This week is thesis week for me; I am rattling off my first full draft and sending it to my thesis chair by Thursday. So, for the sake of time, I will simply relate one charming anecdote and be done with this week's post.
Last week I had the delightful experience of welcoming students into my office for conferences. Because we suffer from such an abbreviated term in the spring months, I don't have time to meet with each student over early drafts of each paper (as I am, crazy or not, wont to do in other semesters). I gave students the option of sending me at least one early draft of one paper before its due date so that I could read and respond to it in detail. I actually had several students take the initiative with this first (and shortest) paper - a handful of conferences passed my desk over this past week.
Because my class is both an evening class as well as held during an abbreviated term, I find that I have more students who just want to 'get the thing done' than usual. I bear them no ill will; I resisted this course up until the very last undergraduate breath. I only evaded its horrors by taking an extra upper-division writing course as a senior during my very last semester at this esteemed university.
Among these reluctant rhetors, I have several part-time students that might more appropriately classified as full-time moms. One student who sought to confer with me over an early draft was just such a one; she even warned me beforehand that she would likely be bringing two toddlers in tow. This was no imposition to me. Besides the occasional terror of being handed an infant without warning, I find that I behave just fine with children, even small children of indiscriminate cleanliness and temper. I also have reason to believe (unless my swelling uterus and ultrasounds lie) that someday I may need to have children in tow on various daily errands. I was more than happy to oblige.
She came in on a sunny Friday afternoon, two rosy-cheeked babes at her hips. One was, I believe, around one year old while the other (as her persuasive essay informed me) was two and a half. She sat in a chair next to my desk and swaddled her chubby one-something in a green quilt, which he smacked happily between his slobbering gums for most of the conference. Her two-something child scrambled into an empty seat next to her and moved through various stages of tapping, clapping, leg-swinging, waving, humming, singing, and innocent question-asking as we conferred over her persuasive essay. She would occasionally break to shush him, which I thought a little unnecessary as he was by no means distracting. I am not one of those people who thinks that little children must always behave like very short adults. Occasional song and dance is to be expected, if not encouraged, in the shorter variety of our species.
Though I do not yet have children of my own, I have learned that the behavior of the small child may resemble the non sequitur to the inexperienced. Random violence as well as unexpected shows of affection can be expected in those smaller persons. For example, when I was a very young person I once ripped four walls free of their mounted wall hangings simply because I wanted to see if they would come off. It didn't cross my mind that such an act might actually be disagreeable to my friend's mother, to whom the walls belonged, and who also brought me directly home after I had dismounted each piece.
I am also reminded of an instance related to me by my husband from his younger days. Once upon a young boy's summer, he and a friend had been eating something requiring a butter knife down in the basement of his friend's house as they played video games. After eating said food, my husband and his friend proceeded to thrust said butter knife into the fibers of the couch, puncturing the various cushions like an oozing, bloated carcass until friend's parent came downstairs and (with perhaps the same sense of the non sequitur) told that miniature version of my husband that it was definitely time for him to go back home.
So, I was far from surprised when the young toddler made an urgent leap from his chair, a silent look of wonder and dismay unmistakably etched across his rosy cheeks. Though I knew of no cause for alarm, I figured this was a wall-hanging moment, or perhaps a knife-in-couch moment that could be illuminated only by some deeper childish wisdom that I could not, as of yet, account for.
Imagine my surprise when my student stopped, mid-discussion, and immediately thrust her open palm between the young swain's bowed legs. She held the little boy firmly at the crotch, just as one holds a flat palm against a spouting faucet. Though she asked it as a question, her response to his behavior was undeniably a demand: "Can you just hold it? Hold it!"
It was then that I realized: this young person is urinating in my office. And, like a hand against a spouting faucet, my student's open palm did little to stop the steady urinary flow. I was likewise powerless. I have no convenient place to store unplanned urine in my office (though I am six months pregnant, I'm not quite so desperate yet). Also, as earlier mentioned, I do have some anxieties about taking charge of small baby-type persons when I have not been sufficiently warned. So, I did not immediately offer to hold her other child who simply sat, plump and cooing, as his mother unswaddled him single-handedly and girt his brother's loins with the green quilt he had so recently gummed to a slobbering mess.
I was somewhat unsure as to whether I should laugh or offer sympathy, and though we'd talked through most of the points I had meant to bring up concerning this early draft, I still had one or two suggestions to make. This I did as she clamped the green, oversized diaper-quilt to her toddler's nether regions. After running through these points, I asked if she had any questions.
She said no.
I thanked her for coming in and wished her good luck in the revision process. She proceeded to thank me for my time and, with a slobbering baby cooing on one hip and a toddler waddling and clutching his new green girth at her side, she left my office.
I was left to do nothing but contemplate the joys of motherhood, work on my thesis, and scour the supply closet for a small bottle of spot remover.
I wish you all a Happy Mother's Day.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
Student ratings season again.
