The Little Professor

Got Lear?

We're at the end of the semester, which means that I have to submit my book orders for the fall.  (It...never ends, does it?)  I'm back to teaching intro to lit analysis, which falls into two halves: poetry and then a long Shakespeare unit, the latter  of which involves one Shakespeare play and several adaptations/appropriations thereof.  This half of the class strongly emphasizes authors responding to Shakespeare in wildly different historical and cultural contexts, so that we can get a sense of how a work "travels."  The past couple of rounds have been all Hamlet, all the time, but I've decided to resuscitate my previous standby, King Lear--albeit with mostly new works.  I generally show at least one film, but the shift to fifty-minute class sessions means that I have to recalculate the amount of time I need. 

Ergo:

• Source material from Monmouth and Holinshed
• King Lear
• Possibly some excerpts from Nahum Tate
• (I don't know if I have time to show an entire King Lear, although I frequently show large chunks of the Holm version; perhaps I'll switch to the newer McKellen staging this time)
• Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot (knocking out Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres; I was also thinking about doing Zola's La Terre)
• Jacob Gordin, The Jewish King Lear Comes to America (because it's a comedy, among other things)
• Akira Kurosawa, Ran (which students  either really love or really loathe; we'll see how the coin toss goes)

 

 

ROTFL

I don't usually break out into uncontrollable laughter while teaching, but William Beckford drove me to it this afternoon.  We were looking at an excerpt from Beckford's satire Modern Novel Writing, and I called the students' attention to this--ah--remarkable paean to love:

And surely he well merited this faithful testimony at her hands, for it must be owned, that the arrows of true passion, when sharpened by the sceptre of disappointment, envelope the heart with a weight of woe, and forcibly obumbrate the finest feelings of the soul.

Never mind politely mixing your metaphors; this one has been stirred, shaken, violently blended, and then pureed.  It's "obumbrate," though, that really puts the whole thing over the top. 

(And then I laughed again when I realized that GoogleBooks has catalogued the novel's second volume only under Beckford's pseudonym, "Harriet Marlow," but that's another issue altogether.) 

 

My fifteen minutes of fame class

Between increasingly frantic bouts of concluding, proofing, and footnoting, I'm grumbling about the loss of fifteen minutes from what used to be a ninety-minute class.  My lecturing has finally settled down into its new fifty-minute groove, but my ninety-minute class is...gasp...freshman comp, and that's a skills/activity-based course.  And I clearly have yet to gauge how to fit the scheduled assignments into the seventy-five minute period.  Part of the problem is that any in-class activity will require different amounts of time from course to course, depending on the number of students, their skills, the amount of caffeine in their systems, their enthusiasm for the course, their enthusiasm for each other, and so forth.  I've had exercises take one group thirty minutes and another group ten (!).   But this semester, we're not finishing things precisely because there's fifteen minutes missing.  V. frustrating. 

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.   

Recalculating

This morning, as I was getting ready for work, the following thoughts  meandered through my mind:

1) We're getting close to midterms.

2) Hey, I should talk to the Gothic class today about midterms!

3) Usual spiel: objective section, short ans--wait, I've lost ten minutes of class time. 

4) Drat! How do I reorganize my exams?

For the past thirteen years or so, my midterms in the straightforward literary courses (as opposed to skills classes like intro to lit analysis) have broken down, percentage-wise, into 10-20-70.  Ten points for the objective section* (a.k.a. "Did you or did you not do the reading?"), twenty for short answer identifications, and seventy for the essay.  This arrangement gives the student a bit of leeway, since they can (in theory) make up for a poor showing in one spot with a strong showing in another: if they do extremely well on the first two sections, then they can still pass the exam even after suffering a momentary block on the essay, and vice-versa.  (On the other hand, if they didn't do the reading  and are trying to bluff their way through, the result isn't going to be an A.) 

It doesn't make much sense to me to keep all three sections while abridging the first two, and I really don't want to eliminate the essay.  Moreover, because I would like them to have five minutes or so of breathing space at the end, I feel a little unconfortable doing four short answer IDs; they need at least five minutes for each one, and the essay takes thirty minutes.   (I have visions of a classroom full of frantic students, leading to Gothic results for yours truly.)   Right now, I'm leaning toward a slightly longer objective section, while giving the essay more weight--something like 15-85. 

*--My philosophy of quotation/title matching, in case you're wondering, is that being able to recognize quotations is a survival skill in literary studies, not makework.  The next step is learning to recognize that something very probably is a quotation, and taking steps accordingly.

Teaching/Research

In the stories we tell about teaching and research, we generally cast teaching as the beneficiary of burning  the midnight oil over, say, obscure Reformation polemics or the works of the Bollandists.  Scholarship keeps us attuned to "what's going on," keeps us energized, keeps us from eternally lecturing from the proverbial yellowed sheet of paper.  (Whether, in this age of iPads, anyone lectures from yellowed sheets of paper is, of course, open to question.)  And scholarship does do these things, even if the scholar in question never teaches the subject of his or her own research.  (Bad religious poetry from The Protestant Magazine? Probably not going to be attractive to undergrads.)  My work on anti-Catholicism, for example, is proving awfully handy in the Gothic course; I gave a down-and-dirty brief lecture on anti-Catholic tropes just this week, as it happens.

