Why I teach

I offer my condolences to students and their families, faculty, staff, and the community of Northern Illinois University.

And finally, in the light of tragic events there, I think I know why I teach.

It means a lot to me to be part of an institution with a long history and a continuous commitment to its mission: pursuing knowledge, in the hope of gaining understanding and wisdom: the central goal of a university.

I don’t mean my home institution, which is not that old; I mean the idea of the university. The university is a medieval institution, founded in the centuries I have spent my adult life studying. As a professor, I take my place in a tradition that has lasted a millenium.

Of course, medieval masters would be shocked by my classroom: taught by a secular, a woman? With women in the classroom! And why are you reading that secular vernacular trash? Look at all the books—every page alike! So bright in here, so warm! What are these people wearing? Does no one know Latin any more? What do all these neologisms mean? And that’s just my classroom, before getting to the rest of the university and its organization.

Nonetheless, I feel the continuity between myself and the medieval masters. It is their commitment to learning, their arguments about the nature of God, their practice of dialectic, their reading to students from precious books, their public disputations, that make possible my work and the work of my colleagues in other departments. We all pursue knowledge; we all hope to understand better our world, our history, ourselves and each other because of this work; most of us hope such understanding can lead to wisdom. Even if our findings are fit only for the Journal of Negative Results, we’re engaged in a process that is in itself meaningful.

I find new knowledge in the library, or at my desk. But the classroom is where I stand up and get counted as a believer in the university’s work. In the classroom, I speak for the importance of asking questions, studying arcane subjects, putting together the puzzle pieces of intellectual inquiry. In teaching, I assert, implicitly or explicitly, that the life of the mind is important, that you should learn more than just what is required to manage day to day life, that preserving and extending knowledge is a worthwhile endeavor.

Both my research and my teaching can, and eventually will, be continued by others. Far from indispensable, I am an academic cog. But I am not alienated from my labors. I have my place in the Great Chain of University Beings, furthering the pursuit of knowledge as best I can.

This is a far more abstract answer than most bloggers have given to this meme, which surprises me, because usually I favor concrete thought. But underneath pleasure in the classroom, or the need to support a research habit, or any of the other good reasons to teach, I find that teaching, for me, is a matter of principle. Every day that I teach, I am standing up for something I believe in: that there is value in pursuing knowledge for its own sake; and that that pursuit may lead to wisdom.

I am a little surprised to find that I am leading such a principled life.

Teaching and translations

I once had a student who translated Chaucer's famous line (thanks to Dr. Virago, we all know it), ""Te-he,' she seyde, and clapte the wyndow to," as,

"'Teach,' she said, 'and close the window, too.'"

Insert joke here about closing the barn window after the horse is stolen.

I expect upper-division English majors to read Chaucer (and many other Middle English texts) in Middle English. I would not expect this of lower-division students in a gen ed course, but it seems to me that if you're a major, you should read Chaucer, not someone else's version of Chaucer. A few years ago, the Chaucer Review published an essay analyzing summaries of the Wife of Bath's prologue (Crags' Notes, Regal Notes, FireStarter notes), and the ways minor misstatements added up to serious distortion; I think the same thing goes for translation. Most of Chaucer's writings are poetry, so the words matter even more than in prose, and you should read for more than just plot. Told by someone else, the Miller's Tale would be just a fart joke.

Some students take to ME quite easily; others take awhile; some never really catch on. My experience suggests that it helps a lot to have (a) a large vocabulary in Present-Day English, so that you recognize archaic and dialect words more easily, and (b) a flexible approach to spelling. Further, being able/willing to sound words out helps; I suspect the student who gave the translation cited above had learned to read by recognizing the shapes of words ("whilom" came out as "William," and a host of similar errors).

I encourage students to use a translation, preferably the Harvard Chaucer Page's interlinear translation, for the General Prologue, and start weaning themselves off translations while reading the Knight's Tale. This used to be self-enforcing, when the HCP gave only the GP . . . the GP and a little more . . . but now the HCP has the whole CT, and various other reputable online sites have most of the Chaucer corpus available in translation.