Today was the first day student ratings were available online. Usually, student ratings tend to swing me into high spirits. I feel validated, tickled, delighted, and even a bit starry-eyed over students I will likely only recognize by face when I pass them on campus. (Was it Carolyn or Carlyn? or Caroline? Curse all parents who name their children with Cs and Ks: a thousand Kristis, Kristinas, Kristens, Kirstens, and Kristas pass into the river Lethe just hours after grades are submitted).
This semester I got a few kicks and giggles, but was jolted by a comment left by a student upon completion of my Writing About Literature class:
I did not enjoy this class. I wish that we could have focused on a different (more current) time period. The class would have been better labeled Writing About Literature: Anne Elliot's favorite authors. My recommendation is to teach whatever you feel is necessary, but allow the students to research something that they are interested in. If I want to research Hunter S. Thompson or Chuck Palahniuk or anyone who is interesting to me why am I limited to Jane Austen or William Wordsworth simply because my professor finds their writings fascinating? We are adults and we have different tastes. If this class is attempting to prepare us to write about literature it missed the mark. I feel confident that I can write about romantic literature, unfortunately I will never read romantic literature unless it is required of me by another professor as I finish out my degree here.
I have come to terms with the fact that not everyone enjoys weekly response papers, that many think I assign too much reading, and that feedback could be more prompt (it always could be, but never is - it's like the American dream in that way), but this really swung me.
The student "did not enjoy this class" because we (woe is me) had to read Jane Austen? The British author beloved second only to Shakespeare by literary scholars (which I think is actually just an honorary first place in the canon on account of his large body of works - everyone would really much rather read a bonnet-wearers' romance than a swashbuckling study in transvestism; but really, Shakespeare, I love thee).
But beyond my initial shock that anyone could come out of an Austen/Romanticism-centered class and not be enraptured to the point of multiple swoonings, it strikes me that this student is not thinking critically about how I could structure a Writing About Literature class.
Here are some scaffolding elements that need to be in place before I can teach a student how to write about literature:
1. A text. If we're going to have discussions in class about how professional scholars write about literature, we need to have a text in common. We need to be able to understand a specific era of literature and be able to have conversations about how scholarly perceptions concerning this era have changed, how they've developed, and where they are now. It should be a text that is not too heavy for beginning readers, but substantive enough that advanced readers can still engage with the text in a meaningful way. It also needs to be a text I, as the teacher, am familiar with so that I can guide my students toward meaningful and realistic interpretations that would be legitimate to other writers about literature.
2. A literary era. If you're going to start teaching students how to write about literature, you need a common frame of cultural reference. How can you argue interpretations of a text if you know nothing about the time in which it was penned? Without history, I could easily argue that Austen's novels were influenced by Freudian angst as much as they were by 18th-century sensibility. While many debate the efficacy and precision of pigeon-holing authors into eras, this is still the most functional way to teach literary trends. Because I happen to have more experience in Romantic/Austen Studies, I knew I would be able to teach this cultural moment better than any other. And yes, I admit, I happen to be familiar with this time period because I find it is fascinating. But it would be a gross disservice to my students to try to teach them about a literary era that I have only a beginner's knowledge of.
3. Meta-texts. Unfortunately, Professional writing about literature is not any in any of the following formats: reader-response, poetry, personal essay, free verse, TV sitcom, or picture books (though "Heidegger's Day Out" is one I'd like to see: "And then little Heidegger noticed that the tree had Being and he decided it was time to join the Nazi party"). And so, in order to teach writing about literature in ways that it is actually done, we need to study actual published works of literary criticism, or, meta-texts. Texts about texts - texts that talk about what's going on in the novel, poem, or play. Texts that engage in professional, multi-national, multi-generational conversations about what these works truly mean, how they've been misread in the past, and how they ought to be studied in the future. The key here is that you can't simply assign a piece of literary criticism to a class if they have no common reference. There are many excellent examples of literary criticism that I would love to discuss in my class, but because the students aren't familiar with the novels, poems, and plays being written about, they can't critique or analyze these meta-texts very well.
If you want to teach an entire class how professionals actually write about literature, you just need to pick a text.
With these explanations still at my heels, I'm willing now to think critically about my teaching here. What if I had students pick their own texts? Their own criticism? Their own era?
I could see this working for a small number of students - students who are already familiar with a given time period, a given body of criticism, a given text. Students who are able to pick out important literary scholarship on their own, who are already familiar with critical trends within their discourse, who already know how to engage with other scholars - students who (really) have no reason to take my class.
I'm not interested in tailoring my coursework to students who already know my subject well. I'm interested in teaching those who need my guidance.
Hopefully I didn't "miss the mark" completely here; I just tried to teach what I know, along with some principles of professional writing about literature that can be used in later (more personalized) research projects.
And, just to validate the socks off of myself, here are some comments that tickled me:
Anne Elliot "is a great teacher, and I have really enjoyed learning more from her, and growing from her feedback this semester."
