What we teach when we teach Chaucer

"Chaucer" to most people means the Canterbury Tales. But should it? Over the years, I think I've taught every Chaucerian work in the canon, except for "A Treatise on the Astrolabe" and "Anelida and Arcite," at least once, and yes, I do include the Melibee in that list. For graduate classes, the syllabus has varied more widely than for the undergrads—even though many grads have not had any undergrad Chaucer, or even any undergrad medieval lit, so there is an argument for giving them a "standard" Chaucer, too.

If there is such a thing as a "typical" undergraduate Chaucer course in my repertory, it tends to include several of the Canterbury Tales plus one of the less famous texts, usually either Troilus and Criseyde or the Book of the Duchess. Lately I've just been doing Canterbury Tales and short lyrics.

My recent trawl through other people's syllabi suggests a fairly even division between CT-only courses and CT-plus-Troilus courses. It has been a few years since I last taught Troilus, and I want to bring it back. In fact, I want to make it the main focus of the class, because I think then I could structure the course in a way similar to the way I structure my Arthurian class, which usually goes much more smoothly than the Chaucer classes: begin with a modern translation of an early source (Latin or OF), and only deal with Middle English after the broad outlines of the plot have been digested. This also allows me to introduce close reading through analyzing different translations of a single Latin sentence, along with a representation of that sentence accompanied with a super-literal translation plus parsing; after that, the whole idea of the close reading goes a little better.

But since people seem to think "Chaucer = Canterbury Tales," I suppose I had better include some of them. Let's put it this way: what tales would you be absolutely shocked to learn that an English major didn't know? Channel your inner old fart, and comment.

Or, if you're not amused by fart jokes (some Chaucerian you are, in that case), which tales "go" best with TC? (Your litel tragedie, does it go? Bet it does, bet it does!)

Vocabulary

I keep saying that I think my students' trouble with ME is not so much ME as small vocabularies in PDE. I'm still working my way through the last batch of translations on the final exam (while wiping my nose, and sneezing, and feeling generally yucky), and I started making a list of perfectly good words that more than one person is having trouble recognizing:

adversity, arse, assent, aught, churl, deem, ere, grisly, haunch, privily, proffer, suffer (in the sense of "allow"), sunder, twain, villainy.

"Arse" keeps coming out as "ears." It's not like we didn't talk about what happens in the Miller's Tale.

Then there are a couple of phrases that I think of as somewhat archaic, but still, I would have expected them to be recognizable to English majors: "must needs" and "plight troth."

I'm thinking next year's exam will have fewer chunks to translate and a very strong insistence on producing grammatically correct sentences that make sense in PDE.

Weekend bullets

• Sir John has had a cold for several days. I think I'm finally getting it. So I'm staying up late to try to finish grading before I feel awful.
• Of course I should have finished already.
  
• Why, with all the "teaching to the test" that presumably happens in schools these days, can my students not manage to read and follow simple instructions?
  
• Grading the outlines of essays (on exams) goes much faster than grading translations.
• I can't believe I made it through the whole semester without getting sick; but then, why now? Why could I not just avoid illness altogether?
• I would much rather be working on the MMP, and this morning I procrastinated for awhile by staring at handwriting snippets trying to decide if one A resembled another. Or not.
• On a related handwriting question, I found a reference to an opinion of Ian Doyle's that was . . . wrong. Not in a major way, but he left out a perfectly legible* letter. My world reeled.
• *Perfectly legible if you read English secretary hands.
• Every time I look at an example of secretary, I panic and think all my skills have fled, or maybe I was deluding myself all along. It takes several minutes to get my eye in and start seeing the shapes again.
• Really I should be thinking big-picture thoughts about the MMP, not tiny-detail thoughts. Have I mentioned that I'm nearsighted?
• Must finish grading translations. Then if I'm sick tomorrow I can spend days lying on the couch watching B5 DVDs and drinking toddies, guilt-free.
  

Guiding independent research

This is really a question. I've had a couple of independent studies/capstone projects to supervise this fall, and will have a couple more in the spring. It has occurred to me that I would like to assign a book that would help guide students through the research process. The books I'm most familiar with focus more on writing literary essays; I'd like something geared to the humanities a little more generally, and to the "research paper" of 15-20 pages, that might include elements of literature, history, and art history. How to read around a topic and then focus the reading, how to develop research questions, these are more important than details like citation style. Any suggestions?

Very bad news from the Chron fora

Not that I've ever got the grading fairy to show up, but I always thought the cats frightened them off. I can't bear to think there just aren't any. And for such a lousy reason, too.

