Teaching

Teaching Bartleby

preterite Teaching

In addition to Advanced Composition, I’m teaching Intro to American Literature this semester, and enjoying it. We’re into the nineteenth century now, short fiction, and I’m rediscovering pleasures I’d long neglected. “Bartleby the Scrivener,” as fundamental as it is, is one such long-neglected pleasure for a rhetoric and composition specialist.

I’ll confess: the first time I read it, as an undergrad, I didn’t get it. Didn’t understand any aspect of it. Wouldn’t engage it.

The second time, coming back to it, reading it for pleasure, I was delighted. It was in a secondhand book with “Benito Cereno” and “Billy Budd” and I’d been on a Pynchon paranoid fiction kick after Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow and my friend M. said there was more of that weird, freaky paranoid stuff going on in “Benito Cereno” and I ought to check it out, and I did, and then remembered that I’d wondered what the big deal was about “Bartleby,” and re-read it in a sitting, as well. As with Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter, I was perhaps more surprised than I should have been by how much more I got out of it on a second visit. This isn’t a terribly original or interesting observation, I guess: the first time I encountered it, as a student, it was an Important Text; the second time I encountered it, as a reader, it was something else, something different. So it’s nice to be teaching it, and nice to be spending two class days on it.

Today was the first, and I stole the idea for my lesson plan from a colleague, who’d used it to great success. Minor modifications on my part, but it went like this: for homework, I’d asked them to read the story in its entirety, and told them to be prepared to lead discussion in class today, and to come to class with notes on motivation and action in the story to help them do so.

I brought my laptop to class, which I’d never done before. (Each classroom has its own dedicated computer.) I set it up on my desk. In the seconds before class started, I said to them something like this: “You’ve just read a story in which someone, with a screen between him and the other characters, fails to do what they expect of him, and in violating the expectations customary to their relationship, causes disruption and concern.”

And that was All. I. Said.

Not a word more. Not a single word, for the rest of class.

I typed notes, fingers flying to keep up with copying what they said, and yes I sometimes grinned or couldn’t stop myself from nodding. And some of them got mad, or frustrated, and some of them disengaged, but a few of them got into it, and discussion ebbed and flowed without me speaking a single word for the entirety of the class period.

I posted the notes to the course site when class was over, and from the notes — five pages, single-spaced — it was clear that they came to the discussion remarkably well-prepared, and managed to talk out a lot of the tough points of the story. Sure, it was hard to keep quiet: immensely difficult, for them and for me, for one section more than another. Fun, too, though, and productive, once they got what was going on. But I asked them to lead, and they led. And we’ll use those notes as a starting point for the second class session.

I also have the luxury that they’re cadets, though; that they’re motivated and obedient, and I wonder how well that’d fly with Michelle’s students, or Joanna’s, or Collie’s. How does the line between expectation and compulsion shift from classroom to classroom, from one institution to another? Sure, I’m a boundary case, a marker, an outlier: are there other boundary cases? Where would or wouldn’t my Bartleby act fly — and why?

Those Are My Feet

preterite Teaching

I’m meeting with a student and talking to him about the presentation he’s working on, which has to do with the pros and cons of soldiers publicly disclosing personal information on the internet, and I’ve got a bunch of windows open on my screen from my previous meeting. And the cadet looks up, and sees a YouTube screengrab of a puppy, and says, “Can you hit the back button, Sir?”

I hit the back button.

“I think that’s me in that video.”

OK. The video plays: soldier’s feet, cute golden lab, black nose and lips, all nippy.

“Sir, those are my feet. That’s Bambi, the puppy my platoon adopted in Iraq.”

And yeah. It’s totally him. It’s his voice.

In the Valley

preterite Politics, Teaching

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, my colleague down the hall asks:

What does it mean for an undergraduate to pass the morning reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and the afternoon parachuting from a helicopter?

It’s a form of the question I’ve been asking myself in the year since I came here, and it’s a question she’s been asking herself much longer. I admire the way she extends the questions she poses into a meditation on the purposes of teaching, and I admire the conclusions she draws as well. Her article is the most thoughtful representation I’ve seen of what it means to teach here, of what it means to teach English here, and of what the productive complications teaching here might bring to the teaching of English. She’s working from the perspective of the teaching of literature, and some of the ways I look at concerns associated with the teaching of writing here are somewhat different — but for much of what she wrote, I found myself nodding my head and saying, “Yes, yes, yes.”

The essay well describes what we do. I’m interested to hear what you might think, reader, especially if you work in rhetoric and composition, or are at all curious about this place. Check it out.