So, are we to give up and assume that Chaucer, like Beowulf, will now be read only in translation at the undergraduate level? Last time I taught Chaucer, I kept to what has become my usual sequence of texts, and continued to encourage students to do their own translations and check them against the HCP, to wean themselves from the interlinear translation, to bring their assigned books to class and quote and discuss ME in their papers. But I noticed a lot of printouts being used, and there was a notable drop in participation the first day (mid-semester) we discussed Sir Orfeo, which I assigned from the TEAMS site. (Students didn't seem to get as far as acquiring the Tolkien translation, so maybe if I didn't mention the online translations of Chaucer, they wouldn't find them? I doubt it, though.) I think that when faced with ME sans interlinear translation, a lot of them boggled.

Two solutions immediately spring to mind. One, give in to the use of translations and cover a lot more ground than I currently do. (I used to cover more, but back in the day, students seemed to read better . . . please join me in a chorus of my-how-the-world-has-changed-for-the-worse-since-I-was-young.) Two, go the other direction entirely, and do fewer texts but in much more depth, so that students will become intimately familiar with the ME, and thus, I hope, will stop feeling intimidated by it and develop a real appreciation for the language and its strange shades of meaning that no longer exist.

My preference is for the second; and that leads to the problem of which texts to choose. If you were going to spend a whole semester on 2-3 Chaucerian texts (with some supporting critical and source material), which would you choose, and why?

On reading and romance

I work on, and enjoy, medieval romance. I have to admit, however, that I find it difficult to distinguish some of the more episodic romances from one another (or from Harry Potter 7, for that matter), or to remember the sequence of plot events.

So when I read a romance I intend to write about, I take detailed notes, with line numbers, plot summary, reaction, and sometimes interwoven commentary from critics. It might read like this: "2001. Wyrm appears in heavens, hero prays before attacking. Wouldn't that risk getting cooked in own armor? Dude, attack first and pray afterwards. Critic Z says this indicates change in attitude, learning to appreciate piety, but really, there are better places to learn piety, like episodes at 1700 or 2350."

Sometimes, especially when talking with certain colleagues, I feel that this is a total waste of time. I should just write an actual article or at least conference paper, looking things up as necessary, rather than spending weeks noting a single romance. Product! Excelsior!

HOWEVER. I am now engaged in writing a conference paper on one of these obsessively noted romances, and it is SO EASY because I have 30 pages of word-processed notes. I don't have to spend ages trying to figure out whether I mean the first or second wyrm attack; I just hit control-F and sort it out quickly.

Note to self: taking notes is not a waste of time. I should do more of it in general. But most especially in desperately busy semesters when I can't get my mind around a sustained piece of work, it is perfectly, totally, completely fine, nay, praise-worthy, to set aside a couple of hours a week to read another medieval text and take notes on it. It will pay off down the road.

So am I the only one who thinks HP7 is like Guy of Warwick, only more predictable?

More on performing reading

I went to a Twelfth Night party on 5 January: we spent Twelfth Night reading Twelfth Night aloud. We had a couple of middle-aged moms (not exactly SAHMs: people very active in assorted unpaid activities, including home-schooling), a couple of teenagers, a couple of grad students---in all, something like 10 people for 14 parts (plus assorted Officers and Attendants who had to be rapidly assumed). Viola was traded back and forth between two people who wanted to do her. I got to be both the Duke and Sir Toby Belch. Since I was sight-reading, I fluffed a couple of lines, realizing only after the words left my mouth that I wasn't speaking to the person I thought I was speaking to, or that the double entendre wasn't what I thought it was. But I did okay. The teenager whose voice had just broken took Feste, and did a fantastic job using his different registers to highly comic effect.

