The Little Professor

Ups and Downs

Up: Only four more on-campus interviews to go!
Down: Four more on-campus interviews to go.
Up: Choice has asked me to review five volumes from one of those lovely Pickering & Chatto sets--you know, the ones that cost several hundred dollars each.
Down: That has a down?
Up: I now have sufficient Catholics for my Mary Tudor paper.
Down: Victorian Catholics did their goshdarndest not to talk about the Marian persecutions, although they certainly had plenty to say about both the Reformation in general and Mary Tudor in particular.  (John Vidmar confirms that there was, indeed, a hole in the discourse.)  In and of itself, this absence is interesting--I'll post about this in more detail later in the week--but I'll need to explain why the presentation tilts heavily towards Protestants (for reasons other than demographics, that is). 
Up: Everything is set for my trip to California, where said paper will be delivered to throngs of adoring academics.  (Well, maybe not throngs.  And probably not adoring, either.  But certainly academics.) 
Down (1): As usual, I'm on a flight leaving at 6:00 AM.   
Down (2): The flight involves four words guaranteed to elicit shrieks of terror from every seasoned voyager: "Change planes at O'Hare." 
Up: My comedy of academic errors appears to have let up.
Down: Except, that is, for missing a meeting with a student this afternoon...
Up: Spring break is on the horizon!
Down: Which means, of course, that so are the midterms (one tomorrow, one next Wednesday, the last next Friday). 

Confession

The Mary Tudor paper calls for--count 'em--not one, but two novels by W. H. Ainsworth.

I confess that I've been staring at the two offending texts with considerable trepidation, especially since I had a go at one of them in graduate school--and retired from the field, badly bruised.  Nevertheless, the day of reckoning is at hand. 

Bleak House

Oh, we were doing so well.  But this final installment nearly brought on an appropriately Victorian attack of apoplexy.

First, the positives.  With Tulkinghorn out of the way, a large chunk of tonight's viewing was devoted to Alun Armstrong's simultaneously charming and unsettling Inspector Bucket.  I particularly enjoyed Bucket's cheerful habit of interviewing people while Tulkinghorn lay defunct on the floor.  (As Mr. Smallweed noted, Tulkinghorn didn't look at all well.)  Lady Dedlock suffered nobly and died sadly, Ada Clare gained some (rather out of character) backbone, and Mr. Jarndyce relinquished Esther with considerable elan.  Even Lady Jane put in yet another appearance, sitting (with characteristic feline aplomb) on John Jarndyce's last will and testament. 

Nevertheless, I spent most of the two hours sputtering incoherently at the screen.  To begin with, I had the oddest sensation: I felt like I was watching LoTR: Return of the King.  No, not because Gollum chewed off Esther's finger, but because the episode had at least four endings.   #1: Hortense is arrested.  #2: Lady Dedlock dies.  #3: Richard dies.  #4: Esther marries Woodcourt (a.k.a. the actual conclusion).  The multiple climaxes--some of them probably an artifact of the original episode divisions--both disrupted the narrative's pacing and wrapped up some of the plot elements far too early.   Hortense, for example, was dispatched with startling speed (and without, I fear, the doughty Mrs. Bucket's assistance).  Even worse, Lady Dedlock's flight was utterly botched; we got the beginning of her deliberate, symbolic de-classing (the abandoned jewels), but not the end (the dress), and very little of Esther's long journey with Inspector Bucket. 

Other little, yet significant, details prompted me to further exasperated mutterings.  I shook my fist at the screen after Woodcourt responded rather, er, inappropriately to the news that Esther was engaged to Jarndyce.  I battered my head against the wall when Esther described Ada's and Richard's lodgings as a "damn poky little place."  Language, Esther, language!  I winced when Jarndyce was, once again, too obviously jealous of Woodcourt.  And I cringed when Ada showed up at Esther's wedding plus child but minus mourning dress.  All of these things are insensitive readings of the original text, and quite frustrating to pedants like, well, myself. 

Two random pedagogical observations

1.  It is a truth universally acknowledged that no matter how many times the instructor reminds her students to append their names to their assignments, at least one student will opt for anonymity.

2.  Most teaching texts include footnotes or endnotes.  Footnotes and endnotes have remarkable use value, especially when they explicate the meanings of unfamiliar words or identify now-forgotten historical or cultural facts.  Convincing students of said use value, however, seems to be a largely impossible task. 

