First Year Wrap-Up: The students
I’m sitting at the front of the room while my Brit Lit II class works on their final exam, and all of this prompts me to do some reflective writing on teaching here, at the end of my first tenure track year.
I guess to a certain degree, calling this a first year of anything more than a new institution becomes meaningless, because I cannot currently perceive a great many ways that being on the tenure track has affected either the way I approach the classroom or the way my students approach me. While one or two students in the composition class can probably make a distinction between a junior faculty member and a GTA, generally, the authority my position brings isn’t changed by the degree to which I have always worked to establish a kind of intellectual authority while simultaneously make myself seem more vulnerable (bringing in details of my life outside the university, being willing to laugh at myself, performing a kind of ridiculousness at times to lighten the mood).
That said, this is the first year at this new institution, and I have, on many occasions reflected on how this institution is different. The primary difference seems not to be intelligence, even though both of the other institutions at which I’ve taught, Maryland and GWU, maintain consistently higher profiles. I maintain that my smartest students here and my smartest students at any of those schools could all hold their own with one another in intellectual discourse.
Of course the range of students here is much wider than at past schools, but that has more to do with preparation than with something like intellectual capacity. The public school system in this state seems to verge on disastrous, from all I’ve heard (although I confess I have no first-hand knowledge), and so many students come in to my class thinking that all they need to do is summarize to earn a strong grade. The notion of knowledge production is foreign to many students in a way that it hasn’t been at more cosmopolitan institutions.
The other factor here is diversity, and it’s a big one. At GWU, diversity was big factor to be sure, but I’d maintain that class diversity was a bigger problem there: there were fewer working class students, and certainly fewer working class students of color, and even fewer rural working class students. And so a deeply entrenched middle-class cosmopolitan identity got entrenched among the students there in a way it can never be here.
Here the students are less uniform in terms of class, and perhaps even region (with a large minority coming from PA/NY/NJ/MD because even the in-state tuition here is inexpensive). But the prevailing ideologies here are distinctly pro-white-patriarchy.
While in my comp classes this year, I have tried to take on more pop-culture oriented topics (food politics and advertising, respectively), it is the prevalence of a white masculine ethos that has been the subject of the most insistent inquiry in my British Lit class. In my first semester I really felt like I had run into a brick wall in asking the students to think about the these texts as cultural documents that reflect attitudes about gender. Many students, while willing to do the “we’ve come a long way baby†thing with women, were unwilling to question how discourses of masculinity might change or need to change.
This semester, that process hasn’t changed only because I’ve been more persistent about it. Making white masculinity the central discursive concern of the this class has first of all allowed me to actually get a number of less obviously ideological concerns: the function of the sublime in Romanticism as a gendered concept, the division of Jekyll and Hyde as a Darwininan anxiety about a muscular kind of masculinity as animalistic, the figure of the troubling mythical warrior-poet as protector of Mother Ireland in a great deal of Irish Modernism, etc.
As they were from the fall, I expect my teaching evaluations this semester to be strong. My RMP “overall quality†rating is a ridiculously high 4.9 (even I don’t think I’m that good), and students seem to have fun in my classes while reporting that they think they’re learning a lot. But evaluations aren’t everything.
In fact, I put the most stock in what the writing looks like. In my Lit classes, then, the results are strong, especially considering what I saw on the first batch of papers last semester. I’ve developed a packet on writing arguments about literature (which it seems everybody has—we should probably compare notes on these things) that seemed to cut off a lot of problems at the pass.
In my comp classes, I’m not so sure. The curriculum I teach is sort of halfway between what I taught at GW and at UMd, but the results are much more like those at Maryland. I think the state school profile, credit hours in the classroom (4 @ GW, 3 here), and class sizes (22 at MD and here, 15 at GW) say more about this than my teaching per se, but The writing has not been so good here. I think I need to post about grade norming from school to school, because Any given GW class of final papers would have gotten mostly A’s here and any given WVU class of final papers would have gotten mostly C’s at GW. In technical matters (grammar, citational systems, organization) these students are significantly less prepared than their peers even at Maryland, a closer institutional peer—and there I was teaching Freshmen; here I’m teaching the second level composition class—sophomores and juniors.
I have mentioned often that I am committed to teaching compositon well, but after more or less 8 years of teaching and/or administrating for composition, I am looking forward to a break from it next year. In the fall, I’m teaching my first grad seminar (on post-war British Drama) and returning to my two 200-level bread-and-butter courses, Brit Lit II and Intro to Drama. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of writing to do, and a post about doing research on the tenure track is forthcoming.
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