don't understand in the title, unless you are prepared to look them up. Do not write about a news article that does not take an argumentative position. Do not write about an evangelical Christian web site. Do not write about a blog entry about a culinary gadget that electrocutes lobsters.)
Seriously. I feel like I'm spending my entire life telling people what not to do, and if I do this for another fifty years I still won't hit all the things they shouldn't do. I mean, it would never in my wildest dreams have occurred to me that someone would try to turn in a paragraph about a lobster-electrocutor. (Cue this classic bit of snark from Rate Your Students. This, friends, is Basic Comp in a nutshell.)
So, yeah, feeling pretty burnt out right now. (It will be better in the spring, when this class is tiny and I usually get to know the students well enough to be generous with them. It takes time to be generous.)
Thursday, September 29, 2011
How it went...
Wow, time is passing quickly this semester. We just had our last small-group meeting in Intro to College life. They have one more session in the Big Auditorium, and then final grades are due, and we're done.
It was OK. I'm not sure whether I'm going to do it again. The students were fine, all five of them friendly and participatory. They did most of the extra reading I assigned even though it wasn't tied to any quizzes or papers (although I think I will ask them to respond to it in their journals if I teach this course again -- I don't think they really got that a reflective journal for a class is supposed to be different from a personal diary). They had a bit of a tendency to talk about their personal lives a lot and go off on random tangents, but I think there's supposed to be room for that sort of thing in a course like this, so no worries.
The large-group sessions were ... bleah. I guess the kindest way to put it is "varied," since there were some speakers who were genuinely informative about useful topics, and one or two who managed to be informative and entertaining. But there were also some speakers who were patently disorganized, inept at communicating, or just plain off the rails (as in, presenting as fact a pop-psychology "personality test" with about as much as scientific validation as astrology, and pretending that this was somehow educating students about diversity).
More generally, I'm concerned that the whole slate of presentations seemed to emphasize student life at the expense of saying anything about the university's intellectual mission. I mean, it is important for students to know where to find the counseling center, and how to get their financial aid checks, and what to do if they think one of their friends has alcohol poisoning. No question. But shouldn't someone, at the very least, also be telling them that they should plan to spend a couple of hours outside of class for each hour in class, and that those required gen ed courses can illuminate one another in surprising ways, and that they shouldn't be afraid of going to a professor's office hours? I want someone to tell them, too, that words and ideas matter, that slow reading and deep thinking have value, that skepticism and critical inquiry are necessary tools for living in the world, and that if universities were really ivory towers closed off from the real world, people wouldn't get so damn angry at them.
(I think I may have told my little cohort some of these things. I think I do want to teach this class again.)
Oh yeah, and we talked about the university's common reading book, which was both enjoyable and a little weird. I have a whole different set of reservations about campus-wide common reading programs, but those probably belong in an entirely different post.
It was OK. I'm not sure whether I'm going to do it again. The students were fine, all five of them friendly and participatory. They did most of the extra reading I assigned even though it wasn't tied to any quizzes or papers (although I think I will ask them to respond to it in their journals if I teach this course again -- I don't think they really got that a reflective journal for a class is supposed to be different from a personal diary). They had a bit of a tendency to talk about their personal lives a lot and go off on random tangents, but I think there's supposed to be room for that sort of thing in a course like this, so no worries.
The large-group sessions were ... bleah. I guess the kindest way to put it is "varied," since there were some speakers who were genuinely informative about useful topics, and one or two who managed to be informative and entertaining. But there were also some speakers who were patently disorganized, inept at communicating, or just plain off the rails (as in, presenting as fact a pop-psychology "personality test" with about as much as scientific validation as astrology, and pretending that this was somehow educating students about diversity).