But we rarely talk about how teaching provokes or affects our research.  This evening, while prepping tomorrow's class on Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother, I suddenly found myself working out how to talk about the White Lady of Avenel as a non-problem in Walter Scott's The Monastery and The Abbot duology.    (Why she's usually treated as a problem: supernatural figure wandering about loose in the otherwise realist first novel, who then gets the delete-key treatment in the second. See also the history of critical unhappiness with The Bride of Lammermoor.)  Or, more directly, an article I have coming out in just a few weeks emerged from a "wait, haven't I seen this before?" moment while rereading Vanity Fair for a seminar.  Both instances, you'll note, were very spur-of-the-moment, very unexpected--something that's also important for scholarship.  How can we ever know what will help us to learn some new thing or break through some old mental block?     

In search of lost time (ten minutes, anyway)

Second week of classes, and I'm still in search of the right rhythm.  As I mentioned before, this is our first semester on an entirely new schedule: hour-long sessions have dropped to fifty minutes, ninety-minute sessions to seventy-five, and three-hour sessions to two-and-one-half.  You wouldn't think that losing ten minutes (or more) would have that much impact, and yet. 

In my case, the problem is not so much taking a completely-scripted lecture and whacking ten minutes out of it, because that's not how I lecture.*  I reserve that type of script for situations in which I need to deliver substantial quantities of factual content.  Instead, my notes tend to be skeletons, used either to extemporize or to stimulate student discussion.  Or, to put it differently, they're maps.  For example, from today's class on The Castle of Otranto:

Effect of clashing erotic desires as the narrative continues on? (Theodore and Matilda, 72-74; love interferes in the relationship between Isabella and Matilda, 86-89; Theodore’s relative disinterest in his father, as compared to Matilda, 92-93; Frederic’s desire for Matilda, 96, 100, and his rebuke by the ghost, 105-6; Manfred’s accidental murder of Matilda, 108) 

Which led us to discuss the role of intense desire in the novel and its usually dangerous moral/intellectual effects; passion vs. reason; the repeated calls for patriarchal authority vs. the novel's men acting like addled teenagers (if the teenagers were murderous...); and so forth. I know what I want to say, and I know where I would like the students to arrive at the end of class, but most of my "dialogue" in class emerges from the process of asking questions and then responding to the answers. 

The problem, then, is trying to identify what can't be discussed, now that those ten minutes have gone missing.  (I wanted to talk about interruptions today, but was, er, interrupted.)  Lecture-with-discussion, after all, tends to be an amorphous sort of being: what if the students wind up having nothing to say?  I've been momentarily bounced back to my early years of teaching, when I would consistently overestimate how much we could do in the space of an hour.  Notes for a fifty-minute session just look embarrassingly skimpy, even though there's almost certainly too much on the plate. 

*--Which is why the whole "hey, just turn your lectures into podcasts and stow 'em on the web" would not work so well. 

The Horrid Dungeon of the Syllabi!!! A Fragment of a Gothick Romance

Editor's note: The following fragment came into my hands after an archeological expedition to Brock-Port discovered a miraculously still-functional electronic device, known to the ancients as a "laptop computer," which contained several documents of a most curious description.  Although the bytes were considerably degraded, we were able to decode the narrative below, which throws a most shocking light upon the manners and customs of academic life in the twenty-first century.

...Icy winds, as cutting and uncaring as an anonymous peer review, blasted around the crumbling brick towers.  They piled the dank, dirty snow into treacherous heaps,  concealing deadly ice patches that threatened the lives of any innocents who dared venture beyond the doors.   But those trapped inside were held fast by cruel orders, and heavy chains, and evil spells beyond description.  For this was the Dungeon of the Syllabi, to which all faculty who left writing their syllabi to the day before classes were consigned.  Woe!...

...Shivering in her chilly cell, Elle P. hunched over her laptop, staring bleary-eyed at a syllabus for the Gothic Novel.  Her chains of USB cords clacked softly as she sought to relieve her aching back. Beyond the steel door, she heard the wails of fellow inmates, bemoaning their fates as they pounded unceasingly at their uncaring keyboards.  Some of them, it was rumored, had been sent to the dread Dungeon every semester for years and years upon end.  Elle shuddered at the thought of the bitter torments that awaited those who failed to complete their miserable task: incomplete assignments! Late papers! Sneering student evaluations! The disdain of her colleagues! Whimpering softly as she bemoaned her fate, all the more horrid for being self-induced, Elle burst into a song of despair--but her voice soon died away, for she had never been very good at rhyming on the fly...

