The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Historical Tales for Young Protestants (American Sunday-School Union, n.d.). Reprint of a collection first published by the RTS in 1857. The British Library ascribes it to the otherwise unknown J. H. Crosse; however, Ralph David Byles claims it for one of his ancestors, the prolific Christian novelist Esther Beuzeville Hewlett Copley.

• The Christian Witness and Congregational Magazine, n.s. II (1866). British Congregationalists; theological and controversial articles, poetry, didactic fiction, etc. There's a very basic overview of Congregationalism here.

• Harry Shaw, ed., Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels (G. K. Hall, 1996). Useful anthology of major essays and book excerpts, ranging from the mid-19th c. to the present day.

Academic freedom

Dennis Baron, in one of his rather too revelatory* (and rather too rambling) essays for the CoHE, does wander across an important issue: are there limits on academic freedom? But neither of the cited examples really opens up any serious path into such a discussion. If anything, they suggest that "academic freedom" has become a buzzword for "I can do whatever I darn well please." In the first case, an instructor claims "academic freedom" when he seminars instead of surveys. Baron's point, reasonably enough, is that one thing is not like the other: a course advertised as a survey really ought to be a survey. (Signifier, meet signified.) That eo ipso, however, is not an "academic freedom" question, although it might possibly be a professorial literacy question. Had Baron forbidden our pseudonymous professor from teaching his "pet project," he would have crossed the line; telling O.P.P. that he cannot teach said pet project as Brit Lit II or American Lit I or whatever sounds like a perfectly appropriate exercise of authority. It's as though I proposed spending all of Brit Lit II on Felicia Hemans (something I'm not likely to do, seeing as how I don't teach Hemans in Brit Lit II in the first place, but never mind). Nowhere in the AAUP's statement on academic freedom is "refusing to teach the course assigned to you" listed as a core component of one's understood intellectual privileges. Similarly, in the second case, we have several instructors arguing that classroom observations violate their "academic freedom." In that case, I can't help wondering if having students in class violates academic freedom. More seriously, such observations would undermine academic freedom only if they were used to police faculty opinions--penalizing all those who preferred Hamlet to King Lear, or, more seriously, all those who argued that Marx was wrong or Adam Smith was wrong or whatever other sacred cow was wrong. Suggestions like "use the blackboard more often" would seem to fall under the heading of useful (if trivial) advice rather than the decline and fall of academic life as we know it.

*--An Anonymous UIUC Source has confirmed for me that all of these people are immediately recognizable.

Flurries

We're nearing the end of the first week of classes; so far, things have gone swimmingly, or perhaps snowingly. (Miracles of miracles: the sun is out as I type this.) Oddly enough, the onset of teaching has led to a burst of typing energy on my part: I'm making headway on an article that I've had no time for over the past few months, I've got two more accepted articles to correct and I'm starting to plan yet another article. Moreover, there's lots of historical fiction criticism to digest for another piece due in October. (There's also a final index for the book, but I can't do anything about that until I get the publisher's last requests for changes.) What this means, of course, is an internal flurry of photocopies, as I drag papers out of my filing cabinets and arrange them in aesthetic piles on the floor, the desk, or any available (hah!) shelves. In any event, it's rather interesting that I feel more writing "drive" while teaching my usual load (3-3) than I can during the breaks--which, I should hastily point out, is not a request for a heavier course load. I suspect that teaching imposes structure on my days--prep time, lecturing, office hours, meetings, etc.--and that in turn leads to a sort of overflow into the evening or weekend downtime.

Of course, I've also got non-academic things to think about. Like my house, which seems to be springing leaks in unfortunate places. My handyman knocked the ice off the roof in back, but he'll have to repaint the ceiling and window frame in the spring (luckily, neither the ceiling nor the plaster walls cracked) and replace the light fixture (which, granted, was about forty years old anyway). Heck, while he's there I might as well have him repaint the entire room, which currently comes equipped with a rather depressing floral wallpaper--"depressing" both because of the shade and because the wallpaper itself was not applied properly. (This house has squashed even the remotest "do-it-yourself" stirrings in my soul; I've had to replace almost everything the previous owners did.) To add to my woes, I discovered that Vicky was staring at something last night. Now, cats often stare at things invisible to the naked human eye, which often leads to impolite comments about feline sanity, but persistent staring in the same direction normally indicates that something is afoot. Lo and behold, the window frame in the living room had decided to add to the chorus of dripping water in my household. No doubt my handyman will be thrilled to get yet another call from me, begging him to chisel the ice off the roof yet again. I see ice guards in my immediate future.

