First in what I think will be a series of reflective postings on teaching:

It’s all over but the shouting. Or the final exams, anyway. As the semester draws to a close, I’m thinking about teaching and planning for next semester.

In both English 317 and English 350 this semester I had the students play “Ivanhoe: a game of critical interpretation” developed at the University of Virginia’s Speculative Computing Lab. I used Movable Type as the software and created a simplified version of the game (PDF rules) for my students.

The students seemed to like playing the game, and I think it really opened up some issues with the texts that they might not have otherwise considered. Now I’m faced with the challenge of grading their performance in the games, which is tricky. The classic assignment in an English class is the essay, and there are relatively standard requirements for what goes into a good essay even as the specific goals of that essay might change. Students will ideally be familiar with these requirements by the time they reach a junior-level English class, but this isn’t always the case. (There is always a bit of re-explaining that takes place.)

However, I’ve always wanted to provide students with a variety of assignments that provide them with multiple ways of thinking about the subject of a class. Some times I’ve given them a menu of “Self-Directed Learning Tasks.” If you give students an unconventional assignment, one they’ve never encountered before, you will have to be quite explicit about how to complete it, what the goals of that assignment are, and how their performance will be evaluated.

This semester I came up with a series of different assignments (more on them later) that were meant to provide for them the understanding that literature, literary criticism, and scholarship do not happen in a vacuum but are part of an ongoing conversation among writers and readers, some professional and some not. I think I need to work on how I explain this to my classes. And I need to determine for myself and for my students whether Ivanhoe helps provide them with that understanding. I think the answer is yes, but I will work on articulating why.

I used to be able to just power my way through a stack of papers, averaging one every 20 to 30 minutes. Now I find myself pausing to think about the point of the assignment for the umpteenth time, looking back at already graded papers to compare them to the one in front of me, re-reading the opening paragraphs. Have I lost my grading mojo?

Is grading papers always a grind? What kind of assignments in a literature class would result in papers that are not, first of all, likely to be downloaded off of the web and that, second, fully engage both halves of a student’s brain? I try different things from one semester to the next. I’d like to assume that my students already know the mechanics of writing an essay, but often this is not the case, and this failure to construct, say, a fully developed paragraph gets in the way of my knowing what they are trying to say. I swing between concluding that some students just lack the necessary writing skills and concluding that I have failed to explain the assignment adequately.

I will say this, however: In the past I’ve been frustrated by what are supposed to be argumentative papers that instead provide detailed summaries of the text under consideration. This assignment, however unfamiliar it might be to students, is succeeding to varying degrees at getting them to focus on interpretation and the strategies of persuasion. I’d like them to see that one text might support multiple interpretations of a particular issue, but that this does not mean that anything goes. Some interpretations are better supported by textual evidence than others. Some are more persuasive than others. Some, finally, just don’t hold water.

Sometimes I fear that I’m the only one who struggles with these teaching issues and that everyone else just effortlessly gets their students to write interesting, well-constructed essays and then just effortlessly glides through grading them. We usually talk the most about our successes, not what feel like our shortcomings.

This is the new course that I proposed (successfully) to the department. Haven’t yet found an available course number for it, but it will be a joint undergraduate/graduate course. If it passes the College curriculum committee, I believe I’ll be teaching it in fall 2004:

English 4xx/5xx 442/542 (course number still to be determined): Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing

Catalog Description: A study of selected topics concerning the material practices of writing, reading, and publishing within specific cultural and historical contexts. Issues examined may include authorship, education, information technologies, libraries, literacy, periodicals, popular literature, publishers, and communities of readers.

Rationale: This course would draw upon the expertise of any one of several faculty members in the department whose research and teaching already involve many of these issues. How the course would fulfill curricular requirements of a particular student would depend on the individual faculty member’s design of the course. Thus, a version that emphasizes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England would not count for the same category as a version that focuses on turn-of-the-century America. Various permutations of this course will offer students the opportunity to explore the material practices by which writing (literary, political, religious, journalistic, educational, etc.) has historically been created, reproduced, distributed, and consumed. Also under possible consideration will be the imaginative means by which cultures construct such seemingly self-evident categories as ‘author,’ ‘literature,’ ‘copyright,’ ‘literacy,’ and ‘reading.’

In my early British literature course, students are responsible for group presentations. Today was our last day discussing Paradise Lost, and the students decided to stage an O’Reilly Factor panel discussion featuring Satan and Adam as panelists. The only thing I know about this show is from the spoofs of it that have appeared on Saturday Night Live, but I can say that the presentation was easily one of the best all semester, in part because the format allowed them to emphasize that at the heart of Milton’s epic is a question: who’s to blame for why the world is in such a sorry state?

O’Reilly set the stage for the debate, and then asked pointed questions of both characters. When Satan would try to weasel out of his responsibility for the fall, O’Reilly would remind him that this was the “No Spin Zone.” Other students in the class then took on the role of “callers” to the show, asking questions of the panelists. It went very well.

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