Raining Cats and Dogma

A close friend of mine just confronted a student about a plagiarism case, and he met her with tears, and a more affecting story than usual. While she did not regret her actions on the matter, she felt bad about that moment of triumph she felt, that twinge of glee at catching a dishonest student, which made the tears she witnessed later all the harder to contend with.

This is a place I've been a lot, and I've come to a point where I think that I just have to understand that I can't have it both ways: that I can't be passionate about my teaching, and yet emotionally impervious to those moments when my passion and my values are trod upon.

I remember one semester in particular; it was the first time I was teaching Intro to Drama. It was a totally stressful semester, but I had so much invested in it--I thought this would be the course that I would be teaching for time immemorial, and I wanted to get it right. But I was mentoring in Freshman Writing that semester, and working a second job, and it strikes me that I had just had a long semester.

I had this bunch of guys in the back of the class who were driving me crazy--lots of energy, but often not focused on the class. They could be my best allies or my worst enemies in the classroom. By the end of the semester though, I felt like I had gotten two of them in particular really psyched about the class.

One of their last papers was a review of a live play, and one of these guys had shelled out the cash to see Romeo and Juliet at the Shakespeare Theatre at the Lansburgh in DC. I got the paper, and it was gorgeous. So gorgeous it could have been written for the Post, so gorgeous that it had been written for the Post. By Trey Graham, one of that venerable paper's prominent reviewers.

This kid would've gotten a B in the class even had he failed this paper, and instead he got an XF. When I figured it out I was so angry--furious--that all afternoon long I was literally seeing red around the edges of my vision, my face was flushed, I couldn't sleep that night.

When I confronted him, long after I had gotten my emotional response in check, he wept like a child. He didn't even have the pathos-inducing story that my friend's student had, and still, I thought, "Man, is seeing him cry making up for the anger I felt? That would make me a horrible person." But I just couldn't figure out why it had made me just so mad--it had completely ruined my day. It ruined his, too, but HE did something to deserve it.

You know, we are often reminded by our students how much power we have over them, but we really do give so much back to them--we lay our hearts in their little fingers every time we assign a paper, and have them broken dozens of tiny ways, and mended in another dozen.

For God's sake, we didn't go into this for the money. We went into it because we love it--we love the material, and at our best we love them--maybe not individually, but collectively. And sometimes, just like all the people we love do, they betray us, in little ways and big ways.

My point is, the moment I stop feeling just a little betrayed by my students is a scary one for me. Maybe that's not a bad thing for many people, but for me, and I suspect for others, too, it's a moment I dread, because then it might become just a job, and I never wanted just a job.

In the hypercritical field we're in, it's really very hard to talk about something so unrigorous as love--for the books we read; for the time we spend in front of the classroom; for the stupid little crushes we get on students with bright ideas, and with potential; for the silly idealism of it all. It's important for me to remember, right now especially, as papers pile up, as cribbed papers slide across my desk, as identical wrong answers appear on consecutive quizzes. And I want to tell my students, yes, dammit, it makes me mad. It makes me mad be unrequited love always makes us mad.

Posted by at 7:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I was forwarded an article recently from Inside Higher Ed on the need for a Humanities counterpart to the lab environments in the sciences. In an even more recent column, Donald E. Hall suggests that it is the job of endowed chairs to foster these kinds of environments in sites like faculty working groups, designed as regular meetings to discuss pedagogy, workshop research, and generally build intelelctual cohesion.

Well, Hall is an endowed chair in my department, and I have been more than eager to join in the fun. As a member of our Faculty Research Group (FRG), I have been both humbled and invigorated by the opportunity to read and respond to the work of full professors, endowed chairs, and fellow assistant profs.

Shoe's on the other foot today, though. One of the two pieces we'll be workshopping is a piece of mine that has been through the revise-and-resubmit wheel one too many times. It's a smart piece, I think, but it suffers from 1) being an idea that is no longer terribly fresh in my mind, and 2) having had too many cooks in the form of various benevolent, and not so benevolent readers.

Right now it feels like a mish-mash, and it's entirely possible that today's workshop will only add to the too-many-cooks phenomenon. But the greater anxiety is that, as a first-year faculty member on the tenure track, this feels like something of a test, and the choice not to submit something more polished that requires little revision, but might be more impressive feels like a risk.

Add to this the fact that at least two of my colleagues in this group are potential mentors for both my career and my work, and this feels dangerous.

Of course it will be fine; the theory isn't completely flawed, and these are generous folk, but it's the first time since the job talk that anyone's gotten much of a chance to look at my work.

