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via A Delicate Boy
As the New Kid confronts the spectre of the academic Impostor Syndrome in a new venue, I am finding it in a venue all too familiar: right here in my home department.
I mentioned on Friday that I was excited to join the first meeting of the year of the Faculty Research Group (FRG) a diverse workshop of fellow faculty from across career points and specializations. The first two papers were submitted by our two named chairs, and aside from an occasional proofing comment, i had virtually nothing of value to say, something that is not like me, and moreover, something that was not true of the other participants in the group. As I remarked afterwards to one of the workshoppers, I felt more like a precocious grad student allowed to see how the big kids play than a colleague of the big kids.
Yeah, you know Impostor Syndrome--the one where no matter how much research you do, how much thinking you do, how much prose you generate, that eventually, someone will discover that you are a total fraud, and kick you out of where you are immediately. Since you have no other job skills, you will likely have to pump gas somewhere, living in constant fear that you aren't really even qualified to do that, since working with your hands was never something you were terribly good at.
Occasionally, though, just occasionally, you get an instant reprieve. Today I got an email from someone putting together a panel for the Comparative Drama Conference. She had read my most recent article in Modern Drama {link to subscription-only Project MUSE, and my article is in an earlier volume than is catalogued there), and wanted to invite me to give a paper on the panel.
A Reprieve! A reprieve!
In a brilliant planning move, I scheduled papers to arrive from all three pf my classes--a haul that could've been as high as 101 papers, but after add-drop and no-shows left me with something like 84 in all.
I have always been of the school that believes that commenting is the best one-on-one teaching I can do (a quote I've stolen from good friend Erin Sadlack). If this is true though, we have some real evidence abaout how calss size affects teaching, and it's not just about the classroom dynamic.
My 18 comp. papers went pretty much as usual, since it's an assignment I've taught several times before, and the commenting is almost automatic--and they are therefore more substantive, because the act of diagnosis is all the easier.
The Lit papers are another case altogether. Since there are 65 of them, and it's a new assignment (and from a teaching standpoint, new material), I'm finding that the diagnosis is trickier, and some of the really poor papers (more than a couple <2-page papers for a 4-6 page assignment) are not getting the kind of attention that they might because of both the temptation to take the shorter papers as a reprieve, and the need to get onto the next paper, one with more heft and therefore more required energy to grade.
End comments are therefore not getting the usual 3/4 page of handwritten feedback, except in extraordinary cases, and I fear that the least-skilled students are going to have a harder time learning those necessary skills. My recourse? The venerable "For the next paper, let's talk about x as you plan your draft." The upside about this tactic is that it could generate a bit more traffic in my often desoalte office hours. The downside is that either there will be too much traffic to manage (which happens a lot) or that students will not show up, and not get any of that guidance. The latter problem is theirs and not mine, but I still feel the loss.
Anyway, time spent blogging this dilemma is time not spent commenting, and a half-graded close reading of Tintern Abbey, and a half-eaten sandwich await my attention.
***Thanks for the excellent comments (both on the blog, and via email) about my crisis in masculinity. To celebrate, I am wearing my Edward Gorey "Real Men Read" T-shirt. Today's brit lit classes have student groups running the show today with lessons on "Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen," which, conveniently enough, calls both class and gender into question.
***My transition here seems to be going well, professionally. I do feel like I might be in danger of being one of those overly outspoken newbies always proclaiming, "when I was at (Grad U) or (contract position), we did it this way." So while I can't entirely keep my mouth shut, I am trying to ask more questions than filling in my own answers. That said, I think I've already been pegged as a committee sucker, with three significant service activities already on my plate. And while service and collegiality are intertwined here, I feel confident that the collegiality of this place is going to make the service that much mroe invigorating.