I am SUCH a nerd, but that was the most fun I'd had in quite awhile. Of course it was partly the people and the party atmosphere. Would that I could bring mulled wine and munchies to class when I want students to read aloud. I'm sure it would make a difference, the way a drink or two helps enormously with fluency in foreign languages. (Since I often teach in a "smart room," we're not supposed to have any food or drink, even water, to protect the equipment.)

This spring I'm teaching a lot of Malory. I plan to use the Malory Aloud CD as an example before students read aloud; this time around, rather than having a formal paper in which students analyze the passages, I'm going to assign Discussion Board posts on Blackboard about the passages they choose to read aloud. I find this is a good way of testing or working up to formal assignments. When I have an idea for a new kind of assignment, I try to work it out in stages, making it somehow more informal at first---through group work, in-class writing, or Discussion Board comments---while I work out what about it interests students, and what they find difficult or frustrating about it, before working out a full formal essay. Sometimes it never does go to an essay or formal project; some ideas work better as informal writing or reports. Or I may wind up with a sequence that starts with something informal and works up to a longer, more point-significant piece of work.

I wish I could get to the point where I have my courses prepped once and for all. My parents, who went to college in the days of formal lecture, do not understand why I spend so much time on course prep. But the students change. The people I teach now are different from those I taught at the beginning of my career, and different even from those I taught 5 years ago. Dr. Crazy had a good post recently about the changes she's made in her classroom. I've had a similar transition, but it took me longer---partly because 15 years ago, it was still possible to teach in the more traditional way she describes. Most of my students did understand what I meant by "a 5-7 page paper." As the years passed, that was less and less true. I'm sure some of it has to do with what happens in high school, but I have no control over that, so I have to adapt my course delivery so that we are all happier.

At least, I hope we are.

Another thing I'm trying this spring is very detailed sets of reading questions/note-taking questions for each class day, inspired partly by discussion at---somewhere---I actually saved the discussion for myself as a file, but now I can't find it (d'oh!) and don't, of course, remember who sparked it. Anyway, it may be overkill. But I want to make it very clear that there are certain things students should get out of the readings and out of lecture and class discussion, so if they fill out the question sheets for every day, they will have excellent class notes that will help with writing papers and studying for the final. We'll see. Can someone tell me who had the post and comments about assigning points for reading questions and so on?

Edited to add: I found both my saved document and the original post. It was Hilaire's. My brain isn't totally down, just temporarily off-line. I was inspired in a sort of backwards way, since she was encouraging students to ask questions and I am telling them what the important questions are (though I'll also include a question about their questions); but the discussion of giving credit for such things was very helpful.

MLA

I am not actually attending the conference, but I did wind up in Chicago post-holidays, so I went to the Hyatt for the blogger meet-up. The first person I saw was a former professor of mine, eating an orange in the lobby before rushing off to a panel---at nearly nine at night! What the hell? Soon the MLA is going to be running 24-hour sessions, either preparing its members for jobs in the service economy, or perhaps as a concession to those who already are in it; and the conversations will go like this:

MeLiA: I got the worst time slot, 5:00 a.m., I'd never in my life been up at that hour before, and the only audience members were horribly hearty morning people on their way to the gym or, worse, on the way back from it.

LiAM: Mine was worse, 3:00 a.m., and the only people there had been out clubbing; they were ALL drunk and half of them heckled with no inhibition whatever and the other half fell asleep and snored.

ALMa: Even noon isn't what it used to be, because most people there are either exhausted from getting up at 4:30 to go to the gym or else they just woke up, and they're all cranky and low on blood sugar, it's just like teaching during lunch hour.

It was fun meeting people. No one looks anything like how I imagined them from blogs (Sisyphus is not actually a talking black cat), except for being much younger than I am. But a couple of people were kind enough to say that since so many bloggers are grad students and junior faculty, it's good to get some balance from old bags like me the tenured. Good luck to everyone with interviews and papers and networking!

Performing Reading

So, no one's interested in showing off their languages. Moving on, then.

