Raining Cats and Dogma

OK, so my scintillating charm and wit, along with some serious attention to careful lesson planning, have me in comfortable territory with two of my three classes.

And the other seems to be slipping away. An exercise that goes gangbusters in one section is a bomb in the next, always for a different reason. Teacher-centered classes are met with bored stares, quizzes seem not to be provoking reading (the quiz average is abysmal), and de-centered strategies (of which I am generally most fond) are getting responses from resentful silence to a sense of outright betrayal.

My midterm evaluations from this group of students asked specifically and consistently for more lessons "where we copy notes from the board." I attribute this attitude to the "will-this-be-on-the-test?" mentality propagated by No Child Left Behind (Since None of Them Will be Really Getting Anywhere), but it doesn't make the dilemma any more real. They want to be given the answers, they don't want to read, and they want class to be fun.

I'm not happy with designing lessons for an engaged class and using them to horrible effect in the other class, because a) it's not good teaching, and b) It's an hour of agony three times a week.

So this week's dilemma with the plegmatic class: keep plugging away? let 'em sink? do more tap dancing?

Posted by at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

OK, so we get summers "off," and some days we are home all day. But as most of my readers know, being an academic is about a more flexible schedule and not a lighter one.

Today, I left home at 8 and returned home at 7:30. In between I
-->responded to twelve emails (a light day on that front)
-->had online conversations with three fellow academics (one of which was actually on an academic subject.)
-->Designed draft worksheet to copy and handout to 9:30 class.
-->Reread Eliot's "The Waste Land" and "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
-->designed (with big help of Lisa) a lesson plan for above readings.
-->Implemented successful lesson plan, twice, converting one specific student from "this poem is a waste land" to "now that I understand it more, it's a pretty good poem." (OK, I'm paraphrasing badly, but he came around).
-->Had lunch with wife for 45 minutes, for which I feel somehow guilty.
-->Chatted up fellow colleague in hallway about freakish weather patterns in Morgantown.
-->scheduled meeting for composition mentoring group (this was an unnecessarily complicated process
-->sat in on colleague's 3-hour graduate class to discuss two truly excellent plays.
-->Walked 15 minutes to car.

So it was a long day. my eyes are tired. My brain is tired. But damn, it was good. When I was an undergrad, I announced often and vocally that "what I was going to do with an English major" was read books and talk about them all day, I was talking about days like this.

See

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Fall snow
Originally uploaded by Ryan Claycomb.

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The view from the front
Originally uploaded by Ryan Claycomb.

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Ugly Duck
Originally uploaded by Ryan Claycomb.

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Anyone who has waited tables (of performed any number of other tasks that uses the phrase) knows that being "in the weeds" or "weeded" means that you're too busy to think, too busy to stop and even do a to do list. These are the moments when service gets really bad, when orders get lost, when food gets spilled, when snappish comments flutter out of pur mouths before we even know they're emerged.

Today, I emerge from the weeds. I am passing back, in htree different classes, a batch of papers, a batch of midterms, two batches of quizzes, and group project write-ups for four different groups. I have short lecture prepared for an introduction to British Modernism, and then,

yes, then,

I get to teach my FAVORITE POEM OF ALL TIME.

While there are certainly more than one embarrassing personal story about my adoration of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I have no teaching stories to tell about it. But today that all changes.

Yes, it's fall, the leaves are turning lovely colors. Faculty are emerging from stacks of papers to wax rhapsodic about their favorite configurations of language. Undergrads are listening and taking notes, and raising their hands eagerly to participate . . .

Well, we can all fantasize, can't we?

UPDATE: OK, so it's not that much of a fantasy: Prufrock seems to have lit up my first class as much as it lit me up in 1991, the first time I read it. Funny note: A student mentions, "this guy sounds like he was listening to a lot of grunge music, like Pearl Jam and stuff" and I dis the math for them. I wasn't wearing flannel shirts and my hair long just yet, but I had just discovered Nirvana's Nevermind the same year I discovered Prufrock. I think that just made me seem old, but also a little cool.

Posted by at 10:48 AM | Permalink

Creepy post-war British playwright Harold Pinter has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature [Washington Post Registration Required]. I first encountered Pinter in an Intro to Drama course I took for college credit while still in high school. In retrospect, I find it pretty amazing that I liked his work so much, given how dependent it is on what lies beneath the surface, and how subtext-ignorant I was at that age.

