Here is a link to my course website for ENG 2100 - Writing about Literature: Intro to Poetry
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In my annotation for the "Eves Apologie" section of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, you can see how I took notes in different colored pens. This is because I went back over it and read it a second time. The black pen signals my initial notes, while the pink pen highlights things I found important the second time through. At points, my annotations are just summarizing Lanyer's arguments about gender inequality and the Garden of Eden, but I also utilize the margins to ask questions about the text and Lanyer's claims. These questions could be the basis for an analytical paper. I also circled some words which seemed connected to each other, and seem to discredit Lanyer's argument about feminine superiority (which she asserts is by virtue of their weakness).
I thought I'd use this last bog-post of the semester to talk about an idea I have for my intro to poetry class this summer. Several weeks ago in class, we talked about ideas for getting students to show up on time, and some suggested showing some sort of youtube video at the beginning of class every day. Students might then not want to miss the daily clip. I'm thinking about taking this idea and combining it with the concept of "low-stakes writing" to get students some practice doing close-reading, but also create a fun beginning-of-class tradition. I found Cathy Davidson’s blog posts about grading extremely interesting, particularly since (as Davidson acknowledges) grading is one of the most difficult pedagogical activities. Here is why I dislike grading: - I constantly second-guess my judgment. Having a rubric makes things even worse: for each item on the rubric, I labor over the point total. “Does this student deserve a 2 or a 1.5 for the “ethos” section of their rhetorical analysis? Can I give it a 1.75? If I give a 1.5, what will that do to the total score? Maybe I didn’t teach this section well enough,. So-and-so is going to be so sad when she sees this grade,” etc. Davidson picks up on this with her hypothetic al musing, “Is this an A-- or a B++?" It’s funny because it’s true. It’s not funny because it’s true. - This second-guessing makes grading take FOREVER (along with the commentary I offer, which is a good thing). Student projects on average take over 30 minutes each to grade, sometimes 45 minutes to an hour. That means the entire process can take days to get through, depending on how distracted I am. - The amount of time I spend on grading leads to a sort of “self-loathing.” I get frustrated with myself, I get frustrated with the assignment I designed, I get frustrated by the fact that all of my work is going to get put off and I will have to scramble and compromise. I was really interested in the special topoi study conducted by Laura Wilder and Joanna Wolfe and documented in “Sharing the Tacit Rhetorical Knowledge of the Literary Scholar: The Effects of Making Disciplinary Conventions Explicit in Undergraduate Writing about Literature Courses.” I was particularly interested because the study provides a concrete way of introducing critical concepts to students who are engaging with literary interpretation for the first time, and concludes that teaching these “special topoi” specifically improves students’ literary analysis according to what is considered “good” within the field. To me, these conclusions seem fairly self-evident. However, there is some resistance, which Wilder and Wolfe note near the beginning of the study; some critics, for instance, worry that “topical instruction” could produce “too much rigidity” in student writing, and “formulaic and uninteresting interpretations” (177). I was intrigued by Jesse Stommel's blog post on Twitter essays. I have resisted getting a Twitter so far for reasons that are unclear to me, especially as I kind of have a hand in the Digital Humanities. The professional networking possibilities with Twitter are becoming a real thing, and, as Stommel demonstrates, there is potential for Twitter in the classroom, too. Stommel has created formal “Twitter essay” assignments were students respond to questions which could take books to answer, in only 140 characters. It is a soul-searching exercise where the students have to really look carefully at a subject and make the decision about what is essential at the concept he or she is being asked to define (for Stommel, “what is a monster?” or “what is posthuman,” etc). In The Future of Thinking, an open-access digital book on changing patterns of learning in the technological age, several interesting observations are made on the tensions in pedagogy regarding technology use in the classroom. For example, many college-level instructors are interested in the concept of using computers in class, but those same instructors become increasingly frustrated when the presence of computers becomes a tool for students to do other non-class-related things. I experienced this frustration when I taught in State Hall 029 last year. I guess there are a couple solutions to this problem: one is to request a non-computer classroom and ban the use of all digital devices during class sessions. The other is to use the computers as much as possible, counting on the fact that students will spend their time doing course-related activities on those irresistible machines as opposed to other things. If one was to adopt this second course of action, then the idea of creating a “social network” for the class seems appealing. The authors of The Future of Thinking mention sites like Ning, which are social networks structured like Facebook, but are cultured specifically for smaller groups of people. At first I scoffed at the idea: Facebook for my classroom. Great. What on earth would I possibly do with that? But after thinking about it a little, there does seem to be some real benefits. This week’s readings presented several different philosophies of teaching which can be located at various points on the pedagogy-spectrum . For example, in Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature, I was surprised to read of Bonnie Zimmerman’s (University of California at San Diego) approach to pedagogy: “I believe in telling students what they ought to think. I tell them, ‘I’m going to preach to you, because I want you to think about the meaning of books and I believe that literature makes you a better person,’” (Showalter 51). Remember that reading response that I mentioned getting destroyed over my first year in my Master’s program? I think I said something like that. Now, I can see why statements like Zimmerman’s (and mine) are rather fraught and contentious. The idea of looking for “meaning” is a statement that needs to constantly prefaced and qualified over and over again to students, if the term is going to be used (which Zimmerman may do, I don’t know). But even more problematic was the idea of literature making students “better” people. Whose notion of ethical/moral progress is being used at the standard to measure “better” in this sense? Is each student able to decide what “better” means to them, or is there an underlying current of morality which Zimmerman cultures throughout the semester? Felicitously, the week I get notification that I may get to teach my very first lit class ever (Introduction to Poetry) is also the week we were assigned to read the chapter "Teaching Poetry" in Elaine Showalter's Teaching Literature. I eagerly read the chapter for suggestions from seasoned professionals on how to handle introducing poetry to unsuspecting undergrads, since I have never really had that experience. Instead of just talking about some of the methods I liked and might try over the summer, however, I'd like to revive our conversation from last class session and discuss ways of bridging the gap between composition and literature. The general concept behind Michael Berube’s “Teaching to the Six” is both an interesting and vexing one, and one that I’ve considered often. Though I’ve never taught a literature class, the parallel to student engagement is transferrable to the majority of college courses. In every composition course I’ve taught, a week or two into the semester, I begin to realize that my students are varied in skill and interest-level, sometimes dramatically so. When I taught at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, for example, one of my first year composition courses included a male student who wrote almost better than me (ALMOST), and a couple students who wrote at what I estimated to be a middle-school level. In the center of the spectrum were students who wrote appropriately-enough for the class, others who wrote slightly better, and still others who wrote in a not-quite-middle-school-but-not-college-appropriate manner. I would often lament to my adjunct-faculty colleagues that I felt at all times that somebody was getting stiffed in class, whether it was the future literature scholar or the dazed/confused/overwhelmed students. How could I reach everyone? How could I best ensure that all my students were meeting the learning outcomes for that class, not just the metaphorical “six”? |