At least I'm making grading progress on my own.

Re: Ask Mended Drum your nagging questions here; get a completely awesome answer. « Reply #220 on: December 02, 2011, 03:02:46 PM »

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Quote from: concordancia on December 02, 2011, 01:52:48 PM

Will the grading and final writing fairy come if I take the afternoon off for beta testing a game?

The last known member of that particular species of fairy was throttled to death during a regional assessment committee visit to a formerly pleasant campus. Rumor says that the murderer was a member of SACS.

Steps in grading

1. Assemble papers.
2. Open Windows Media Player; plug in headphones and un-mute the computer.
3. Find new purple pen.
4. See if anyone has added a comment to ADNWG's end-of-term post.
5. Check to see if anyone else has updated a blog. Consider saving new posts to read during breaks from grading after actually doing some. Read blog entries anyway.
6. Count papers in stack.
7. Check the Chronicle fora, especially the Thread of Grading Despair and Paralysis Analysis, to see who else is grading right now.
8. Eat chocolate.
9. Check current Lexulous game(s).
10. Start music. Read first page of top paper.
11. Worry about unfinished book review.
12. Finish reading first paper.
[13-17: Repeat steps 4-8.]
18. Worry about needing to order ILL books for winter writing project so they'll show up before the library closes over Christmas, and whether it would be better to do that now or keep grading.
19. Grade more papers.
20. Take longer break: cook and eat a meal, say.
[Repeat steps 4-10; expand 5 into checking out blog links never before clicked on and going into the archives of some previously known blogs.]

Give yourself a holiday

I make papers etc. due after holidays (Thanksgiving, Spring Break), not before. That way I get a break, too. Or at least I can use the time to read and write, rather than grade.

The grading we have always with us, and it can get done while we're teaching. At the end of term, putting off due dates till after Thanksgiving works even better, because then you don't have to put detailed comments on anything.

If you really want to game the system, have the "original" due date before the break and then "change" it to after.

I have to grade all afternoon, but after I get this batch done, I'm good for a week. So I'll be able to write a book review.

More heresy (plus nostalgia)

It seems that for quite a long time (that is, a decade or more) there has been more and more pressure on professors to plan the whole course, day by day, before the semester begins (and put the schedule on Blackboard or similar), so that everybody knows in August that on November 15th we'll discuss Fitt 3 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and on November 17th a paper is due. Students expect to be able to look up their reading and paper assignments weeks or months in advance; a few super-conscientious and organized people (usually the returning students who are planning their coursework around their kids' school and sports events) even start work on the papers well in advance.

Such planning can also be useful for professors, who get notably more harried as the semester wears on (Thanksgiving? you mean it's the end of November already? it was Labor Day about an hour ago). October, we all know, is Exploding Head Month; I don't know if there's a name for November (except NaNoWriMo), but you have to figure that the month post-head-explosion can only be messy.

But in Olden Times, whatever long-term advance-planning professors might have done, I sure didn't know about it. When I was an undergrad, a syllabus listed contact information, required texts, number (and sometimes due dates) of papers and/or exams, and maybe some general goals for the course or a note that it was a pre-requisite for something else. Schedules and assignments might be given as separate hand-outs, later, or maybe just announced in class.

And so, not knowing any better, I wrote syllabi like that when I started teaching, as a grad student. I taught in a writing-across-the-curriculum program that gave grad T.A.'s a great deal of autonomy (excellent training for being a professor). I made up more detailed schedules and assignments that covered 3-5 weeks at a time, and as we got to the end of one such segment, I'd make up a new one. Of course I had a general sense that students would write so many pages during the term and that we'd spend weeks 7-10 (or whatever) on Sir Gawain. But if in the event it turned out that three pages turned into a revision instead of a new paper, and if SGGK got weeks 8-11 so we'd have to read less Malory at the end, well, fine. Who (but me) would know how my plans had changed?

The great thing about that way of teaching, which I continued into my early years on the tenure track, was the ability it gave me to be flexible and responsive. If I found that a large chunk of the class needed work on thesis statements, then we'd work on thesis statements; if they were great with thesis statements but had no idea how to argue against possible objections to their ideas without feeling they were undermining their position, then we'd work on that kind of argumentation. And so on. I liked that. I wasn't forced by the syllabus into spending time on topics that were unnecessary and boring for most of the class, and if interesting ideas came up in discussion, I could alter our trajectory so that we focused on, say, medieval castle construction instead of clothing, and create paper assignments accordingly.