I later went on to write one of the best undergrad papers I produced on Foucauldian panopticism in The Caretaker and have virtually ignored Pinter in my work since.

This is partly because he is not really producing new scripts anymore, so he doesn't blip on the radar when your foocus is on very new work, but also because I have found his gender politics uncomfortable. Of course, that entirely the point: everything in a Pinter play is imbued with a sense of unease--even the famous "Pinter Pause" is shorthand for an absurdly long uncomfortable silence.

But perhaps I'll return to his work, since the rest of the world is being asked to . . .

Posted by at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Midterm is rapidly approaching, and as I am asking my students to reflect on their own progress midway through, and assigning midterm grades for those in trouble, I am also reflecting on my own progress.

What is so tricky here is that attrition is really high. Retention is a problem here (not first-year so much, but 6-year grad rates are really low), so I feel like there is some pressure in these sophomore heavy classes to pay attention to in-class attrition. For both of my 200-level lit courses, attendance is about 65% of ennrollment (around 26 out of 40 students). we'll see how that stands up for the midterm exam, but still, there's an attendance policy, and people are dropping like flies.

Again, I am concerned with whose responsibility this is. Of course, the students are responsible for showing up; but there's a sense here that many students have not been equipped yet with a sense that they do have ownership of their education. So I take it as my responsibility in part to imbue my education about literature with an additional axis--that what I have for them is not knowledge, but rather the tools for them to lay claim to their knowledge, and high class drop-out rates tells me not that I'm supposed to be doing more work for them, but that the work I have been doing on my teaching has not entirely invested them with their own ownership.

Of course this is about a larger university culture than just my class--I've been told that these rates are entirely normal for this sort of class--but it doesn't mean that I'm not dismayed by it.

teaching-carnival

Posted by at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The AC has been out of commission in the English Dept. for over a week now. THis is not a new building. Offices have no windows. It's been in the 80s all week, and though it has dropped to the high 60's outside, it's rainy and muggy there, and the temp inside has not dropped from the balmy temps from this week. I broke into a sweat opening my office door.

There are plans to move us from this old renovated field house to a lovely renovated building in the center of campus in June of 2007, but this is the sort of thing I've heard before (those who know where Tawes building is will know what I mean).

I am currently wearing a T-shirt at 11 am that I have already sweated through once, and really am stuck in the rest of the day. I know. Grody.

Posted by at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The typical student here seems not to be one who knows how to advocate for their own education, or, to put it less flatteringly, knows that learning is an active verb.

In class on Wednesday, I asked how many people had read one of the four assigned poems--some of Tennyson's Camelot poems, specifically, so not like they're super boring . . . Two students raised their hands.

Moments like this, I often perform a bit of anger and dismiss them on the spot--but it's too early in the semester for that (although another case like that and it'll happen).

But What I've been thinking about is not student effort but mine. I am a failed actor, but a performer by nature--I love a rapt audience. On the other hand, I know that lecture is not the most engaging pedagogical method; Instead, I run a mean class discussion.

Thing is, it's oftne very much a teacher centered discussion. Sure, I'll break them into groups to collect evidence; sure, I ask questions where the answer is open-ended. But I am always making an argument, I am always, through the evidence I ask them to collect, through the questions I pose to them, driving toawrd a specific reading of the literature.

The result for me is a very active pedagogy, kinetic, hyperactive, even. When students are lethargic, I threaten to tap dance. They still don't answer and I shuffle off to Buffalo. I make sure to hit all of the sexual references. I make analogies to hip hop lyrics (and those who know me know how comical this must be).

I fear that at its worst, it is pandering to apathetic learning tendencies. At its best, it keeps one or two or more students engaged so when I do the more rigorous work (and my classes ARE rigorous), they're still along for the ride. But I am ambivalent about the pedagogue-as-entertainer, even as it is the role I take on with the most gusto.

Of course, this is bound up in my anxiety about masculinity in the classroom, but its also, I suppose, the basis for a question to the pedablogosophere: How entertaining a teacher are you? Why/not?

teaching-carnival

Posted by at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

So as it was, with paper batches from three classes, new material to teach in the survey course, ongoing research projects, random and planned collegiality, and the London Theatre tour to plan for next semester, I was juggling a lot of stuff, but so far successfully.

All it takes is one weekend with a cold, and boom! I'm waaaay behind.

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Look! Certain doom below!
Originally uploaded by Ryan Claycomb.

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