Stephanie Trigg, in responding to the Books You Loved meme, turned the question around to ways you performed reading in 2007. An excellent question . . . particularly as one of my Christmas presents responds to both halves of the meme: it should be on the original list as a book I loved in 2007 (and which actually came out this year), and I have been performing from it to anyone who will listen (mainly Sir John and the cats). The book is Decca, the letters of Jessica Mitford, and it has me (as the Mitfords would say) in shrieks.

Performing reading comes in two flavors, for me: private and public. Private performance happens at home, when Sir John and I read bits we like to each other (from newspapers, magazines, books). I probably read to him more often than the other way around. We don't do extended reading-aloud sessions, like some of our friends. (We know a couple who take turns reading a chapter or two aloud every night, often from young-adult fiction.) But snippets are a good way to share our reading interests.

Then there's public performance of reading, which happens in the classroom. I read to my students, and make them read aloud, quite a lot. In Middle English classes, it's a way to work at pronunciation and comprehension, demystifying some of the spelling, insisting on the difference made by the Great Vowel Shift. In other classes, I hope to train students to listen to the rhythms of prose and poetry, to get away from reading for plot and hear the language. (Suddenly I am very conscious of the clunkiness of my own prose.) Many students read aloud very flatly, slowly, dully; I aim to change that, to make them lively readers.

I am planning an assignment sequence that begins with preparing a reading performance. Rather than my calling on people randomly in class, students will pick a passage they want to read aloud, and practice it, figure out what its rhythms are, what words should be stressed, what they want to convey, and then read it to us. I guess I'm trying to mimic private reading performance, in this: "Here's a bit I love and I want to share with you." I will use the reading-aloud prep to segue into the Close Reading: why did you stress these words, what's important about them, how do pieces of this passage work together to create the whole?

I hope this will work. I believe in Close Reading as a tool: it's worth paying attention to details, thinking about all the layers of meaning in a selection of prose or poetry, unpacking metaphors and images. And for some reason, my students have a lot of trouble with the concept. They tend to read for the big picture---plot, themes---not details. Maybe working on presentation first will make clearer why the details matter.

The drawback here is grading. Grading close readings is easier if everyone does the same passage; then I look to see if they hit most of the high points, or at least some of them, comment on writing style and mechanics, and move on. If everyone does an individual passage, papers will take longer to grade. However, hearing them read in class will make me fairly familiar with their passages. I might also do this as an "informal" assignment, checked off rather than formally graded, as a preliminary to a formal paper for which everyone would work on the same passage.

Merry Christmas

In how many languages can you wish people "Merry Christmas"?

On suburbs, cities, wilderness

I'm doing some reading about city walls in the Middle Ages, which is making me think about where I live.

I grew up in a medium-sized city that was part of a major metropolitan area. Now I live in a town that is less than half the size of my home city, but it, too, is part of a major metropolitan area. I drive about an hour to get to work, which is in a town a little bigger than the one I live in . . . but not really part of the larger area, though it may get there.

I love cities, which has a lot to do with why I commute (as does my two-body problem). I tried living in my work town for a couple of years when I got the job, and found it difficult for a single person who valued privacy over community. It seemed I couldn't buy toilet paper or tampons without running into a senior male faculty member, which led me to the conclusion that I would drive at least 40 miles to buy condoms. Moving made me much happier in many ways, and allowed me to get involved with the man who is now my husband.

At the same time, I now worry about my carbon footprint. I drive a hybrid, I recycle, I do what I can; but I still drive a lot, and take planes to visit my aged parents, and to do archival research Across the Pond. And so sometimes I think about moving back to the town where I work. This week I spent some happy hours in the library there, enjoying the peace and quiet (though there were quite a few other faculty there for the same reason), and thought about how much more library time I could have if I cut out my commute. That is probably more important to me than the environmental factors, to be honest.