We've got the first of nine (!) candidates coming through this weekend. The weather will be balmy: at least twelve degrees! I've been asked to take #1 on a tour of the village, an assignment which, I must say, will not exactly occupy much of this person's time. Granted, things may be slower than anticipated if we have to drive through a blizzard...

First day

None of my students appeared particularly terrified by my "I'm a very easy C" speech, but perhaps they will be later on in the semester. In any event, all three classes (intro to lit analysis, Brit Lit II, the Victorian survey) seemed off to a good start. But I do have to get one of my classes out of the basement: the room is too small to do group work and the temperature controls down there never work properly (translation: either the students have to wear their winter coats inside or they need to bring a T-shirt and shorts). Since the Victorian survey is a BA/MA swing course, I also need to set up additional meeting times with the graduate students. I think I was on an "additional work for myself" kick when I drew up the syllabi: more meetings with the graduate students, additional papers in all three courses and preliminary drafts. Then again, I'm probably going to eliminate peer review; it works fine in comp, since the students get a lot of practice, but not when it's a one-off (even with practice sessions beforehand).

Meanwhile, my water woes continue. This morning's problem--no water--has been rectified. This evening's problem, however, involves water where it ought not to be, namely, coming through a lighting fixture and a window frame. Since the fixture and frame are on the same path, as it were, it's likely that the gutters have backed up. Snarl. Luckily, the ceiling itself hasn't been wrecked (which is good, since I just had it painted this summer; of course, I also had the window frame painted this summer...); I can't say so much for the light. Under normal circumstances, I'd just punch a hole through the ceiling to let it drain, but since wiring is involved, my handyman will have to ride to the rescue tomorrow. The rest of the damage has to wait until summer.

Course evaluations and diminishing returns

Reading these studies (PDF), one challenging and one supporting the claim that students give better evaluations to teachers who give them higher grades, prompted me to think again about my course evaluations from this past semester. Both of the undergraduate courses ranked me somewhere in the 1s* in all categories. I administered the evaluations nearly two weeks before the end of the course, so the students had not yet seen their final paper grades and, of course, had not taken their final exams. One of the courses was a major requirement; the other was lower-division. In both courses, most students received Cs, with very few earning anything below the C-range and rather more than that earning Bs or sometimes As.

The lower-division course polled slightly better than the required course--but the students in the required course in fact had higher grades overall. Moreover, going into the evaluation session, the grades they knew were far higher than those of the students in the lower-division course. To make matters even more interesting, the dynamics of the required course were far more lively and engaged than those of the lower-division course. Nevertheless, my prediction--that the lower-division course was going to whack me around a bit--conspicuously failed to materialize.

Would my evaluations demonstrably improve if I started giving lots more As and Bs than I do at present? This instance would appear to suggest that the answer is "probably not." The students earning As in the required course were almost as likely to love/hate the course as the students earning Cs in the lower-division course. If anything, this would suggest that the students responded primarily to the course content, to my instructional methods (both courses preferred me to the content) and the like--not to their current or anticipated grades. In other words, I don't think I'm the kind of instructor whose evaluations would materially improve with a sudden influx of As. I might go from being "good" to "cool," but I'm not sure that the fractional improvement would really be worth it. Does this mean that the evaluations are "objective"? Well, not necessarily. For example, required courses in this department normally poll lower than electives. Upper-division students often give better evaluations than lower-division students. Classes can be destroyed by the rooms in which they're housed (this happened to me once--rotten acoustics and almost no heat). Some classes suffer from internal poisoning, brought on by students who, for whatever reason, decide to disrupt or divert the learning process (this hasn't happened to me so far). The students with Ds or Fs don't necessarily respond too well when it comes time for evaluations. And some questions produce nonsense results--students who never come to office hours or call for help complaining that "the instructor wasn't available"! But looking over my teaching portfolio, I also have to admit that the changes in my teaching evaluations overall conform to the changes in my own strengths and weaknesses as an instructor.