Many things are much easier with fewer students, of course. Even though classes were bigger at LRU than they were at my graduate institution, I benefited from a reduced load in my first three years, 2-2 instead of 3-2, and so I had fewer students overall than I do now, and could manage this model effectively. Once I added the third course (and there were some years when I taught 3-3, to make the release available to hires who came after me), it got much harder to take stock of where each individual class or section was, three or four times a semester, and change course accordingly. It actually came as something of a revelation to me that I could plan the whole semester in advance and just stick to the plan. If this is Tuesday, it must be Madrid Marie de France.

Students like knowing what will be due when, of course, and I think it makes them feel secure (or something) to know that the professor is organized, has a plan, and will stick to it. But I think better teaching may happen when the plan gets thrown out, or is vague to start with, and the professor can respond to what interests the students and get the whole class to hare off in some unforeseen direction.

This doesn't seem to fit with my other heretical ideas about more lecturing. But I think what both posts have in common is wanting to be truly student-centered: if what the class wants and needs is more lecture (that is, a stronger framework), then I'm willing to provide that; and if what they need is more short papers with outlining and revision stages, then I'd like to be able to do that; and if I find that they can manage the five-paragraph essay handily but have no idea how to construct a more complex, somewhat longer paper, I'd like to be able to teach that, without feeling locked into a particular structure.

As I write, I notice that I'm emphasizing teaching writing, which was not at all the idea I thought I was starting with. Perhaps I'm still, really, thinking about content vs. skills. It does seem like what students really want in a detailed syllabus is information about written requirements: how many papers, how long, due when, what the papers should do (the "what do you want?" question). I'm reasonably sure that the students are happy to let me decide most if not all of the content issues. But somehow I need to assess what they're learning, and in an English class I am not willing to give multiple-choice exams to see what facts they can regurgitate about SGGK, and yet if I want papers that don't make me want to cut my own head off I wind up needing to teach writing skills.

So. I was going to say, heretically, that I want to give up on the detailed syllabus and respond to what my classes need and/or find interesting; that I'd like to have an end goal in mind but not plan the route in detail; that the class should, ideally, be a quest. And I was going to lament that having lots of students, and the kinds of students that we have at LRU (complicated lives, can't meet outside of class, need to plan library time and writing time well in advance) makes this quest-model rather difficult to put into practice. But if my real topic is still "what sort of writing assignments should I give" or "how to blend content and skills-based teaching," then I have to start this essay over.

Not right now, though. I shall mull for awhile, and see what further thoughts, orthodox or heretical, occur to me.

Was it something I said?

I am really disturbed by the number of papers that imply that the Wife of Bath is responsible for Jankyn's violence, that she deserves to be hit, and that she shouldn't "allow" him to treat her this way. I'm now examining my teaching-conscience, wondering if something I said or the way I presented the Wife's Prologue prompted such attitudes, or if the students really believe this.

Students should feel free to disagree with me; I don't want to get pious papers that just parrot my own words or pay lip-service to politically correct notions. The papers I'm complaining about show flaws in logic and insufficient attention to the text. The fact that my skin is crawling over some of the statements (most, though not all, from female students) has nothing to do with the grades they're getting. I just need to vent, before I go into the classroom and calmly, thoughtfully, make students think about the likely effects of a twenty-something man hitting a forty-something woman over the head.

Grading whine

The only thing worse than papers about the Wife of Bath that treat her as a representative medieval woman who, like all medieval women, is sadly oppressed by her husbands, yet somehow comes up with some modern feminist principles in order to redress the balance: papers that suggest that the domestic violence she endures is all her fault and that she has no business complaining about husband #5 hitting her on the head so hard "that in the floor I lay as I were deed."

Teaching, heresy, and logic

I'm sure you've read, somewhere, a rant against Boring Old University Farts Lecturing In A Monotone and thus Preventing Active Learning.

I must say, even though I took six years to collect an undergraduate degree, and heard a number of lectures while I was doing it (as well as experiencing various other types of classroom activities), I never heard anyone lecture in a monotone. In fact, my only experience with this was very recent. At a conference this fall, I heard someone read from a paper held close to the face, in a monotone, and I thought, "Wow, maybe this is the source of all those rants." The speaker was quite animated in private conversation; I think the problem was poor eyesight and a laser focus on just getting the paper delivered, without any frills like eye contact or performative speech.

But I digress, as is my wont.

Anyway, according to this pedagogical theory, we university teachers are not supposed to lecture. We must engage our students in active learning, discussion, projects, teaching one another, all learning together. According to this model, the students learn more this way than they could from lecture. Also according to this model, students are independent thinkers, responsible for their own education, able to adjust their approach to their projects in accordance with their own learning styles.

