Various and sundry midsemester reflections

• This afternoon, I flirted with the idea of teaching George Eliot's Romola in one of my classes next semester.  The flirtation ceased after about five seconds, as it seemed likely to result in my immediate execution by the students.
• British Gothic seems to be progressing reasonably well; the students performed excellently on their midterms (prompting sudden visions on my part of being accused of rampant grade inflation, despite being one of the department's most notoriously evil graders...) and did nicely with their first set of papers.  I usually like to teach genre by getting the students to extrapolate conventions from the texts, as opposed to outlining conventions up front, and this group responds quickly to that approach.
• Of course, I never know how a course is actually going until I see the evaluations.  At that point, needless to say, it's too late...
• Next up: The Monk.  
• The "you know, if something in Walpole or Beckford strikes you as hilarious/ridiculous, that's because it is" lecture appears to have done its work.  A colleague and I were discussing the difficulties involved in teaching anything funny, because students tend to default to "oh, if we're studying this in class, it must be Very Serious."  I teach Sherlock Holmes (very) occasionally, and the students are equally puzzled: it's enjoyable! Can this be OK?  In my colleague's case, things went a little haywire when the students insisted on treating Alice in Wonderland with a completely straight face (although, to be honest, I suspect that a lot of Carroll's jokes no longer work without an explanation; how many students will pick up on the parodies, or even the mad tea party "etiquette"?)
• Still working away fiendishly to finish up all the revisions to Book Two and the annotated religion & lit bibliography (although, honestly, I'm going to have to ask for an extension on that one), after which I may be able to get back into more regular blogging.  That is, between bouts of annotating Robert Elsmere.   

Comments

[Brandon]

I love Romola! But I agree that trying to force it upon students might be dangerous.

I actually have the same problem with students trying to read funny with a straight face. Hilarious tends not to come up, but jokes and irony come up quite a bit. Plato's Socrates is actually constantly cracking jokes, and getting students to realize that they are, in fact, jokes, is often difficult -- once you're explaining the punchlines, it's already too late.