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So, ten years to the week after entering my first graduate seminar (where I met both my advisor and my wife on that first day of class), and six years after my last graduate course, I'll be re-entering the graduate classroom again, this time to teach the class.
The course is entitled "Anxiety and Anger in Postwar British Drama" and will look closely at the work of six British playwrights from the last half of the 20th c: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, and Sarah Kane. I've been reading pretty extensively this summer to develop a good reading list and some relevant and instructive secondary readings.
So now I turn to you, O internets, as I continue the course planning: What were the best features of graduate teaching you experienced? I generally have a sense of what doesn't work about graduate teaching, but what are tactics and approaches that you recall working particularly well? Your advice is enthusiastically submitted and warmly received.
Click here and you'll see.
1. Grammatical pet peeve: Possessive problems, Faulty paralellism, and dangling/misplaced modifiers. At least the last category can be funny, as was the case a couple of years ago when a student wrote something like: Passing the six foot wooden chicken sign at the entrance to the fair, my gastrointestinal system prepared for a culinary onslaught [Ouch!]. Also, more recently, finding out that things that I always thought were "rules' are in fact just "preferences."
2. Household pet peeve--Oh, god, I commit so many of these in tiny ways...probably just general clutter.
3. Arts & Entertainment pet peeve: Comedy that makes me feel ashamed for laughing--potty humor often, but also the range of racist and sexist humor that proliferates.
4. Liturgical pet peeve: ermmm...lots of them, but increasingly, the eroding distinction between church and state, or more precisely, the church and the GOP.
5. Wild card--Lateness. Having kids has really made me reconsider this, since they make it very difficult to be punctual, but time is very precious to me, and when I am late I am very aware that I am wasting other people's time.
Bonus: Things that I do that become other people's pet peeves? So, so, many things. But for now I'll go with my propensity to answer rhetorical questions with absurdities: "You wanna hear something funny?" "Like a parade of tiny mangoes weaving their way through the produce aisle?"
As seen at Jo(e)'s
Ellie was born in February, a micro-premie at 28 weeks, and before then, she hadn't been thriving in utero, so she was even smaller than she might've bee otherwise. Over the following three months, Ellie lived in the NICU, where her parents visted her daily. She came home in early June.
Ellie's mom was one of Ann's dearest friends from college, and when our two were born, Katy came down and helped us adjust to parenting. We had always admired Katy and Dean's approach to parenting. We knew that the strength and support network that they had between them would help them as they lived through the parental nightmare of months beside the incubator, and scares about kidneys, lungs, eye damage, sepsis, and brain damage.
Dean, who is training to be a pastor, was also sending out emails to their large network of friends and family, and apparently, their hopeful tone and pleas for prayer prompted their forwarding near and far--Dean reported that folks would meet him and realize: "oh, you're Ellie's Dad."
Ann went to visit them in Delaware last week, in part to return Katy's favor of three years ago--helping with housework, bringing large frozen meals that could be reheated easily, offering conversation. She returned Friday night, talking about how lovely and fraglie Ellie was. Saturday night, Ann got a call from Katy's mom. Ellie had stopped breathing, and couldn't be revived. She was four months old, but only about 6 weeks past her initial due date.
I am ambivalent about things like prayer, but If I could send comforting thoughts to anyone tonight, it would be Katy and Dean, and their two sons, Jack, who'll be 9, and Sam, who had just celebrated his 6th birthday. Ann is at the visitation service tonight, and will stay for the funeral tomorrow.
I have had little to offer the family, but support to Ann, who can in turn off support to them. But if you're the praying type, or the sending-good-thoughts-into-the-universe type, do those things for these people this evening. If not, just try to be a little bit nicer, to offset a little bit of the pain in the world. Grief renders us all helpless, and grief for such a tiny little person feels even more debilitating.
To Ellie, may your departure engender, even if in the smallest way, a better world, even though it must go on without you.
I had mentioned a few times that earlier this week I would be at the Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies conference, to present work on performance in the composition classroom. I ended up happy with the paper I presented there, although the presentation of the paper was hardly the important part.
This conference (I actually hesitate to use that word, actually; it was sort of an extended round table, or a de-centered seminar) was a focused, invited group of 18 scholars with a diverse set of interests that intersected on this single topic. Only one session ran at a time, which meant more or less, everyone heard everyone else's papers, and conversation threads picked up and left off for session to session. We all ate lunch together on the first day and at the end of the second day, there was time for open discussion to pull together threads that had been discussed over the previous two days.
The intellectual exchange was rigorous and actually predicated on exchange, which is a contrast to many conferences I've attended, where participants (with the exception of some regulars) were often more interested in presenting, taking the line on their cv, and enjoying an interesting talk or two if it happened to appear in the program.