The town has grown since I first moved there. It has acquired bookstores, many new subdivisions with larger houses than the older housing stock, and a lot of chain stores and restaurants. I went to one for dinner before driving home, and didn't see a single person I knew. It made me think maybe I could live there in reasonable privacy now. My idea of reasonable privacy, of course, depends on other people's attitudes as much as on actual size of the place. I now live in a townhouse in a set of eight, where I know all my neighbors to speak with but socialize with none. We ask each other to keep an eye on things when we are away, but I wouldn't call any of them friends. I wonder whether the newcomers to my work town are city people, who keep their distance like my current neighbors, or if they are people who "value community" and would insist on getting to know me in ways that would actually be uncomfortable for me. (I am speaking here as a highly introverted person: I don't really mean to criticize people who enjoy smaller towns/cities, but they say community and I say fishbowl . . . and you know what the next line is.)

My husband would hate living in my work town, because in order to help the carbon footprint any, he would have to telecommute, and he loves cities even more than I do. And he would not be comforted by the proximity to a research library.

Chain stores certainly make the town more livable, but they don't make it a city. They make a sprawly suburb, where you may have access to city stuff, but not to city life. What I love most about cities is not the skyscrapers of downtown, but the outlying streets: the compactness of little shops lying cheek-by-jowl, funky little shops that have been there for decades, their closeness to residential streets, houses' small yards (I disapprove of lawns, but small scruffy ones at least use less water than vast suburban ones), and most of all the sense of contrast: in neighborhoods, people construct their community against the anonymity of the larger city, so that recognizing someone in the coffeeshop is a sort of triumph, rather than an everyday and possibly irritating occurrence. In a sense, the city becomes the wilderness, where the individual carves out an identity through testing experiences.

Books!

I’m afraid this became my favorite books: though I did read some fun books that were new to me in 2007, I don’t think I loved any of them. And to quote my tagger, Medieval Woman, "When I read for fun (i.e., not obscure Middle English romances), I read trash. Yep, that's right. Trash. . . . I also read my favorite books over and over again. 4 or 5 times means nothing to me." So my responses might be the same as they would have been last year. And may be again next year.

What I mostly read for fun, though, is fantasy, children’s literature, and mysteries. But I think this list will be all the first two, as I’ve been a bit off mysteries in the last year.

1. Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I read it when it first came out; this year, I liked it even more than the first time. Fantasy with footnotes: what could be more fun?

2. Pamela Dean, The Secret Country trilogy. Not at all new, but topping the favorite list. I originally read it in grad school, when a friend lent me her battered paperbacks. After I got a job, we mailed each other her copies across the country, several times, because both of us are re-readers and for a long time it was impossible to find these books. Finally they were re-issued a couple of years ago. The Secret Country, The Hidden Land, and The Whim of the Dragon. Reading these always makes me happy.

3. Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion. And Paladin of Souls. These are brilliant. I love the world of Chalion-Ibra. (I’m also fond of her Vorkosigan series. Not so much the new series—too long-winded and goopy.)

4. Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons. There’s nothing so worthwhile as simply messing about in boats, and being trusted by parents to behave sensibly while you’re camping out, without them.

5. Pamela Whitlock and Katharine Hull, The Far-Distant Oxus. Two schoolgirls were inspired by their love of Ransome’s books to write their own series, back in the thirties. The children in this one imagine themselves in Persia, inspired by Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustom. It’s a little weird to read this now, as the kids shop in "Cabul" for camping provisions. But if you like Ransome, you’d like these.

I'm not sure of the etiquette of tagging people. Should it be those who have commented here? People on whose blogs I have commented? Can it be people I read but haven't commented on? I am inclined to spread this to the Southern Hemisphere and tag Stephanie Trigg and StyleyGeek. But I don't think Styley knows me, and Trigg has been here only once, recently.

Intro class/grad class

This semester, I didn’t have a graduate class. I had three undergrad classes: one section of intro-to-the-major, plus huge tracts of Chaucer. (No, not the Parson’s Tale, or only a couple of scraps of it; that was a Python reference.)

But now I feel like in some ways, the intro class was my grad class.

