Teaching Narrative, Fall '15.
This year had me teaching a wide
variety of courses and covering a great deal of terrain, both
physical and figurative. Reading, Writing, and Rhetoric courses,
coupled with the companion course Research, Writing, and Rhetoric,
were the staples. I contiguously taught a hybrid English Composition
for Teachers course in Corbin based both on composition teaching
theory and contemporary popular essays. This year I taught two
writing intensive classes, and having never taught a W course before,
I was challenged to integrate World Literature, Enjoying Literature,
and the requirements of the Writing Intensive courses.
All
instruction with Eastern went smoothly and as planned, likely because
the “first-year” composition courses are salty staples of my
teaching history--and the pitfalls are known and avoidable.
Composition remains a pleasure, while the literature theory course is
presenting the usual difficulties in managing a mountain of course
material and writing – with the accompanying reward of obvious
improvements on the upper-classmen's writing. My two 200-level
classes together renewed my excitement for literature (rather than
articles) in teaching humanities, and the smaller classes were a
welcome change for grading—though the smaller sample for grading,
even grading quizzes, was a problem I had never had to judge in
teaching in the past. Teaching Advanced Composition, then Advanced
Composition for Teachers was a welcome dalliance and a strong chance
to bring my knowledge base for composition theory up to date.
My
greatest personal personal challenge for the year was moving to
Richmond with my wife Ella and baby Alexander, which we only narrowly
accomplished before the beginning of the semester. We are thoroughly
enjoying our (fixable) new home and our proximity to campus, and my
students seem to much appreciate my availability outside office
hours.
My
teaching evaluations were returned for both semesters, and in several
cases IDEA forms were required for courses each semester. The
reviews were generally favorable. The aggregate scores on the IDEA
synopsis forms were a 4.9 and a 4.8, respectively, out of 5, and I
found that the reviewers answered the questions in much the way I
would have across the board. They noted the shortcomings of the
classes, of the syllabi, the course schedules, and the timbre of the
class – that is, the way the intellectual current was running in
the room. The overall impression is that students appreciated the
close attention to ideas and the careful review of their own writing,
and that we had a good rapport as fellow scholars, but that they were
sometimes snowed by material or rushed into deadlines.
In
collusion with Adam Hisel and Christina Lovin, I reviewed essays from
the writing-intensive World Literature II classes, theirs and mine.
The formats of the classes were very different, as one instructor
requires a single, longer literary analysis for the class and gives
more exams, while another requires many essays a few exams. My own
class had three mid-length essays, which could be called a literary
analysis, a comparative “local” analysis, and a comparative
“global” analysis. After some reading, we were able to mutually
conclude that the writing assignments in the 200-level courses, the
world literature courses, and the writing-intensive courses could
collectively be tailored differently: students seem to need full
direction in producing essays consistent with academic discourse
conventions, but they also need instruction in innovation, and
conjectural thinking in order to produce meaningful writing. Said
shorter, they should be taught carefully to write to the task while
being also strongly encouraged to deepen and broaden their thinking –
or, as a rhetorician would put it, to use the controlling ideas to
show how the essay will think.
Of those three sections, mine were the students whose thinking could
use some assistance with climbing back in the box, or at least
curtailing the wildest of the correlative impulses, and
more direction in the “assertion, evidence, interpretation” model
of literary criticism.
In
fall 2015, I am teaching a single 101 course, two 102s, a 210W, and a
302. This is my first year teaching 101 with Language Awareness,
and its approach is a complete departure from the texts chosen by the
department in past years. It requires almost no reading and offers
almost no advice for rhetoric, but it does take students through the
writing process in ways that our past texts did not. The result so
far is that the students have difficulty choosing subjects for
writing and are much more concerned about topic selection than about
expressing their own ideas—however, they have three more major
essay assignments this semester for which we can temper those
expectations. The students in this night class are festive but
comparatively inattentive, and they require more classroom management
than I am accustomed to giving. They are writing well, however, and
paying close attention to their drafts, now that they have learned I
will
scrutinize
their ideas early in their
writing. The Composition I
class was exceptionally rowdy, which made for difficult short
lectures but also for engaging discussion. This is one of the best
types of class for my teaching style. Two out of the three 102
classes were quite ready to discuss our many essays, though they were
less interested in discussing their own researching and writing. The
third 102 class was only slightly less eager.
The
four research writing 102s have used the short edition of From
Inquiry to Academic Writing, and
like the new 101 text, it includes few essays, no articles, and much
advice on prewriting and editing, with much less emphasis on the
process of writing or even ideation. The students therefore rely on
the production of their own texts for education, which entails more
use of documents on the projector for live editing and for short
lectures rather than discussions. It is nearly impossible to lead a
discussion without rhetorica, so we rely on examples of secondary
texts instead of the primary texts we used in past years. All this
translates into editing and composing instruction for the students
and much advice on writing, rather than philosophizing and
argumentation.
ENG 301 was a first-time
course for me, and nearly all the students preferred to temper their
creative writing and comment on the academic articles, rather than
discuss the Best American Essays in
class and perform academic argumentation, as I had imagined they
would. This made our midterm and final interesting, because they
were required to apply academic tropes to recent, popular essays,
both in the short essays they wrote and in short-answer questions.
We did use two textbooks for the course, one creative and one
academic, each of which was its own kind of success. Every student's
writing improved measurably during the semester, and several students
in this section were among the best writers I've ever had in class
the day walked in.
ENG
303 was full of strong readers and writers who were rather excited
about revision. Nearly every student was willing to share thoughts
on every short essay. Were I to have the semester over again,
though, I would have required reaction, reflection, and response
pieces of the 303, then had the students to build those into a
critique as an additional MEA. Their “classroom personality” was
remarkably taciturn, particularly considering that every student was
an elementary education major, and I assumed that their
loquaciousness would run the class material out of town on a rail –
instead, they demanded lecture, direction, and a militaristic outline
of expectations, even at the end of the semester. It seemed they had
never been presented with academic articles before, and they needed
considerable decoding in order to discuss the works meaningfully.
ENG
302 will have a restructuring the next time I teach it. In several
attempts to convey a history of literature while teaching a
serviceable survey of critical literature theory, I have reached the
unsurprising conclusion that the two cannot be addressed in one
semester. The textbook also relies heavily on poetry, and while that
works up through Romanticism, poetry becomes a disjointed analogy for
literature thereafter. The students take well to the literature in
the course, but they actually love the discussions of theory, tropes,
and social trends as represented by short stories, heroes, protests,
the fragmenting of the narrative in the Modern, the fracture of
consciousness in Postmodernism, and even the wry, arch reductionism
in Deconstruction. In the future I believe we will take apart a
single poem every week, have a pair of axial novels for the course,
spend much more of our time on the history of criticism.
The
class schedule remains
five days a week, and
essay grading tends to take all night, at least half the nights of
the week, but I believe my
students received quality instruction and attention to their writing
both semesters.