Better yet, the logistics of such an event were remarkably easy to manage: Because we were all in one room for the two days, overhead was minimal--one person in the English Department at GW reserved the room, and another participant put up the website. There was no registration fee, no need for silly name tags, and no overpriced conference hotel. I stayed with friends, and many just commuted from home, and so virtually no one had hotel costs.
So let me prpose this model to you: the micro-conference. Locate scholars (at all levels--bringing in grad students was an important part of the conversation) with similar interests as you within driving distance of your institution (particularly if you're in a metro center), and propose the event. See who is interested, and then schedule a date around their availability. Reserve a room in the department, point out the local *$ for breakfast, and hold a conference!
Stoppard did it. Updike did it. Renaissance Faires do it every summer. Filmmakers galore have done it in some way or another...It? Hamlet, in their own distinctive style. Contestants, you have until the end of July to reconceive a scene of Hamlet in your own inimitable approach.
Since there are three of you, you can each email the judges at their home address, who will post your entries as stand alone posts on successive days in the beginning of August, where readers of the blog will be encouraged to submit comments (as if anyone ever comments here!)
So whether you hope to duplicate the Oedipal struggle of Hamlet and his mother, the performed madness of Hamlet, or the "truer" madness of Ophelia, the Ghost scene, or the final bloody slice-and-dice, make it yours and make it good. You have two weeks (and a bit). Good luck!
I've been working for weeks on this paper called "Teaching/Performing/Writing," which I'll present Monday morning, and I've finally got something workable and, I think, thought provoking, when what do I find but this trifle on IHE.
As a remedy, I'll likely be posting sections of my paper here for feedback...
This story linked at Bitch PhD, provoked my comment below. This issue touched a nerve for me, both on the religious politics front, and the local news front, as I am a native to Southern Delaware, and went to school two districts north of the offending Indian River School district. See below the fold for my inital comment at Bitch's, a few responses to me in the comments, and, perhaps later, some further thoughts on the issue.
The discussion is currently into the 70s of comments, but here is mine and the few folks who responded directly to me:
Like EJW, I grew up in Delaware, but, unlike EJW, I grew up in the southern half, the set-your-watch-50-years-back part.It's even trickier than that, though. The unilateral Christinity there, is not so much targeted anti-semitism (I rarely heard the sort of "Jews are greedy conniving Jesus killers" that we typically think of. Rather, the fundamentalist mindset that dominates Sussex county (Where IR school district is) seems to believe that any thing that challanges or falls outside their specific spiritual/political landscape is an opportunity for evangelism. So whether it's the single Jewish student (There was only one Jew in my graduating class, too), or the gay men and women who trek to Rehoboth beach every summer, these are treated as opportunities to spread God's love, or at least a very specific brand of doctrine.
Because any one of the people targeted by this suit will feel like their actions were framed out of benevolence, accusations of hate speech are met with bafflement--"We were only trying to save her lost soul."
What makes all of this particularly insidious, then, is that our shock, our horror, is read as more evidence that the world is godless, and needs more fervent prayer and ministry to the lost.
I am all for standing up to anti-seminitism, and queer bashing, and anti-muslim sentiment, and anti-urban prejudice, all of which is a boom industry in Southern DE and hunderds of rural counties like it around the nation. But I think we need to think very carefully about ways to respond to this worldview that aren't condescending, not because the condescension isn't warranted, but it may not be effective; quite the contrary, it may only galvanize the advocates of the offending discourse.
From Steve LaBonne:
Sorry, Cats, I've had it up to here with treating this kind of vicious insanity with kid gloves. There is no place for it in a sane, modern society and it needs to be fought tooth and nail, not coddled. And the "they're not real Christians" band of Christians need to stop whimpering and get their asses on the front lines of this fight.
From Frowner:
Cats and Dogma--Actually, I think that Christians who claim to spread "God's love" when they're really harassing Jews/Muslims/people who are insufficiently 'Christian' are being pretty darn disingenuous. It's all about the libidinal thrill they get from being aggressive in a sanctioned cause. They like to be aggressive, but they also like to be victims. So they set up this ideology where they can do both. They get a lot of nasty, intense satisfaction from this, and that's what keeps them coming back to it. They don't call someone "jewboy" because they really, lovingly want to save his soul and they're just confused and misguided. They do it because it's fun to be cruel and they've got a way of thinking that (unlike the Christianity I grew up with) doesn't get in the way of cruelty but rather encourages it. The unpleasant thing about this neo-fundamentalism is that it's NOT about self-sacrifice and repression and wearing plain colors and never having enjoyable sex or doing anything frivolous--it's actually all about thoughtless ecstacy of a particularly nasty kind. That is, I don't think that taking their claims about "really wanting to save people's souls" at face value addresses why they do what they do.