More generally, I'm concerned that the whole slate of presentations seemed to emphasize student life at the expense of saying anything about the university's intellectual mission. I mean, it is important for students to know where to find the counseling center, and how to get their financial aid checks, and what to do if they think one of their friends has alcohol poisoning. No question. But shouldn't someone, at the very least, also be telling them that they should plan to spend a couple of hours outside of class for each hour in class, and that those required gen ed courses can illuminate one another in surprising ways, and that they shouldn't be afraid of going to a professor's office hours? I want someone to tell them, too, that words and ideas matter, that slow reading and deep thinking have value, that skepticism and critical inquiry are necessary tools for living in the world, and that if universities were really ivory towers closed off from the real world, people wouldn't get so damn angry at them.
(I think I may have told my little cohort some of these things. I think I do want to teach this class again.)
Oh yeah, and we talked about the university's common reading book, which was both enjoyable and a little weird. I have a whole different set of reservations about campus-wide common reading programs, but those probably belong in an entirely different post.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
I don't think I like courses designed by committee
I'm meeting with my Intro to College Life freshmen* for the first time tomorrow. Well, we met for a hot second last week, but since the mandatory presentation in the Big Auditorium took up 35 of the 50 minutes of class, and then I had to find my students in the crowd, we didn't really have time to say much to each other.
Anyway, I have been reading over the syllabus and now I kind of want to shoot it. There is a half-page-long list of Course Goals and Learning Objectives**, including such items as "Students will clarify their values about cultural and gender diversity" and "Students will manage finances, time, and stress effectively" (is clarifying values like clarifying butter? and has there ever been an eighteen-year-old in the entire history of the world who has managed finances, time, and stress effectively?) Good God. I hope they don't think I wrote this stuff.
The course is described as "a series of freshman seminars focusing on a variety of topics," although in fact more than half of the meetings are being held in the Big Auditorium with speakers who talk at the entire freshman class for fifty minutes and show powerpoints. Which kind of makes me think the person who wrote the course description doesn't know what a seminar is.
But! The rest of the class meetings are mine, and I think we can dispatch the official topic for tomorrow's session ("Navigating College Online") in about five minutes, which leaves us loads of time to talk about why we have college and about enlightenment. (Why yes, I did sneak some actual reading assignments onto the syllabus.) And maybe the students will get to, you know, say stuff, as should happen in a seminar.
I feel so subversive. Don't tell the administrators.
* Freshwomen, actually, since all five of them are female. This isn't particularly unusual given Misnomer U's demographics, but I do wonder if it's a sign that we're having trouble recruiting men to the humanities.
** What is with the fad for including Learning Objectives on everything, anyway? Do students actually want them? Do any of them read that part of the syllabus? For whose benefit is this supposed to be?
Anyway, I have been reading over the syllabus and now I kind of want to shoot it. There is a half-page-long list of Course Goals and Learning Objectives**, including such items as "Students will clarify their values about cultural and gender diversity" and "Students will manage finances, time, and stress effectively" (is clarifying values like clarifying butter? and has there ever been an eighteen-year-old in the entire history of the world who has managed finances, time, and stress effectively?) Good God. I hope they don't think I wrote this stuff.
The course is described as "a series of freshman seminars focusing on a variety of topics," although in fact more than half of the meetings are being held in the Big Auditorium with speakers who talk at the entire freshman class for fifty minutes and show powerpoints. Which kind of makes me think the person who wrote the course description doesn't know what a seminar is.
But! The rest of the class meetings are mine, and I think we can dispatch the official topic for tomorrow's session ("Navigating College Online") in about five minutes, which leaves us loads of time to talk about why we have college and about enlightenment. (Why yes, I did sneak some actual reading assignments onto the syllabus.) And maybe the students will get to, you know, say stuff, as should happen in a seminar.
I feel so subversive. Don't tell the administrators.
* Freshwomen, actually, since all five of them are female. This isn't particularly unusual given Misnomer U's demographics, but I do wonder if it's a sign that we're having trouble recruiting men to the humanities.
** What is with the fad for including Learning Objectives on everything, anyway? Do students actually want them? Do any of them read that part of the syllabus? For whose benefit is this supposed to be?
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