Nightmare on Grading Street

Just when you think the CoHE first-person essays have settled down into terminal mildness, along comes the pseudonymous Louise Churchill to shake things up.   This time, though, multiple targets seem worthy of readerly ire.  Certainly, I sympathize with Prof. Churchill's general predicament: she teaches at a college where, apparently, the numbers on one's teaching evaluations somehow overpower all other proofs of teaching quality.  Thus, Churchill explains, her chair "had observed me in the classroom and had heard praise about my teaching from students, so she had trouble meshing all of that with my scores, which are generally slightly below our institutional average."  In other words, despite Churchill's ability to demonstrate that her students are actually learning something, despite her chair's firsthand knowledge of her pedagogy, and despite the testimony of a number of her students, she is not officially a "good" teacher. 

Hence, Churchill argues, there's only one way to improve matters: "I need them [the students] to like me."  We all like to be liked, of course, but that hardly measures how effective we actually are in teaching Bleak House.    It is unfortunately the case (for us, I mean) that the most incompetent instructors may also be charming, winsome, and personable in all respects, while some of the most brilliant and influential may also be monsters of the first order.  By the same token, the monster may be incompetent and the charmer may be brilliant.  But it's difficult to know who is who until long after one's schooling is complete.  Moreover, education generally involves many things that are not especially fun--I don't recollect enjoying calculus, for example--and not all 18-to-22-year-olds can distinguish their dislike of the subject from their dislike of the instructor (a problem that is not, I hasten to add, limited to that age group!).

Churchill's solution, however, struck me as being both misguided and potentially over-optimistic.  Since being warm and cuddly didn't improve matters, she has decided to pump everyone's grades full of helium.  After all, "I hear from students and other faculty members that grading standards are quite lax among a significant number of my colleagues, most of whom already have tenure."   (I confess to wondering if hiring graduates from this college is altogether a good idea.)  Leaving aside the fallacy involved in Churchill's self-justification--no matter how much she qualifies it--it's not clear that scattering high grades with a lavish hand will necessarily result in drastically higher teaching evaluations.  Affect them, certainly.  But speaking as someone who generally gets respectable teaching evaluations, I find that the course itself influences the scores more than the actual grade distribution.  I've received very strong evaluations from courses where nobody got an A, and fairly grouchy evaluations from courses with a lot of As--but required courses always poll lower (sometimes much lower) than electives, no matter how well the class actually performs.  Similarly, freshman composition does not inspire students to utter hosannas of praise--and I see that Churchill teaches a couple of composition courses per semester.  Now, this behavior may just be our students, but I've heard anecdotes from other colleges which suggest that this is a familar evaluation pattern.

Obviously, if Churchill's campus wants to misuse evaluation data in this fashion, then there's nothing much she can do about the situation.   Perhaps, post-tenure, she can give up on being "liked," and return to teaching her students how to punctuate. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Jeanie Selina Dammast, St. Mary's Convent; Or, Chapters in the Life of a Nun (S. W. Partridge, 1899).  Late-Victorian anti-Catholic novel.
• Clare Clark, The Great Stink (Harcourt, 2005). Historical thriller set in, er, the sewers.
• Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple (Little, Brown, 2006).  Despite the title, this is a novel.
• The Cottager's Monthly Visitor, vol. 3 (1823).  Bound volume of a Christian periodical aimed at rural, working-class readers.
• John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, ed. Aaron Garrett (Liberty Fund, 2006).  Reprints the 4th ed. of Millar's work.
• John Vidmar, English Catholic Historians And The English Reformation, 1585-1954 (Sussex Academic, 2005).  A rather concise survey.
• Thomas G. Weinandy et al., eds., Aquinas On Scripture: An Introduction To His Biblical Commentaries (T. & T. Clark, 2005).  Metacommentary, as it were. 
• Niles Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (Norton, 2005).  Illustrated companion to the Darwin exhibition. 

All by my lonesome

Hugh Schwyzer notes a correlation between the number of students e-mailing their professors and the number of students actually coming to their professors' office hours.  I'd have to agree.  My own office hours are generally populated by myself; some semesters go by without a single student visitor.  There are ways of remedying the absence of student presence, of course; I require one-on-one conferences with all of my students in freshman comp, for example.   