From PhDyke:
Responding to EJW and Cats & Dogmas [sic]Then as now, "It's downstate, what do you expect?" is an intellectually lazy answer. There are many bigots north of the Canal, and people working for change southward.
Remember: Wilmington schools weren't desegregated (by federal court order) until **1978**. And an law banning anti-gay workplace discrimination repeatedly fails in the state legislature, despite the overwhelming population of the north. (Downstate senators block the bill, upstate senators allow them to do it.)
Sure, downstate Delaware is more rural, more conservative politically, and more religous. (It was a center of the Methodist revival movement.) It's also hosts the only wild, beautiful places-- wildlife refuges, tributaries, inland bays-- left in Delaware, since the "civilized" north has paved every square inch of New Castle County. It's also home to a large lesbian and gay community (mostly Rehoboth transplants, but some homegrown), including a gay-straight alliance at Cape Helopen High in Sussex Co. Given the choice of polluted, "progressive" north or rural, "conservative" south, it's not obvious to me which I'd prefer.
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Now, I think that some of these comments that respond directly to me misread my point, which is neither "We should treat Fundamentalist bigots with kid gloves, that they are in fact being "good Christians," or that being from Sussex explains all this away.
I am still deeply rooted there, since my folks still live there, and even though I distanced myself from that area during my time in the DC area, I find myself at WVU confronted with many of the same mindsets. I DO think, unlike frowner, that plenty of folks act this way because they really believe that they are doing good, but I also think those folks are flat out wrong. Whether following the Steve LaBonne logic will work is where I have to ruminate.
I grew up as a Sussex County fundamentalist, and my parents still are. I disagree with them often (though not always openly), and I've been inside the mindset enough to know that the ass-kicking progressive approach won't change their minds. Which is why my inital comment advocated another way, which may very well look like coddling.
The question of approach for me is not ethical, though (I feel pretty clearly that LaBonne and I agree on ethical grounds) but rather rhetorical. And then I wonder (as I work on an essay on performance audience and rhetoric) whether this is even an audience worth trying convince (not because they're intrinsically valueless, but because they're unconvinceable). It is part of why I don't openly confront my folks on a lot of subtly racist and openly homophobic stuff they pull.
I dunno. The story itself is pretty clearly appalling. How we individually and collectively respond to it and the ways that the scenario is reproduced in variations around the country remains the more pressing, and more troubling issue for me.
It's been a wet summer here, as for many places. In my head, I've sung "rain, rain, go away" more than once. Despite the fairly steep hill we live on, we've still got water pooling in the flat spaces--the water is still standing in a few of the flat spots on our lawn.
Of course, that means that it's been beautifully green all around, even in July, when I'm used to that dry, brown, crisp setting into the grass and the bushes. Our herbs, which are currently potted in planters with no drainage (I thought we'd need to hold onto the water) have needed draining every couple of days. The sage and the rosemary have has a rough time of it, preferring, as I've learned, more sun than water. But the basil is growing monstrous, emitting its sharp sweetness for several feet around. The tarragon is thriving, and the chives are standing taller than I've ever seen them.
It's been too wet to mow more than once in the last three weeks, so the grass is growing tall, and a few weeds are having a veritable field day. Even our roses, which were planted in an unfortunately shady spot on our back hill, and bear the brunt of our benign neglect, have been offering beautiful blooms in crimson and fuschia.
Last evening, I told the children a bedtime story about the rain fairy, who lives in the clouds and rides raindrops down to the ground to kiss all of the flowers and plants--it was an opporunity to give the kids little kisses all over, eliciting giggles with every blossom.
This morning, it is dry and clear, and the standing water has maybe a day to evaporate. Collin, who is home sick today, helped me drain the herb pots, and when I showed him the work of the rain fairy on the basil plant, he leaned over and kissed the fragrant leaves, just like the rain fairy. Summer, which I have traditionally disliked, is now in its fullness, the insects are buzzing about, and it's a beautiful, wonderful day to be living.
Usually, I start writing long before I'm done reading. My experience has been that what I'm usually working on is sufficiently off the beaten path that I won't really ever need to make anything other than minor changes--citations, nods, etc.--and usually additions. I rarely find that my point has already been made elsewhere. Occasionally, but rarely.
Sadly, though, after drafting a good ten pages of potentially usable material, I found that in the December 05 issue of CCC, And article entitled "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy" from a gaggle of Stanford folks (including the eminent Andrea Lunsford) had all but flat-out duplicated the writing I had done. I might as well have been summarizing.
Uggh.
The good news is twofold: One is that their bibliography and mine looked pretty similar, so even though composition studies is not my primary field by any stretch, I'm not completely in the dark. The second is that perhaps the smartest of my writing options remains open, and while I'm more or less starting from scratch, At least I've got a fairly clear path that remains.