It is not, at the moment, my purpose to critique this theory, though if you want to do so in the comments, or give links to people who have already done so, please do. I just want to note that the theory gives considerable agency to students.

OK. Now you have probably also seen the reports on how professional actors lecturing from a script get better teaching evaluations than the professor with the real expertise in the subject area. Well, of course we all like to be entertained; but doesn't that experiment show that lectures can be both entertaining and informative? And further: students also report that they prefer lectures from professors—people whose expertise they recognize—rather than working with their peers, who don't know as much as their professors. Students feel they are paying to learn from experts, not to try to teach each other.

Now, if we grant students agency, if we say that we trust them to know how they learn best and what they need, should we not then take their desire for lively, informative lectures seriously? A good lecture provides a framework for reading and writing (or projects and homework) done outside of class; it's a starting point, raising questions for students to consider and try to find answers to, or a finishing point, rounding up answers and synthesizing the work that has (one hopes) happened outside of the classroom. Oh, but students don't really know what's good for them; we should force them to do the active learning projects etc. because that's how they'll learn more . . . . But if they don't know what's good for them, why must we then treat them as if they did?

Actually, I have spent my career thus far teaching almost entirely via discussion, with relatively little lecture, or at least, little that's formally planned. My students have discovered that what they think is a simple question can easily wind me up for a 10-20 minute lecture. I can often predict at what point in the semester someone will ask the question that triggers the lecture on the Black Death, or on medieval demography, or various other topics that I can cover apparently extemporaneously. That is, I want to get those lectures into the class somewhere, but the particular day doesn't matter; the questions are going to come up, and then I will let my tape unspool.

Such teacher-training as I had emphasized discussion, in part because we were dealing with small (17 or fewer students) classes, where it was easy to make sure everyone was participating, and in a student population where it was easy to devise good discussion questions and ways to get students to prep so that really informative, significant discussion would happen. And there's nothing so much fun as going in and having a really good talk with smart, interested people about topics that interest all of us. That model worked quite well for me for a long time, even at my current job, where the classes are twice the size and the students are a very different population.

Times change, though, and people change, and students change. I've alluded here and in comments on other people's posts to some of the changes I've been noticing this fall. In short: my students are smart, and certainly engaged in their own education (most of them), but definitely lacking in the kind of preparation, and the kind of doing-college skills, that I could expect nearer the beginning of my career. They seem to profit enormously, disproportionately, from lectures that give them a framework for their readings, and they are (many, not all) nearly helpless to even begin constructing such a framework for themselves, as I was expected to do in much of my undergraduate work.

And I remember (digressing again) wishing someone would provide such a framework: even though I was able to build one up for myself, I did, at that stage of my life, feel it might be a waste of my time to do so when I could have got one from a professor and used it as a springboard to get me further into the material. Am I glad I did the frame-building myself, was it useful after all? I don't know. It's what happened. It was my formation. I am the thinker, the scholar, the professor I am because of it; but I don't think it was the best or only way that my education could have proceeded. It's useful to build your own frames, but it can also be useful to start with a nice sturdy frame someone else has constructed and focus on adding the wallboard and the wiring. I guess it depends on what you think you're teaching: how to frame a house, or how to finish it?

At any rate, while I think there are places for discussion, and for the kinds of projects that require students to frame and solve problems on their own, I also think that (a) there is a place for lecture, (b) lectures are not in and of themselves boring, (c) if we're considering students as independent adult thinkers then we should pay attention to what they say they want and value, (d) they say they want and value lecture from their professors, and so (e) I should lecture more.

Besides, I seem to be good at lecturing.

Heresy.

Hard/not

Yesterday I had a conversation with a distinguished senior scholar. When I mentioned one of the projects I'm working on, he said about the area of study it falls into, "It's hard." He said this a couple more times about this field, once explaining why there are few people currently working in it, and once more along the lines of lamenting that more people aren't being trained to go into it.

Every time, I thought, "No, it's not. It's easy."

Finally, when he began to explain what it takes to do this well, the "hard" comments began to make sense to me. As graduate education is normally comprised, this area is interdisciplinary, and so people trained in one department don't usually have any significant acquaintance with the other one necessary to do this work; and furthermore, the general attitude of scholars in at least one of the disciplines is dismissive about this area.

But I had a checkered undergradate past, and an interdisciplinary graduate education, and so I am in fact very well trained to do this work, besides having a native talent for the underlying skills. So it is easy for me. So easy that it doesn't really occur to me that not everyone finds it easy and fun, and that really I ought to be focusing my energies here and making a name for myself in this area.