Posted by at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Instant Kharma: A couple of weeks ago, in the tricky class, I tried an exercise where students led the discussion with only some notecard prompts from me. In order to keep me out of it, and to keep them responsible for keeping the discussion rolling, I told them I had lost my voice.

Yesterday, in that very same class, I actually lost my voice, and I may not get it back for tomorrow. This is fine in my 9:30 comp class, where students are doing group draft workshops, but in my lit classes, we're reading Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, a text I very much like teaching, but one that will require a fair amount of guidance.

But what do I do if I cannot speak?

Posted by at 10:11 AM | Permalink

In which the work of this blog is linked.

Check it out at Scrivenings.

Posted by at 10:09 AM | Permalink

The third issue of the Carnival of Feminists is now up at Sour Duck. And mein gott, is it compelling. Read it in big gulps. You might feel better about the world.

Update: the broken link is now live. Thanks for pointing that out, Jennifer!

I have been reluctant to be as open about my feminist politics on the blog for fear of being construed as a poseur, or worse, as trying to cash in on the cultural capital of feminism in the academy. But as a few recent discussions in my classroom have reminded me, that kind of silence is counterproductive to the political ends I advocate.

When asked at conferences, or at job talks, why as a white men I choose to address feminist texts and performances, my answer has always been fairly clear: In a democracy, we need a majority to make changes. And since not all women are feminists, I want to step in and fight in their stead. Just thinking of me as taking Phyllis Schlafly's place.

Of course that pithy little response elides a lot of the more complicated politics of men doing feminism. There is always the concern I mentioned above that I am speaking for women, which is precisely the kind of thing that much feminist practice has worked against. I prefer to think of myself as speaking with women, since mine is hardly the most groundbreaking or authoritative work on the topic. I hope my work is careful in contextualizing my own positionality, so even if I am critiquing the politics of a self-professed feminist author, performer, or text (like Eve Ensler) I try very hard to situate that critique in the context of other women's voices.

The other reason that I am a feminist, though, has little to do with my work, or even with legislative change. It has a great deal to do with my family. Ann and I work very hard to enact a feminist marriage, and while our marriage is in many ways traditional, I hope that our struggles to conduct our relationship with equity can be a model that proves that feminism isn't just about men acquiescing power, but rather about changing the terms of power so that it is shared and deployed equitably.

And there are the children--I want to raise a strong daughter and a strong son, and part of doing that means not just espousing a simplistic girl power motto, but also teaching them both that their positions in the world are not innate, and that their actions must be framed by an ethics that considers that truth. I want to raise a feminist son who can be (if he chooses) as manly as he wants to be, without being a cog in the patriarchy, and a feminist daughter who can be (if she chooses) as feminine as she wants to be without simply being an object.

So while yes, my work on feminism does earn me some small bit of cultural capital in the academy, it's not why I espouse this position. It's because these views are right, compassionate, and moral. That is all.

Posted by at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I know, not the kind of title people have come to expect from me.

When we first bought this house, I figured that the leaves from all those trees were gonna be a devil to get cleaned up. I didn't think, though, that we'd have to be cleaning up the trees themselves.

Early on in our tenure, several folks noticed that a tall Poplar at the edge of our property had died. Although it wasn't crucial to get it done immediately, we knew that we'd have to have it taken down before the fall set in. $600 later, we now have an elegantly-ground stump off to one side of our property.

We thought that'd fix it, but no. This weekend (after the kids and I watched Winnie-the-Pooh, no less), we had our own blustery day (which produced some of the pics from the previous entry). Mostly, it was just leaves circling around, but as the rains came, I happened to look out the window, and saw that the huge poplar in front of our house was at a remarkably odd angle. The Tower of Pisa would have been jealous.

I also noticed that it was looming precariously over our neighbor's fairly new Ford truck. I called, and after getting no answer, I ran over to knowck on their door, but no one seemed to be on the floor that their front door was located on (one of the oddities of building on a hillside).

I went back and called again (clearly, there was a car there, so someone was probably home), and as I dialed, I heard the thing come lurching downward. Poor truck.

After some chainsawing, and a big uprooted hole in the middle of our front yard, we now have about 30 feet of tree trunk in two large logs (one still attached to the roots and a large measure of turf) hanging out in the front yard. It's ugly, though not as ugly as our neighbor's truck.

Fortunately, we seem to be running out of trees to come down.

Posted by at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Bird bath
Originally uploaded by Ryan Claycomb.

Posted by at 1:04 PM | Permalink

A continuation of the previous post. Instead of focusing solely on the simpler yes/no choice of blogging, I wanted to consider why I make certain bloggerly choices.

