Testing to the Teach
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.