Starting Again

preterite Academia, Teaching

I taught my first class of the semester on Monday. It felt good — it always does — to be back in the classroom again. New semester, new duties, new responsibilities: the bureaucracy here is the temporal equivalent of a gas, expanding to fill the available time. Which means I don’t have much time for leisure reading, but I’m riding my bike to and from work when the weather permits, and getting up early (5:15) to do PT before going in around 7. I’m trying to do the job stuff when I’m at work — I got some good work done in the office this summer, helping out with a Kairos issue (I won’t mind at all if you tell me how cool that logo is, and — while certainly partial — I really like what Steve did with his article), submitting one article for publication, and working on another, plus two more to go — and leave it behind as much as possible when I come home in the evening, but I know with the first batch of papers to grade, that’ll change. Still, I’m feeling well-adapted: I was one of the lead people working on our FYC curriculum over the past year, so I’m somewhat satisfied with the way we’ve worked the syllabus, and have much more comfort with the mesh between my expectations and my institution’s expectations than I did last year — to be blunt, it’s been a bit of a battle, and I felt like I took some flak last year. This year, I know the ropes, I know the responsibilities, and I know how the cadets are. Again, I love the plebes — the freshmen — because of their openness, their willingness, and their enthusiasm, but it’s also interesting to me that the cows — the juniors — that I taught last semester are now back as firsties with full firstie privileges, so I’ll run into them in their civilian clothes when I’m in town running errands. I’ll be mentoring some cows for the Marshall and Rhodes scholarship applications, and I’m mentoring a senior as a part of a pilot academic advising program, and that feels good as well. So: a new start, and I’m hoping it’s a good one.

One More Thing, Mr. Kerr

preterite Computers, Teaching

Some final thoughts from Kerr tonight — it’s been a long night, and I should’ve been in bed long ago, but I’ve been struggling with various technology issues for my two sections tomorrow. Which is somehow appropriate, since the stuff from Kerr is about technology.

Kerr argues that “The best of the liberal arts colleges are likely to be the least affected by the new electronic technology since they are mostly engaged in the all-around development of the children of the already affluent (the top one-fifth of the economic scale), providing sports, lifetime friends, social skills, programs for cultural interests, and all-around intellectual advancement, not just job skills. These institutions get their main support from gifts by affluent alumni who have the ability and willingness to pay high tuitions for their children, not from public funds” (224). But those of us who have visited computer labs in wealthy private institutions and compared them to the computer labs at the less wealthy public institutions where we teach know quite well that “the best of the liberal arts colleges” also have more, better computers per student, and because their students tend to come from more affluent backgrounds, those students often possess a higher level of familarity and proficiency with computers, and also often know how to do different sorts of work with computers. The divisions Jean Anyon points to in “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” apply very much to the use of computers in elementary and secondary education: students in poorer schools are often given drills-and-skills instruction while students in wealthier schools get to do the fancy stuff.
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The Teacher & The Researcher

preterite Teaching

Mike the writing teacher might respond to Mike the blogger’s post yesterday in the following fashion:

“Dear Mike:

Your first paragraph really got my attention, with the way your small alliterations called attention to the connection between the cause (your classes having gone well) and the effect (your good mood), and the ‘oh’ of clear delight. The problem is, the rest of the entry doesn’t deliver on the promise of that paragraph. You immediately switch gears by going into a detailing of bad days, including a throwaway military reference, and then for no apparent reason throw some abuse at campus IT workers before returning briefly to your ostensible topic: your good teaching day. However, you bring it up again only to confuse us by just as quickly dropping the subject in favor of the focus of the post’s second half: questions of ethical student representation. In raising these questions, you in no way acknowledge the obvious and strong connections to your earlier post, ‘What’s in a Flame?’, which was prompted by remarkably similar questions about how and where instructors talk about students.

Maintaining a solid focus — either the ‘good day’ narrative or the ethics of representation questions — should help you revise this into something that readers may be able to productively engage with. It’ll take some work, though.”

And Mike the writing teacher would be right. It was just such a good day that I couldn’t not tell you about it. My questions are still there, though. From that CCC statement I linked and from what I’ve said here, what’s your sense of how much I can responsibly write about my classroom? Obviously, I wouldn’t ever use student names, not even just first names — but does even talking about a student without using names (e.g., “I have one student who’s ten months out of Moscow and has immense difficulties with English, but man! she’s well-read and has some fantastic ideas; one of her first drafts referenced Chagall and Bulgakov in this extended metaphor that worked with some seriously apocalyptic imagery to make a political statement about being a Jew in Russia”) violate my ethical obligations as a teacher and researcher? I think so. So how much can I say, if anything? And is this really just the question Liz was asking but in a different skin?

What Class are Teachers?

preterite Class (Economic), Class (Marxian), Teaching

There’s an insightful discussion of the academic labor market over at the consistently excellent Invisible Adjunct. Reading the posts there led me to ask whether I should rethink the way I’ve circumscribed my examination of class to focus on students: after all, if I’m going to argue that class structures are enacted, negotiated, altered, or reproduced in the college writing classroom, teachers are certainly components of those class structures. As instructors, teachers may be reasonably expected to foster a student’s class mobility, while at the same time standing as a member of a class to which the student does not belong.
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