"She cares for writing and literature and shares her passion with students."
"She demands more of students than they think they are capable of, and that's great - it helps us realize that we're capable of more than we thought we were. Her teaching style is fun. Terrific instructor."
This semester I got a few kicks and giggles, but was jolted by a comment left by a student upon completion of my Writing About Literature class:
I did not enjoy this class. I wish that we could have focused on a different (more current) time period. The class would have been better labeled Writing About Literature: Anne Elliot's favorite authors. My recommendation is to teach whatever you feel is necessary, but allow the students to research something that they are interested in. If I want to research Hunter S. Thompson or Chuck Palahniuk or anyone who is interesting to me why am I limited to Jane Austen or William Wordsworth simply because my professor finds their writings fascinating? We are adults and we have different tastes. If this class is attempting to prepare us to write about literature it missed the mark. I feel confident that I can write about romantic literature, unfortunately I will never read romantic literature unless it is required of me by another professor as I finish out my degree here.
I have come to terms with the fact that not everyone enjoys weekly response papers, that many think I assign too much reading, and that feedback could be more prompt (it always could be, but never is - it's like the American dream in that way), but this really swung me.
The student "did not enjoy this class" because we (woe is me) had to read Jane Austen? The British author beloved second only to Shakespeare by literary scholars (which I think is actually just an honorary first place in the canon on account of his large body of works - everyone would really much rather read a bonnet-wearers' romance than a swashbuckling study in transvestism; but really, Shakespeare, I love thee).
But beyond my initial shock that anyone could come out of an Austen/Romanticism-centered class and not be enraptured to the point of multiple swoonings, it strikes me that this student is not thinking critically about how I could structure a Writing About Literature class.
Here are some scaffolding elements that need to be in place before I can teach a student how to write about literature:
1. A text. If we're going to have discussions in class about how professional scholars write about literature, we need to have a text in common. We need to be able to understand a specific era of literature and be able to have conversations about how scholarly perceptions concerning this era have changed, how they've developed, and where they are now. It should be a text that is not too heavy for beginning readers, but substantive enough that advanced readers can still engage with the text in a meaningful way. It also needs to be a text I, as the teacher, am familiar with so that I can guide my students toward meaningful and realistic interpretations that would be legitimate to other writers about literature.
2. A literary era. If you're going to start teaching students how to write about literature, you need a common frame of cultural reference. How can you argue interpretations of a text if you know nothing about the time in which it was penned? Without history, I could easily argue that Austen's novels were influenced by Freudian angst as much as they were by 18th-century sensibility. While many debate the efficacy and precision of pigeon-holing authors into eras, this is still the most functional way to teach literary trends. Because I happen to have more experience in Romantic/Austen Studies, I knew I would be able to teach this cultural moment better than any other. And yes, I admit, I happen to be familiar with this time period because I find it is fascinating. But it would be a gross disservice to my students to try to teach them about a literary era that I have only a beginner's knowledge of.
3. Meta-texts. Unfortunately, Professional writing about literature is not any in any of the following formats: reader-response, poetry, personal essay, free verse, TV sitcom, or picture books (though "Heidegger's Day Out" is one I'd like to see: "And then little Heidegger noticed that the tree had Being and he decided it was time to join the Nazi party"). And so, in order to teach writing about literature in ways that it is actually done, we need to study actual published works of literary criticism, or, meta-texts. Texts about texts - texts that talk about what's going on in the novel, poem, or play. Texts that engage in professional, multi-national, multi-generational conversations about what these works truly mean, how they've been misread in the past, and how they ought to be studied in the future. The key here is that you can't simply assign a piece of literary criticism to a class if they have no common reference. There are many excellent examples of literary criticism that I would love to discuss in my class, but because the students aren't familiar with the novels, poems, and plays being written about, they can't critique or analyze these meta-texts very well.
If you want to teach an entire class how professionals actually write about literature, you just need to pick a text.
With these explanations still at my heels, I'm willing now to think critically about my teaching here. What if I had students pick their own texts? Their own criticism? Their own era?
I could see this working for a small number of students - students who are already familiar with a given time period, a given body of criticism, a given text. Students who are able to pick out important literary scholarship on their own, who are already familiar with critical trends within their discourse, who already know how to engage with other scholars - students who (really) have no reason to take my class.
I'm not interested in tailoring my coursework to students who already know my subject well. I'm interested in teaching those who need my guidance.
Hopefully I didn't "miss the mark" completely here; I just tried to teach what I know, along with some principles of professional writing about literature that can be used in later (more personalized) research projects.
And, just to validate the socks off of myself, here are some comments that tickled me:
Anne Elliot "is a great teacher, and I have really enjoyed learning more from her, and growing from her feedback this semester."
"She cares for writing and literature and shares her passion with students."
"She demands more of students than they think they are capable of, and that's great - it helps us realize that we're capable of more than we thought we were. Her teaching style is fun. Terrific instructor."
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