***Speaking of collegiality, today is the first meeting of the Faculty Research group here, a group where 8 or 9 of us get together monthly to workshop some kind of work in progress--and the group ranges from full professors of Anglo-Saxon lit, and both named chairs, as well as several Assistant Professors with foci ranging from contemporary performance to digital studies to 19th c. Native American women's writing. I'm not sure how much I'll have to contribute today, given thta both peices being workshopped are from our very distinguished named chairs, but the ride seems like it will be a blast.
***The leaves are beginning to fall already, and I am preparing for an absolutely magnificent autumn. October has always been my favorite month: the beautiful leaves, fall foods, Halloween parties, the meatiest part of the semester before the real anxieties set in. Stir into the mix the recent notable addition of the kids' birthday on the 30th and two highly anticipated visits, and I havve myself a great month to look forward to. I'll try to remember to post some campus pics to Flickr during the next month.
***On a less optimistic note, I am scared by Rita. I posted very little on Katrina, in part because my feelings of sadness and outrage were at onece too hard to tease out coherently, and expressed amply by others. Here I suspect that the target site (Texas), the greater oil risk, and the black eye left by Katrina will have the administration acting faster, but so many already displaced, so many resources on the line . . .
***Finally, far more petty outrage: If you are going to cite one policy in the syllabus on late papers, please read all of those policies. One cannot expect papers handed in on Friday for a previous Monday due date will not be penalized. And you put me in the unpleasant position of having to tell you that yes, the course policies do apply to you, too. [I can only assume that part of the education on how to succeed in the academy is to not coddle irresponsible students. I just hate having to level the boom.] Check out this funny little bit in Inside Higher Ed
I've been trying to wrap my brain around the way that the students I have right now differ from my teaching experiences inside the beltway; and one of the most obvious differentiators is class. Just a casual glance at the clothes these folks wear around town--mostly just t-shirts and jeans or cargo shorts--makes me deeply aware that we aren't in foggy bottom anymore, where dressing down means juicy couture sweats or popping the collar of your logo'd polo shirt.
But class doesn't entirely explain the problems I'm having with motivation, with talking up in class, with verbal expression--and neither does ability, per se. But when I start trying to link it with masculinity, a whole new dimension opens up.
More so than a working class university, this is a masculine university. The Mountaineer moniker certainly tells you something, and is more than just a mascot when we consider a certain strong, silent ethos that pervades the classroom.
Whiteness is also at issue here, and my sense that my prototype student is a working-class white male says a lot about whata is happening with my classroom. Verbal flourishes are outside accepted constructions of their identity (not that some of my students haven't gone their, but they seem to be flouting some sort of unspoken dictum about normative behavior.
It also seems to affect the women in my classes, particularly the white women. For the first time in my career, I'm having trouble eliciting responses from the majority of the white women in the class, which is leading to a more embarrassing issue of having trouble learning their names (of the fifteen or so students whose names I can't immediately muster, almost all of them are virtually silent white women).
I am finding here that there's way too much to tease out in one blog post, but I want to illustrate a bit. For the comp class, I've gone with my food and politics course again--one that at GW was wildly popular with both genders. At one point late in the semester last year at GW, an impromptu group presentation for some fun in-class work produced a good-natured poke at my masculinity. It was nothing I'd never heard before, and given the other men in the classroom, a couple of whom were openly gay, and others who were hardly mountain men, I felt no threat in the jibe, inappropriate as it may have been.
Here I imagine such a barb would not ever be made, perhaps because such things are unspeakable, but if it had, it would have been freighted with open hostility, a sense that I am not one of them, and that my authority means nothing because I don't measure up on a certain masculinity scale: I gesture wildly, I know about fois gras, I speak in long florid sentences, I dress up, I do not have wild facial hair (which is alarmingly common here). I am not a real mountain man by any stretch.
Those who know me will know how unsettling this has been to me, but until recently, I've not been able to pin it down. Now that I have, I'm wondering how it will change my pedagogy: will I be more butch in class? will I confront it head on? will I soldier on as I have, and be deflated by course evaluations that don't ever really express what they think of me?