The biggie: Using my real identity--I've heard tell that the choice not to use a pseudonym is often a gendered one, although some male faculty in specifically prickly situations often also choose to. But off the top of my head, most of the non-anonymous academic blogs I can think of are men who are relatively happy in their positions. This, so far, is true of me as well, and because I have always enjoyed a large degree of white male privilege, I haven't the energy, or perhaps even the capacity to remain anonymous. OK, so my students can google me and find out what I'm thinking about their classes, and the administration can google me, and my parents can google me, and all sorts of people can find this blog even if they are not the target readership.

But I'm not really hiding anything. Sure, these people may learn things about me that they didn't already know, but ultimately, I think I am that deadly combination of honest, optimisitic, and idealistic that often gets read as naive (and may indeed be naive). And I'm not interested in being disciplined away from these personal qualities that I hold dear. So I use my real name, and people can find me when they want to. Maybe someday I'll pay, in some small way, but we pay for all our words and actions, and I know I can rely on a certain amount of pre-existing privilege and a sense of honesty and propriety here to mitigate those (potential) negative consequences. See? I'm an optimist.

Subject matter: Primarily pedagogy--I have posted on modern drama couple of times, but unlike Chuck or any number of digital studies folks, not many readers have much familiarity with the material. I have also posted personal stuff upon occasion, but most of that I share with the people who are interested in other ways. Yet these are components of an academic life, and I'm not terribly interested in hiding them, either. Mostly, though, my most substantive posts of late have been related to pedagogy--handling difficult situations, considering my teaching style, some of my experiences teaching different texts (both rewarding and excruciating). Ultimately, I think this is my response to the growing sense of blogging community I'm finding, with lots of folks. The now-inactive Academic Self discussion group helped crystalize this. [A note to my readers who were part of that discussion: Hall, who is a colleague here at WVU, found the blog as it was ongoing, and has reported that he found much of the response posted there helpful, but also an eerie experience].

So yes, you can find pics of my kids through the link to my Flickr page, and yes, you may know about our bing honkin house, or the unseasonable snow, but Right now I'm thinking a lot about teaching and becoming part of an academic department, and these are the things I want feedback on, or think readers may find interesting.

Frequency: weekly or so?--No, I'm not the sort of person you can depend on to post every day or so (the first semester of this job has me BUUUSSSYYY), but I do hope to stay on people's radar. Plus, I'm spending enough time as it is here, and probably can't afford to do more.

OK, so maybe this is all self-indulgent navel gazing. Maybe tomorrow, I'll post on kidney stones or W.B. Yeats, or the really excellent pizza they make at The Daily Kneads (a fab local bakery), or my growing optimism about even my most reticent classes. But for now, navel-gazing it is.

Posted by at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Scribbling Woman today posted a piece that she had written for a university publication on what blogging does for her, and Given thaat I am home sick today with a not-serious-but-occasionally-excruciating little ailment, I thought I'd try to do a little reflection on my own blogging choices--Why I blog, how I blog, and why I blog the way that I do.

So, why do I blog? Peer pressure for one. The lead wordherder, Jason, is a close friend, and when he started the herd, many of us were sharing dinners and milestones together--weddings, defenses, births, marathons--as well as tentatively looking out into the burgeoning blogosphere. As some prominent herders grew in readership, others of us have come along for the ride.

Furthermore, having left physical proximity of the herd, blogging has become an important way to keep up relationships beyond the "how is the kid/marathon/diss" level that happens in too-brief phone conversations. So not only is it the tool of online community that so many adore, it has been a tool to maintain existing relationships at a substantive level.

That said, my readership, though small, has expanded considerably in the last year or so. By commenting on others' blog, and getting trackbacks and responses from them in return, I've leaerned that I have readers all over the country (some of whom I don't actually know--gasp!) and in England, Autralia, Canada, Asia, and South America. I am both flulmmoxed and seduced by this mystical readership, a readership that all of the acaademic writing I've done couldn't hope to reproduce, at least not in the short term.

And finally, as my blogginr ecently has turned pretty regularly to issues of pedagogy in the first year on the tenure track, I'v found that blogging is finally a very real and very valuable professional resource. So while getting feedback from old pal (dave e), is an important and long-standing relationship, exchanges with New Kid and Dr. Crazy enrich the experience even more.

So yes, I blog at my own peril, and yes it can be a time sink, but in the same way floating new ideas in public is always perilous, and that valuable teaching conversations in the hallway are always time sinks. But ultimately, this blog is so so so valuable in totally intangible ways.

Posted by at 10:33 AM | Permalink

Studying literature is not about having the right answers. It's about asking the right questions.

And you can't ask the right questions until you've already asked a hundred wrong questions.

So ask away.

Posted by at 7:42 PM | Permalink