A few weeks ago, I expressed early anxieties about the grad class I'm teaching this semester. The room issue came to a head a week or so a go when, during a discussion of "Mouth" in Beckett's Not I, we began to hear some loud "Sir, yes, Sir"s coming from the room next door. That's right, ROTC was next door to our alread terrible classroom. Well, I lobbied for a change, and this past class, we sat around the seminar table for the first time. And I sat at the head of the table, and ran a discussion, very much like my seminar professors did.

This was freaky, because it underscored for me the way that my positionality in this classroom is imbued with authority, and I need to think hard about how to challenge that de facto assumption without compromising my job, which is to teach not only the material, but to a large degree, the expectations of the profession. Commenters? Any thoughts?

That said, the level of discussion has improved dramatically each week. There are fewer blank silences, and the distribution of discussion, while not precisely perfect, is getting closer to what I'd hoped for. Our last night on Beckett (ROTC notwithstanding) was spot-on, I think...