*On a 5-point scale, the lower the better. It's possible to go below 1 (the graduate course gave me two .9s), but departments using this scale generally consider something in the 1-range to be a good performance.

Things can only go up from here

While there is never a particularly convenient time for the village's water main to break, I'd have to say that early morning of the first day of classes counts as exceptionally inconvenient.

A Dance to the Music of Time (Third Movement)

(Cross-country plane trips have one thing going for them: the opportunity to read long books in one sitting.)

In War and Peace, Tolstoy discusses at length both the sheer messiness of war and the real problems involved in representing it. Powell takes a slightly different tack, for there is remarkably little "war" in A Dance to the Music of Time's Third Movement--if, by "war," you mean fields of battle, high heroic deeds, international political intrigue and so forth. Indeed, if you handed this novel to a group of under-instructed undergraduates, they would most likely not understand why anyone was fighting or to what end. Moreover, every death occurs offstage, even though the toll includes several previously important characters. Instead, Jenkins traces wartime bureaucracy, much of it amazingly petty: haggling over positions, misguided obsessions, minor cultural clashes. At the same time, some of the bureaucratic red tape turns out to have real consequences; most notably, Widmerpool's machinations indirectly cause at least two deaths.

Powell's strategy here certainly carries on his overall plot's emphasis on the problems of finding a pattern: Jenkins, a participant in WWII, does not see "the war" so much as he finds it violently disrupting his own life's networks. But I think that Powell also sets out to upset our notion of what constitutes a wartime plot. On the one hand, he alludes repeatedly to the boy's adventure stories found in the Boy's Own Paper, with their plucky heroes and triumphant progresses; on the other, he makes one of his characters obsessed with the centurion from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. The stories for boys not only make war seem like good fun, but also have clear-cut plots, designed to inspire their readers to patriotic emulation. Kipling's centurion is a slightly more complex case. Puck of Pook's Hill offers a mythical "living history" of sorts: via the agency of Puck, two young children hear figures from the past narrate their own deeds. The centurion, whose experiences stretch over three stories, has been sent by Maximus to help command the guard at Hadrian's Wall. But his position is something of a punishment as well, for putting a disinterested devotion to justice over his career prospects. Even so, both the centurion and his friend go on to devote themselves wholly to Maximus' interests, in the end refusing to serve under Theodosius after Maximus loses his head (literally). The Roman soldiers thus represent an oasis of pure duty and moral obligation in a sandy desert of Roman decay. In Powell's novels, they also represent a wholly unattainable ideal within the bureaucracy that makes up modern warfare; after all, the centurion-obsessed officer, Jenkins' superior, winds up losing his command and eventually leaves the army altogether. At the same time, though, both this ideal and another proposed by Vigny--the soldier as "monastic" devotee to his calling, working steadily through boredom as well as excitement--offer possibilities for thinking about the self in wartime, possibilities which stand in stark opposition to Widmerpool's relentless desire for self-advancement. Jenkins, however, never conceptualizes himself in either fashion.

(Incidentally, here's a quite nice high school essay--from an Andover DTTMOT website--on how soldiers who yearn for the monastic ideal eventually self-destruct. The site also reprints one of the poems associated with the Roman centurion, which Jenkins quotes repeatedly and usually with some irony.)

Friday Cat Blogging

Cat-assisted cat blogging, as it happens, since Vicky has ensconced herself on my lap (and is doing her best to prevent me from typing). In this week's installment, Vicky shows her...um...enthusiasm at my return from California, while Disraeli investigates Kipling.

This Week's Acquisitions

Well, actually, it's this month's acquisitions...

• Emma Leslie, Dearer than Life: A Story of the Times of Wyclif (RTS). Historical novel set in the fourteenth century--Lollards, etc. It seems that the RTS had a late-Victorian series of explicitly anti-Catholic historical fiction for children ("For Faith and Freedom"), of which this is one. Leslie published into the early twentieth century.

• Anne Manning, Cherry and Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague (Dodd, 1866). Autobiographical novel about the plague of 1665.