I'm putting it on the list. Once I work through all the various current and sidelined projects, I will turn to this thing that is easy for me.

And because Profacero has sensitized me to the question of whom it serves to say that writing (or anything else) is hard, I am going to try to use this experience to adjust my own way of speaking. Rather than saying "X is hard," I will prefer "If you have good basic skills in Y and Z, and a talent for Q, then X is easy. And if you haven't got those basic skills in Y and Z, then you must work at acquiring them."

Some people will still find this discouraging, but the statement specifies what you need, and so even for those who lack the prerequisites, it may lead to the question "How do I get those skills?" rather than to the thought "oh, it's hard, I won't be able to."

Chaucer syllabus review

Every fall, I have 70 students in Chaucer, and no help with grading. Teaching Chaucer, for me, is not an occasional treat with a small group of enthusiasts, but a constant hard slog of Middle English boot camp with a bunch of draftees, who every year appear to be in worse shape when they start out than the last batch of maggots.

So tonight I have about a dozen web pages and three more PDFs open to different undergraduate Chaucer syllabuses. It's interesting to see the range of requirements. At Harvard, for example, no papers are required. The grads are supposed to write a paper, and the undergrads may do so, if they want to make up for a skipped exam. But the planned undergrad assessments are exams.

I suppose at Harvard, you can assume that your students already know how to write papers.

There's a whole group of courses structured around a term paper. For some, it's really the only significant assessment, though there may be some quizzes along the way, an annotated bibliography here, a rough draft there. Some make a concerted effort to break down the parts of the research paper and teach students how to do it. Others may do this in class, but it doesn't show up on the syllabus.

A significant minority seem to rely heavily on team/group work, often involving creating webpages or some other sort of visual presentation, alongside more traditional papers and exams.

Another chunk of courses do the little-bit-of-everything approach: some translations, some quizzes, one or two or three shortish papers, or maybe collections of discussion questions, a short annotated bibliography, a longer paper, maybe a final exam. This is what my syllabus used to look like, but it's a model I want to move away from. It's confusing. My aim is to simplify.

I'm never really happy with my Chaucer course. There are too many things I want to do, or feel I must do, and it's hard to set priorities and work out how to teach all the necessary skills alongside teaching the real essential skill, how to read Middle English. Unlike Harvard students, many of mine still have to be taught how to write essays for literature classes. Possibly they knew before they were confronted with Middle English, and what I'm seeing is a reversion of one skillset while they're in the process of acquiring a new one. But whatever: I'm not so much interested in why I have to be very clear about instructions, model processes in class, give sample papers, and so on, as I am in the fact of having to do it, and how that changes what I can do in class.

A lot of my students also face significant time pressures, because they work (often full-time), have children, or both. I know I'm looking at a school very different from mine when a syllabus says that if a class is cancelled due to weather, they'll find a time to make it up. That, to me, says "traditional-age undergraduates living on-campus in residence halls." Chez moi, if we lose a day, it stays lost. Similarly, trying to get people to work in groups outside of class is much, much worse than herding cats. I could herd a troupe of Basement Cat's demonic little friends more easily than get my students together outside of regularly scheduled class time. Anyway, that's another thing to take into account when I'm thinking about what I'm going to require, and how much scaffolding it will take.

My students really seem to want, and do better at, lots of short, low-stakes assignments: translations, worksheets, short papers. I've seen this in the past (right after sabbatical, when I was feeling fired with idealism, I had my classes do some sort of short paper every week: it was great for them, but nearly killed me), and I'm seeing it now, when I've made some mid-course alterations to grant student desires for this sort of thing. After two weeks of students handing in a translation at every course meeting (we go over them in class; I just check them off later), I'm seeing significant improvement in reading comprehension.

Maybe it's a matter of my own bottom-up way of building research topics, but I don't think I can teach how to do the research paper on Chaucer. I'd have to break the process down into teensy steps and collect work every week or two, grade it, and then re-grade the whole thing when it came back as a paper at the end of the course. And I believe in "reading around" for awhile before coming up with a topic; I don't want to assign topics at the beginning of the semester ("bird imagery in tales told by women" or whatever). So I'm not going the research paper route, though I worry a bit about that art dying out: I now have to teach the grad students how to write a term paper, so clearly not everyone is learning that in undergrad any longer.