Cornel West weighs in. He's not a major thinker for nothing.
I got a shot of the ugly duck at the riverfront today. You will also find a few shots of our playground visit on the Flickr account.
So, when I first read Wordsworth in a class with Richard Sha (whom I respect immensely as one of my best 3 or 4 professors to date), I experienced "Tintern Abbey" as roughly less pleasurable than drinking the sand from the banks of the River Wye. But it's Tintern Abbey, so there it is, the end of week 2 of my Brit Lit II syllabus.
So ok: If it's terrible to me, then there's no way I'll be able to make it anything else to my students, so I go looking for angles: Rousseauvian philosophy, the collapse of the picturesque into the sublime, the importance of the visual field. I think my best stab was to look at his valorization of poverty in the figure of the rustic: he wishes the farm at the end of the first stanza were the traces of a homeless vagrant. I hoped that comparing "natural man" against the rank poverty caused by the industrial revolution and the Enclosure act might be a way to add some gunpowder to this poem.
Problem is, so much class time goes into just figuring out what this or that sentence means. What is the pronoun antecedent here? (oh, it's 20 lines above.) Is that semi-colon functioning in the way that we would read it now? (nope: that's a now-obsolete form of rhetorical punctuation.)
Now, I can read poetry just fine, but I'm not so experienced with the teaching of it, so let's just say that today's classes were hardly innovative pedagogy. I was working my tuchus off just to keep them from falling asleep (which, by the way, I'd be doing). What seemed to be working best was to underscore my own difficulty with the text, which probably did little to help them understand it or why it's important . . .
So next Wednesday comes some excerpts from the preface to the lyrical ballads (can a more natural sense of language get us closer to nature? Can that relieve the plight of the poor?), and few greatest hits--"The world is too much with us" and "London 1802." My goal is to emphasize the degree to which the tumultuous social backdrop is illuminated or elided (or both) by flights into abstraction.
Any ideas?
(I never thought I'd say it, but I can't wait for the Victorians!)
I am nearing the end of my second week of classes here, and although I have been teaching for seven years now, I am encountering a number of firsts--some coming surprisingly late in my career:
--This is the first time I have more than one prep. And while I have only two, I recognize that there's going to be a bit of juggling I'd never had to count on before. Granted, one is a writing and one is a literature course, so they are in some ways falling under different disciplinary conventions with different pedagogical demands (a point I know I should be pressing on as I get a bit more comfortable here), but that's going to likely often be true of my course loads.
--This is the first time I've ever taught more than 70 students. With enrollments clocking in at just under 100 students (right now, it's about 93), I am still struggling to learn names, something I've always been very very good at. Part of this is that with sections of 40 students, learning names is tricky at all, but this is the least diverse set mof students I've ever taught, so even in my sections of 35 as a grad student, there were way fewer Ashleys, Jessicas and Brians. One one section in particular, I'm having a very hard time remembering the names of the white women, something I've worked very hard to avoid in the past.
--This is my first time teaching most of the texts on the Brit Lit II survey. What's surprising here is that my appoinbtment is in 20th C. Brit lit, but I never taught the survey course as a grad student, since I had at that point primarily cast myself as a genre specialist. Now with the national tenor of my course assignments, I'm finding that I'm teaching Shelley, Blake, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Browning, Kipling: all white men from the 19th century whom I thought I might never have to read again, let along teach. And let me tell you, right now it seems that teaching "Tintern Abbey" is about as dry as learing it was 12 years ago (suggestions welcome).
Fortunately, because this is my eighth year teaching, none of this has me too out of sorts. I can hardly imagine, though, what this would be like if I had come out of grad school with no teaching experience.
Finally, the new digital camera is here and running, and therefore, and so are all the pics of our wonderful, happy-making new house.
The Flickr set doesn't currently have any of the upstairs, yet, but I'll get those in there in a couple of days.