• Emma Jane Worboise, St. Beetha's; Or, the Heiress of Arne (Clarke). Low Church didactic novel about a young girl's trials and travails.

• Louis Bayard, Mr. Timothy (HarperCollins, 2003). Revisionist twist on A Christmas Carol, from the perspective of a grown-up Tiny Tim.

• Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time, First, Second, Third and Fourth Movements (Chicago, 1995). All twelve volumes of Powell's famous roman-fleuve about the shattering transformations of first interwar and then post-WWII England, told through the partly autobiographical figure of novelist Nicholas Jenkins.

• Patrick McGrath, Asylum (Vintage, 1997). "New Gothic." Wife of psychiatrist meets madman, falls in love with same. Bad things happen, says the inimical narrator.

• ---, Dr. Haggard's Disease (Vintage, 1993). Another New Gothic. A doctor with a severe morphine addiction meets up with the son of the woman with whom he had an abortive (and on his part, dangerously over-romanticized) affair.

• Charles Sauvestre, On the Knee of the Church (Macintosh, 1869). Translation of a French anti-Catholic work on convent schools.

• Justin Fulton, How to Win Romanists (Pauline Propaganda, 1898). A Baptist's guide for converting Catholics to Protestantism. It really can't have worked very well...

• Robert Bridges, The Selected Letters of Robert Bridges, ed. Donald E. Stanford (Delaware, 1983). The late-Victorian author, perhaps most familiar today for publishing Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry.

• George Moore, George Moore in Transition: Letters to T. Fisher Unwin and Lena Milman, 1894-1910, ed. Helmut E. Gerber (Wayne, 1968). Letters written during a period of sea-change in Moore's sense of himself as an artist.

• Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900 (Cambridge, 2003). How representations of child murder worked in literary, cultural and political contexts.

• Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Johns Hopkins, 2000). Proposes a new historical model for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century feminist thinking and its effects on fiction.

• Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2002). Debates over the educational, cultural, aesthetic and political purposes of Greek, stretching from Erasmus to the early twentieth century.

• John A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour, 1818-1841 (Clarendon, 1992). How the Reform Act transformed the nature of popular politics.

• Rainer Liedtke, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester, c. 1850-1914 (Clarendon, 1998). Comparative study of the welfare infrastructure in Jewish communities.

• Peter Hinchcliff, God and History: Aspects of British Theology 1875-1914 (Clarendon, 1992). The interrelationship of new developments in theology and historiography.

• C. Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Clarendon, 1997). The business of managing and marketing newspapers.

• Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge, 1985). Comparative study of English and European diary fiction from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Examining

At the Irascible Professor, Craig Newmark discusses the dreaded "surprise" questions on exams. Dreaded by the students, anyway. My own exams break down into three parts: objective, long identifications (i.d. + analysis) and essay(s). The students have no advance warning about what I'm going to put on the first section; they know the source texts but not the quotations for the second; and they have all the essay topics in advance for the third. This approach, which I've partly adapted from my father, has at least one real advantage, namely, that it gets the students to actually study for the exam. But, as I've also discovered, it has at least one real disadvantage, namely, that the students may not bother doing any reading until they've got the study questions. (I'm not going into the details here, but let's just say it was a gory experience. For the students.)

Is this too much handholding? I could go on sniffily about the Good Old Days, when I had to develop my paper topics out of my very own head and never saw a final exam review sheet, but being nostalgic for 1988-92 strikes me as rather silly. More to the point, my peers and I were primarily traditional full-time students with at most part-time jobs during the school year; most of my students are non-traditional full-time students with full-time jobs or, in many cases, full-time families. This reality not only affects how I write my syllabus--I am so not doing a course on the Big Novel at any point in my future life at this institution*--but it also affects how much structure I provide for the students when it comes to exams. I had the leisure to reread both my notes and everything on the syllabus (OK, I also read kind of fast, but still); does a single parent with a full-time job and a young child? It's difficult to balance the need to teach rapid problem-solving techniques against the blunt realities of other problems, none of which can be reduced to an answer in a bluebook.

*The closest I got was a course on George Eliot, but even Eliot's novels do not quite look like Infinite Jest.