My primary goal is to get students reading Middle English comfortably. I'd be thrilled if they get through this class and then go read some Chaucer on their own. Not necessarily for fun, but say they take Shakespeare and want to look into Troilus and Criseyde as a source for Troilus and Cressida, and feel okay about reading TC on their own: that would be grand. On top of that, if I can teach (or reinforce) some basic literary analysis skills, that's good, too.

Thus I'm thinking, in future, lots of translation, some worksheets, and some short papers that focus on the skill of close reading. Oh, and I think I want to go back to memorizing some lines, which I let drop awhile back due to popular demand. But I think it's important and should come back. Part of my justification for the type of written work is that learning Middle English now seems to be much harder than it was 15 years ago (I blame poor vocabulary, whatever is causing that); part is that close (nay, myopic, the way I work) reading is a useful skill not only for literary scholars but for readers in general, and yet students rarely seem to get much of this in their other classes. There are other things I consider desirable, and I'd like to work out a way to let my top students stretch more than this model would allow, without killing myself grading. But these are the essentials.

Re-booting the semester

Even before Notorious Ph.D. suggested the theme of the re-set button, I had been thinking that I need to re-boot my semester. While I have achieved a couple of significant goals (submitting the fellowship application; adding some polish to a drafted chapter), other areas of my life have suffered: I'm slower than usual to return papers, am not exercising enough, and often don't get enough sleep. I'd like to start over and aim at a better balance for the remaining weeks of term.

Fortunately, I don't have any more conferences to go to (I think in general it is a mistake to go to conferences during term-time, at least in three-course semesters). And I have no more hugely significant deadlines, either. There are six more weeks, I guess, for the current ADNWG term, and about the same before I have to turn in a book review (IIRC; maybe I should check that e-mail).

Last week I was suffering a bit of let-down after getting the application done, and also from withdrawal symptoms (oh, am I not supposed to admit being a research addict?). I enjoyed the focus I needed to exert on the application and sample chapter, the feeling that this was the most important thing I had to do and that I could justify dropping everything else lower on the priority list. I also enjoyed having an external deadline, which forced me to put aside some of my perfectionist tendencies. Put those things together with a resolution made earlier this year to submit something, somewhere, in 2011, and I had to look over my various projects to see what I might be able to finish in the next couple of months.

(I know it's a good thing to have a book that really wants to be written, and I love the conference-paper-turned-book project. But I was so set on sending it out as an article this year. I want more publications!)

So there's the Macedonian Marginalia Project, which could probably be done in a couple of months; but not these months, when I need to catch up on grading and then prep and grade final exams and projects. I planned to work on the MMP in January-March 2012, and that still seems like a good idea. I will have two courses with the same prep in the spring, and (most likely) a lighter workload on my major committee; that will give me more head-space to think about a fairly complex project in which the argument stands or falls on tiny details. I'd like to wrap it up by spring break, on the theory that the second part of the semester tends to have more grading in it, and also that I will have at least one conference paper to prepare in the later spring.

Then there's the Unexpected Project that was a conference paper in the summer. When I got that digitized scan that proved I had a third manuscript to deal with, I got all excited and thought maybe that was the piece that I would push out the door by the end of December. And then I checked on what the manuscript actually is and realized that I have a huge problem with the dates, and because of that, I have far less of a viable draft than I had thought. I have to start all over on part of the research for that essay, which is rather discouraging. I wish I'd thought more about this third manuscript at some earlier stage. I knew it was a possibility, but no scholarly source I found said for certain it was the same hand, and I hadn't seen it myself, and so I just pushed the possibility aside and tracked something that seemed plausible. But "plausible" is now "provably wrong."

Another possibility for a submission this year was a note related to the Big Volume of Manuscript. But the issues involved are similar to those in the Unexpected Project, and so now I'm spooked about that kind of research and want to be very sure that I'm right before trying to publish anything along those lines. It's bad enough feeling that I've given conference papers that are so wrong; at least I didn't publish the incorrect Unexpected details.

Anyway, those were the options for alternate goals for this fall. And none is viable, so I'm back to Plan A: finish a decent draft of another chapter of the book, and work steadily if slowly on the Big Translation. It's a relief, really; my motto for the past few years has been "stick to Plan A," which works for both small and large plans. I can drive myself crazy thinking up alternate plans and wondering which would be best, for everything from "what to wear tomorrow" to much more significant decisions. I am so much happier when I make a plan and stick to it, with only minor modifications (if it's colder, wear a wool blazer instead of a linen one; if it rains, wear the rain boots; if short on sleep, stare at a draft of the writing project and tinker with sentences instead of trying to work on the organization).

