The Many Hands of Teaching

Nearly three weeks into the fall semester and the year is up and running. Papers will be coming in at the end of this week and next thing I know it will be midterm. Every year takes off with this kind of a rush; before I know it, it feels as if I’ve never stopped.

This year though, there is a different feeling around Tucker Hall. The weekend just before classes began my friend and colleague, Paula Blank, died suddenly. It is a shock to many of us in the community who have been touched by Paula. Her absence has made the late summer air-conditioning feel just a little colder than usual.

I have many memories of a long friendship, but here I want to write about how she, like many of my colleagues, active and retired, are part of what I do as a teacher. Students only see me in the classroom, but I’m not alone. Every course I teach is the work of many hands.

Take the classes I’m teaching this fall. I first taught one of them, English 363, fresh out of graduate school in 1988. It is a course that covers the specialty for which I was hired: American literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—think Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Charles Chesnutt. Of course I knew the material, but the first few times I taught it I struggled. There is a difference, I found out, between books that were critically interesting and books that taught well. Senior faculty like Scott Donaldson and Elsa Nettels, who have both retired, helped me find the right readings for Henry James (avoid his late fiction in a survey course) and William Dean Howells. Elsa also passed on advice about how to manage a teaching load of three classes a semester with nearly 100 students (these days we normally teach two classes a term now). Develop one course that fits you like a glove, she told me, revise and update it gradually, and teach it often; that way you can give your attention to the seminars, writing courses, grading, and advising that take up your time.

I followed her advice and made English 363 by bedrock course. I do change the syllabus regularly enough to keep it fresh—all but one of the books I teach now were not on my early syllabi. But with change comes familiarity: this week walking into class feels a bit like introducing students to old friends.

I’ve only taught my other course once before, so it is still in the revision stage. In fact only this year has English 250 been included in the course catalog as a requirement for our newly revised major. “Interpreting Literature,” as it is called, came together over three years of planning and discussion; a number of us even met in a May faculty seminar to hash out the rubrics for the course. Then for several years a number of faculty test-drove the course as an elective. Even before I taught it, the course was the work of many hands.

The class is designed to introduce students to reading and writing about different forms of literature: Elizabethan poetry, novels, slave narratives, genre fiction (detective, science fiction), drama, modernist and postmodern writing. Different texts written at different times invite different forms of attention from readers. Teaching students to talk and write about all this variety prepares them to make the most of their major.

A course like this is meant to stretch the students; it’s also guaranteed to lead the faculty who teach it far from our specialty. This was a particular challenge for me; my only English degree came as an undergraduate, which means I last read Romantic poetry during the Bicentennial. I needed help to make my class work.

I began by reviewing my notes from our discussions and meetings, and collected the syllabi of everyone who had already taught the class, including assignments, paper topics, even discussion questions. All of them were well-crafted, and each one reflected the instructor’s particular interests. I pillaged freely (for most academics I know, when it comes to syllabi there is no plagiarizing, only borrowing), but I was still stuck for a theme, and the “anchor” texts that would organize the course intellectually.

It was then that I talked with Paula, whose specialty was Renaissance literature. I knew I wanted the course to move roughly in a chronological order, and I figured the best place to begin was Shakespeare, whom I had read no more recently than the Romantics. Paula listened to my ideas, and then said, “Oh, you want to teach The Tempest.” It is a relatively short play, she explained, featuring a magician, Prospero, and his daughter Miranda marooned on an island—a circumstance inspired in part by the struggles of recent colonists traveling to Jamestown in Virginia. The play also includes the character Caliban, Prospero’s rebellious and despairing slave—a “monster” who over the centuries has come to haunt the Anglo-American literary imagination as a type of African slave. And at its center is a celebration of “true love”—what better theme to set in motion for the semester?

There was a bonus: like other Shakespeare plays The Tempest had inspired many writers afterwards, including the screenwriters for Forbidden Planet—a cheesy 1950s sci-fi film that featured a monster of pure energy (with claws—don’t ask) that fed off the id of a scientist marooned on the planet with his daughter. With Paula’s suggestion everything fell into place. Elizabethan love poetry, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative, Mark Twain’s tales of race and slavery, Edwidge Danticat’s post-colonial fictions, and even the science fiction of Philip K. Dick all found a place on my syllabus.

When I chatted with Paula last fall after I taught The Tempest for the first time, I admitted I had been well in over my head. She was kindly dismissive: the next time will be better. And she was right, classes were much more productive these last two weeks. I can’t tell her that, but it helps to know that the students in my class are learning from both of us.