Of course, this becomes rather frustrating when students claim on their evaluations that I'm "not available," even though they've never shown up in my office!

Adventures in book-buying, retrospective edition

I was delighted to find the Liberty Fund's new edition of John Millar's The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks in my mailbox this afternoon.  Reading the book in graduate school sent me down the dark and twisted path to my own wee monograph (which, in dissertation form, was not so wee).  When I relocated to upstate NY in 1999, I found myself in need of my own copy--or, at least, of my own twentieth-century facsimile reprint.  Thus ensued a comedy of errors, paraphrased below:

1.  I find a secondhand copy online.  Hooray!
2.  I attempt to purchase it. 
3.  A clerk observes that the book is out of print.  I, biting my tongue (or, as this was an e-mail conversation, my fingers), gently point out that a) I know that, which is why b) I'm buying this book from their catalogue, as they are c) a secondhand bookstore.
4.  The clerk acknowledges the justice of my position, and asks me to send the invoice number for my library purchase.
5.  I, sighing somewhat loudly, point out that a campus mailing address does not equal buying books for the campus library.
6.  The clerk's manager agrees with me that, yes, that should have been obvious.
7.  Clear sailing ahead, right?
8.  Er, no.  Now they no longer have the book in stock.  I sigh again, louder than before.
9.  The manager finds another copy for me in a bookstore across the street.
10.  Success! We must be all done now...
11.  Several months later, yet another clerk e-mails me to inquire if I'd like a copy of The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks.
12.  After staring at the screen in some bafflement, I point out that I have a copy--which should hardly come as a surprise, seeing as how his store had sold it to me.
13.  Yet another e-mail from the manager, informing me that the clerk had been told to clean up his backorder files ASAP. 

Circulation

This article in the New York Times could have addressed one more issue: e-mail wants to be free.  Or, to be more precise, e-mail has a bad habit of circulating freely.  No matter how frequently awful e-mail exchanges leak into the public domain, both students and faculty still forget that e-mails can--and often do--find their way to undesignated recipients.  For example, as a quasi-administrative sort of person (graduate coordinator), I frequently field requests from students who Want to Do Something.  When I tell these students that, indeed, they Cannot Do Something, they do the next "logical" thing: try to go over my head by e-mailing the chair or graduate studies office.  It does not occur to these students, apparently, that said chair or graduate studies office will simply forward those e-mails to me, with predictable results. 

Bleak House 2-19

Tonight's installment, which continued to dwell on varying shades of black whenever possible, also spent more time rapidly cutting between scenes in different geographical locations and temporal moments.  As a way of translating the novel's infamously interlocking plotlines into visual form, this procedure was serviceable enough; I think we could all do without the bizarre transitions, however. 

I'm not sure how I feel about the episode's handling of Jarndyce's proposal.  In the novel, Jarndyce proposes by letter, not in person, and there's a full two weeks between the letter and Esther's affirmative response.  Davies preserves the essential content of Jarndyce's letter (which, in the novel, we only know through Esther's paraphrase), but I think he was in error to up the emotional stakes as he does.  Esther's decision in the novel, which rests painfully on her sense of obligation--"To devote my life to his happiness was to thank him poorly, and what had I wished for the other night but some new means of thanking him?" (ch. 44)--is all the more melancholy for the physical distance between her and Jarndyce.  And the novel's Jarndyce is preternaturally calm about the whole affair, so much so that the conclusion doesn't come as much of a surprise.   Moreover, by accelerating the speed at which Esther accepts the proposal, Davies escalates the actually non-existent passion--something he then abruptly tones down again in the dialogue that follows, which spells out Esther's utter lack of romantic attraction to Jarndyce in excruciating detail.  Dickens achieves the same effect, with rather more economy, in the chapter's final sentence: "I put my two arms around his neck and kissed him; and he said was this the mistress of Bleak House; and I said yes; and it made no difference presently, and we all went out together, and I said nothing to my precious pet about it" (ch. 44).  What ought to be a "something" turns out to be "nothing."

Speaking of preserving Dickens' text, I'm also not sure that taking the narrator's famous excursus on Jo's death and handing it over to Jarndyce was the best idea.  It's not really in character, to begin with, and it's even less in character for the miniseries' Jarndyce; the language sits awkwardly with his other dialogue.  (Why was everybody hanging about Jo's deathbed, anyway? In the novel, it's just Woodcourt.)