As an aside, I think a lot of my difficulties with planning and organization are not native, but learned. For me, the Myers-Briggs categories explain a lot. By temperament, I'm fairly strongly J (in the sense of wanting plans and to stick to them; there are other elements to J-ness, and I think finer granularity in the sub-elements makes the MB types work better: when I took the test, each of the four axes had ten sub-elements), but I grew up with parents who must have been super-P. Thus I both had to learn to tolerate the chaos of our household and did not get any decent modeling of how to plan and stay organized. It's only relatively late in life that I've realized how stressful and irritating I find P-ness, in most areas. Sometimes I want to put off a decision while I collect information, but that is something I plan for, and once I make up my mind I don't want to revisit the decision.

Then wouldn't I just have stuck to the plan about the chapter all along? No, see, the original Plan A was to write an article, not a book. That's where the recent thrashing came from. Must. Have. Article. But no. The better part of valor, considering long-term goals, is to accept the change from article to book, and get a chapter finished this fall, so that I can cannibalize it for a conference paper in the spring (if that abstract is accepted) and have two reasonably complete chapters when I start (oh please oh please) a fellowship year of writing.

So the plan for the weekend was to get all caught up on stuff, get enough sleep, get enough exercise, and re-boot the semester this coming week. Goals: continue to write every day, but stop after half an hour or so (unless I really am caught up on everything else). Turn back papers promptly. Prep more thoroughly for the grad class. Exercise an optimal amount on non-teaching days, and a sub-optimal but acceptable amount on campus days. Set a manageable sleep schedule, and stick to it.

It's a great plan. Sadly, I think Sir John and I both accidentally got caffeinated coffee earlier today. So I'm still wide awake, and expect to be up for awhile yet. I have things to do, of course: grading, notes on books I want to get off my desk, planning. I may not get the sleep schedule sorted out this weekend, but I can at least get caught up (if I don't start remembering more things I have dropped the ball on!), and I'll keep working on the sleep thing.

Update; lists

I think the fellowship application is done. Tomorrow I print the final copy (I expect a bit of futzing around with fonts and margins, once I'm on a computer hooked up to a printer). Friday it gets postmarked.

Papers are commented and handed back: without grades, though. We're going to do some revision exercises and stuff with those papers. I'm thinking what to do about actual grades/credit. I still need a revised syllabus for the rest of the semester.

My guest lecturer for tomorrow just bailed on me this evening. It's not a situation that can be helped; but that's so much less time to work on the syllabus, because I need to cover what the guest would have covered.

So, I have ideas for substantive posts (commuting; changes in/because of/after grad program; titles), but they're not going to get written tonight or tomorrow. We'll see after that.

Oh, noooes

If I didn't have to spend most of tomorrow in a series of meetings topped off with a night class, I'd be in great shape with the grading.

Or if my out-of-town friend had visited some other weekend.

Or if I hadn't stayed up much too late on Friday reading a new book that Sir John got me (really, shouldn't one show appreciation for presents?).

Unfortunately, I have done those things I ought not to have done and will do other things that I wish I need not do, and at the moment I feel I should go to bed very soon or there will indeed be no health in me. And since this term I am grading hard-copy papers, I will not be able to grade discreetly during tomorrow's meetings, blast it. Chalk up another point in favor of all-electronic grading, though I still feel that over all, I'm happier marking up paper papers.

A simple tweak

Grading is boring. Mostly. It's not so much painful as just boring. I'm not frustrated or angry at writing the same comments over and over, and seeing the same mistakes. I expect that. It's okay. I'm asking my students both to cope with Middle English and to do a kind of detailed literary analysis that most of them aren't used to. I can teach that, and I do, and by the end of the term most of them will get it, but the first paper shows that they can't really believe I want what I say I want, and that they feel safer falling back on the kind of thing that has served them in the past. I get that. We can work on all this.

But I get so bored that it's hard to stick with the task.

And then, finally, I remembered the solution: music! I can't believe I forgot that. The problem is that I cannot work on writing or other "serious" work with music playing (except in coffee shops, where somehow I concentrate to block it out and that concentration is actually part of the way work in coffee shops happens). So after a summer of quiet work alone in my study, I really do forget that for some kinds of tedious work, music is the answer. It gives my fretful monkey mind something to think about while the teaching brain comments away and plots how to present these lessons the next time we talk about doing this kind of criticism.

So never mind the four papers and a break. Once I got a soundtrack, I sat in front of an open window and worked steadily for a couple of hours, getting through 9 or 10 papers in that time. That's a respectable rate. I'll still be grading all weekend, but it's looking like a less horrid prospect now.