For one thing, the students were pretty happy to be there. The intro course is, of course, required; it’s supposed to be taken in your sophomore year, though this doesn’t always happen. Many of our students are transfers, so a lot of my students were going, "Wow! 4-year UNIVERSITY! The big leagues! I’m excited and I want to work hard and learn lots!" They weren’t cynical; they weren’t trying to game the system; they weren’t thinking that they were about to graduate and knew everything. Several students in this class were non-traditional, in their early to mid-twenties rather than 19-20, and a few years can make a big difference at that age. They were serious, aware of what they were working toward, of what the degree meant to them and, in some cases, their young families. One was in her thirties, getting a second bachelor’s so she could switch careers; she had a completely professional attitude toward schoolwork, treating it as a job, and often doing work that would not shame a grad student at LRU.

I have no control over who enrolls, of course; but this mix was a good one, and I associate that sense of excitement and willingness to work with graduate students.

Another important element over which I have very little control is class size. The intro-to-the-major class is capped at 25; grad classes at 15; but most undergrad classes are 35-40. It’s possible to scare some people off, but that hurts the class dynamic, and you don’t always scare the ones who most need to be scared. So I mostly have classes that are not so large as to require lecturing, yet not small enough to work really well with a discussion-seminar approach. It’s just harder to make a personal connection with individuals in a room with 36 people, compared to a room of 24. That 50% larger thing makes a big difference. Group work and Blackboard ice-breakers help some, but there are limits to what that can do (especially if you get a batch that hate group work). My course evaluations have improved a lot in the last few years, but I wonder if some of my difficulties stem from introvert-awkwardness with groups the size of my usual classes. I would treat a huge lecture (100 or more people) as performance. With groups of 10-20, I can make a personal connection. That 35-40 size, though, feels too big for easy connections, but not big enough to retreat into a performance-persona. So, anyway, the intro class this year was able to bond and talk to each other and to me in the way grad classes do (or should). I didn’t get that sense of cohesion and cameraderie in the Chaucer sections, or at least, only among students who already knew each other.

The intro students also wrote some very thoughtful, insightful papers, and spoke eloquently and intelligently in class about assigned readings—even on the very last day, when they might have felt like phoning it in. Here I will take some credit for assignments that inspired them (though I’m not so much bragging as thinking, "Whew! I got away with it!"). To begin our unit on poetry, I posted song lyrics and we talked about those; then they brought in lyrics from songs they like, and led class discussion about them. I’m sure everybody’s doing this now, but it does work to make students feel like poetry isn’t so mysterious, that they can understand it. And since there’s plenty of popular music that is totally unfamiliar to me, I could let them be the experts on this. Then we spent a lot of time on sonnets, including an assignment that asked them to write a sonnet (on their own or in groups) plus a reflective essay about what they learned from the attempt.

The first big-point paper was on a sonnet we did not discuss in class, one that just appeared in print in the past year; the second one was on a short story, ditto. This is my strategy for avoiding plagiarism: we have a lot of class work and low-point papers practicing skills on poems and stories in the anthology, but for the important papers, students work on recently-published texts. There’s nothing on the internet about these! I love doing this. They always have fresh insights into the texts, because any insight will be fresh—we’re not dealing with hundreds of years of critical commentary, as with Chaucer and Shakespeare. I wondered if this year’s sonnet might be stretching a bit, but they nailed it. They looked up the words, the geographical and art-historical references, and they put it all together. I was really impressed. Same thing with the short story—they saw symbolism way beyond what I’d noticed. My weakest student, in fact, was the only one who mentioned what I saw as a really key passage in the story, one that tied two characters together in an unexpected way. (Which of us does this say more about?) And on the last day, my students were eager to talk about this story, to share their ideas, to argue about the chances for the main character’s future.

So I went into the final grading for my intro students feeling cheerful and optimistic about their chances, the way I usually feel about my grads. And indeed, they performed well on the last paper and quite adequately on the exam. They’ve learned most of what they need to know, and other teachers will pick up where I left off.

I think I have a whole 'nother post about Chaucer rattling around my brain . . . .