...Finally, the gnawing pains in her belly drove Elle to abandon her office in search of what sustenance the Dungeon had to offer.  Timidly, she crept out into the halls, trembling as the howls and shrieks of the other lost souls escalated in volume.  She inched past the mysterious, fading posters attached to the walls, which blazoned forth the agonies suffered by prisoners past, and, fearing to take the clanking elevator--for who knows if it might suffer some mysterious breakdown, trapping her there to die of starvation!--she crept down the steps.  There, standing before her, were vending machines, filled with unhealthy food intended to inflict cavities, sugar rushes, and halitosis on all who dared consume it.  But the demands of the syllabi forced Elle to indulge...

...Behind her, a SOUND! Elle whirled about and found herself faced with some unearthly creature, tall and indistinct of form, its features obscured with a scarf, its body wrapped in a heavy coat, its feet encased in fuzzy boots.  Her thoughts spun and crashed uselessly into each other in what remained of her brain.  Was this the ghost rumored to haunt the building's halls? Was it some vampire, out to suck her life's blood? Or, even worse, was it the embodiment of the feared SERVER OUTAGE, which had been known to destroy faculty lives with one zap of its electronic paw? Elle's senses swam, and she felt herself swooning to the floor, at the mercy of this strange beast, when it spoke:

"I'm, like, looking for the computer lab.  Is it, um, on this floor?"

Not trusting herself to speak, Elle pointed one trembling finger in the direction of the computer lab.

"Cool, dude! Thanks."

...

...She had completed her task! The curse would soon be lifted! Elle once again attempted to lift her voice in song, but ceased when the next cell's occupant complained that she was off-key.  Nevertheless, she joyously printed out her syllabi and skipped to the door, contemplating her future after her release from the Dungeon.   Never again would she fall prey to that dire demon, Procrastination.  Her life would be one of virtue, cheerfulness, and, above all, punctuality.  As she neared the office ahead, she saw other inmates, all congratulating each other with great excitement over their impending depatures from this fearsome pile. 

Yet, all of a sudden, a terrific SHRIEK arose from amidst the crowd.  The congratulations turned to screams, moans, and gasps of agony beyond mortal description.  Elle rushed to the office as she saw one sufferer after another faint to the floor, clutching their syllabi in their cold hands.  What could it be? What new evil? Why were faculty being brought low at the very moment of their triumph?

And then--she SAW.  Shaken to her core, she sobbed witlessly for a moment, then swooned (again) to the floor.  For the punishment dreaded beyond all others had been inflicted upon them.  Upon the photocopier, there was a sign, inked in a red more bloody than any human blood:

"Photocopier broken.  We've called the repairman.  Sorry!"

Two connected, and possibly contradictory, theses

1.  Tweaking the format of doctoral dissertations will not affect time-to-graduation unless departments also tweak the teaching responsibilities they expect graduate students to shoulder. 

2.  Graduate students who do little-to-no teaching are even more hampered in this terrible job market than they would normally be.  A pedagogy-oriented dissertation will be of no help unless there is some actual pedagogy taking place. 

Lecturing, reviewing, submitting,

• Is it a sign of permanent wishiwashiness on my part that whenever the lecture vs. discussion vs. technology-enabled techniques vs. other approach debates arise, I always wind up saying, "well, it depends"? (You do not, in fact, have to answer that question.) Who's in the class, what are you teaching, does something need to be modeled...Perhaps part of the problem is that I never really encountered the monologic, droning lecturer of legend (I know they exist--I just never had one); instead, the pedagogical models I encountered always talked with us, not at us.  At the very least, the class would be peppered with questions.  My own style would hardly work with the permanently-archived podcast approach, because it involves me stopping every five seconds to ask the students about something going on in the text (along with collaborative work, "find one thing and tell us about it" exercises, and so on). And I don't exactly qualify as an avant-garde instructor...
• For some reason, my young fogeyness keeps emerging when faced with suggestions that peer review needs to undergo summary execution, or at least needs to be zapped with a polymorph wand from NetHack.   Although I like the Kairos model outlined here, there seems to be an odd strand of...utopianism?...involved in many of the suggestions (in particular, the sometimes unstated assumption that people who are actually experts in the field will simply show up and comment on your blog post when required).  I've got a very speculative little article coming out that was going to be a blog post, until I realized that my little speculation about Interesting Thing was actually posing a kind of serious problem--and I darn well wanted an expert peer reviewer to shoot necessary holes in it.   (There are, in fact, times when you want somebody to say, "you know, this could be wrong, and here's why.")   It was not clear to me at all that such peer reviewers would magically appear on my blog--or, for that matter, that anyone who might want to know about Interesting Thing would necessarily think to find it here (it's not the sort of topic I usually write about, for starters). 
• On another note from the article linked above: is it time to revisit the rule that says, "you may submit this article to only one journal at a time"?  (I gather that law reviews don't abide by this.)  The rule in question is looser for book manuscripts (where it's more "you may query multiple publishers, but can only have your book under consideration at one").  Depending on how long an editor hangs on to an article, or how much trouble they have finding a reader or readers, or how long it takes to extract the article from the readers (possibly with dental pliers), the time from submission to acceptance or rejection can become thoroughly unholy.  I understand why you might want to keep the protocol in place--for starters, it keeps the editors from wasting their time with articles they won't have the chance to publish--but are there also arguments in favor of revising the rule of thumb?