As Z would say, it is the weekend so we will sing.

Grading day

I have re-written the opening salvo of my fellowship application, and now I have to go feed the fluffy horde. I declare the rest of today a Grading Day. I intend to do four-paper batches, since that seems to be the number I can do comfortably, with breaks in between: no reading, no computer work, but stretching, walking, maybe weeding or housework, something physical anyway, for about ten minutes, so that I will be truly refreshed when I go back to reading papers.

This is the Plan! I shall conquer the mountain of papers!

And tonight or tomorrow I'll let you know how it goes. The Plan pretty much has to stay in effect the whole weekend, which could get a little problematic since I have a friend visiting from Far Away whom I want to see. Ten-minute breaks don't suffice for social life.

Conquer. Conquer! Excelsior!

Writing etc. report

Sample chapter: done. Done enough, that is, to send to recommenders. It still needs work before it's publication-ready: more conversation with critics, more historical support, more direct discussion of a textual problem. But the argument is clear and well-developed.

Grading: oh, so not done. So just barely started.

Syllabus in need of revision, too.

I need to devote myself to teaching for a bit once I get this application finished and sent.

It's very clear that when I have a single writing goal for the week, I do quite well at it, and when I have more than one thing needing attention, I get anxious and scattered and don't do very well at any of my goals.

In fact, I think this may apply more generally: on writing-intensive days, it is very hard to switch gears and think about teaching. One of the reasons writing first thing in the morning is good for me is that that time-slot compartmentalizes the writing.

Female Science Professor had an interesting post about types of worker. I think I am an X1 who has managed to learn to juggle a few things. In grad school I thought I was an X2 but actually I am good at organizing my own structure: I wrote most of my dissertation in a single year on fellowship while also on the job market. It was a stressful time (more because of the job market and personal life than because of the dissertation) but I got a lot done. But I have never been a W. I wish I were, but I'm not.

So today I meant to finish fixing up the chapter, grade some papers, and pay bills. I finished the chapter, graded about half the papers I wanted to, and went to the bank, which was a precondition of the bill-paying. I went to the gym and took the boys to the vet.* Not a bad day. But all the gear-switching was hard.

I still believe in writing first thing. I'm not changing that. But I think I need to consider ways to "do less" but get more done: maybe that "three things" way of listing tasks, or have days that are supposed to be primarily for grading or for Life Stuff after the writing gets done in its little compartment.

*Basement Cat was so good. The Grammarian fought vigorously against going in the carrier, shouted for help to the whole neighborhood, and then gave up and sulked at the back of his carrier once he was loaded into the car. But Basement Cat was a dream. He ignored the Grammarian's pleas for aid and jumped in the carrier when I tossed in some kibble bits. BC is totally venal: anything involving kibble is fine with him. Since I have no head for philosophy or theology, I hesitate to draw eschatalogical conclusions from this. But I assure you that he thinks it is better to reign with kibble than to serve without kibble.

What problem?

I've written before about the joys of teaching at a large regional university. And now I'm going to say it again: there are plenty of schools that don't have a drinking problem.

Most of my students work 30-40 hours a week. They live off-campus, with their partners, with their children, with their parents. A significant number are not just in-town though off-campus, but commuters from a good way away, just as I am. On weekends they're at work, or doing their homework, or cutting the grass and ferrying kids around, not at football games, not at frat parties. We do have fraternities and sororities, and I can believe there's some alcohol abuse on Frat Row. But I'm not seeing it: those students are majoring in something other than English.

My students have trouble, academically, for varying reasons: they went to bad high schools. It's been too long since they were in the classroom. Their baby had an ear infection and they haven't slept in days. Somebody else didn't show up for work and they had to work an extra shift. Although they're not working extra, they are working, and they only had 3 hours to work on a paper that needed 6. Their chronic illness isn't under control and they spent the night in the ER. Their National Guard unit was unexpectedly called up. Their anti-depression meds aren't quite right. And, sure, there is some ordinary not-getting-it-together, some bad study habits and time management skills, some garden-variety colds and break-ups, as well.

If a person goes straight from a pressure-cooker high school, overseen by helicopter parents, to an expensive college where paying tuition seems to guarantee a prestigious degree, and where students suddenly have a whole lot more freedom and independence than they're used to, then I can see why schools like Tenured Radical's might have this problem.

But it's not a big problem at LRU, and I wish people would stop tarring all "colleges" with the same brush. They vary by region, by mission, by student body and by culture, as well as by size and rankings.