Sometimes (as I mentioned over at New Kid's excellent teaching roundtable post), when I've taught a text a few times, the spontaneity that drives my best teaching, and the great student driven conclusions that arise slowly congeal into a series of really great points that I want to make to new classes. Instead of allowing them to be free to come to similar or different excellent conclusions on their own, I often shrink from the equal risk that they'll come to very little useful on their own, and I drive them to find some of those same conclusions. When this happens too often, students begin to sit back, and wait for me to point the way--Look here. OK, now look here. OK, now let's put these two pieces of information together. OK now let's throw in a dash of X critical approach. What does that taste like to you?

So I get excited by these opporunities to keep if loose, and based on how my students have been doing with this incredibly rich text, I should remember to trust them more often. Yesterday, as we read chapters 3 &4 of Orlando, we discussed how Woolf's opinion about masculinity evolves over the course of the novel, how the middle section of the novel enacts a feminist critique, how that critique is able to separate out the pleasures of gender from the constrictions of gender, and how that critique extends to masculinist views of history and biography. 75 minutes. 200-level. damn.

It helps that I am adoring the novel ... yes, am adoring, since I, like my students, have not finished reading the text yet. This may seem like irresponsible teaching, but I don't think it is. First off, I am re-reading and re-re-reading each chunk of text as it is assigned before moving on to the next one, so my copy is annotated, underlined and well traveled before I teach it, and as I think yesterday's class illustrates, it helps me focus on the text as it's happening, and helps me resist the impulse to go 'big picture" too early and instead stay rooted in close reading, an impulse I struggle with.

In the mid 90's Frank Lentricchia publicly abandoned political criticism in favor of an approach that indulged his less critical love of reading. I find that this approach is letting me have it both ways, because I am naturally retaining my excitement about the text, my giddy love of beautiful, or funny, or powerful passages, while still pushing students to more sophisticated (and indeed, often politicized) conclusions.

And of course, I am also doing the silly, light-hearted things that keep my classroom light. Yesterday, as we worked through the transformation scene, and looked at Woolf's almost theatrical use of the silver trumpets of Truth, Candour, and Honesty, just as the final horn blast of THE TRUTH, I pulled out a paper party horn and tooted a little note. On the one hand, it drew a laugh, but it also helped draw students' attention to the almost Brechtian device Woolf is using here, the playfulness with which she giddily pokes holes in the seriousness of biography. And it was fun.