Neutered

One of the first classes I took in college was on modern Christianity.  It was everything one hopes for in a college class: the professor was a brilliant, encouraging, progressive educator, we had a seminar table, and I left each class feeling challenged, uplifted, and a little unsettled.  

When it was time for us to turn in our first papers, the professor gently suggested considering how we chose to gender "God" in our writing.  Try using "She" instead of "He," he said, and see what happens.  Mind you, this was before it became hip to portray God as a female or black, or whatever.  As I've always been inclined to consider "God" as a male-female pair anyway, I really took to my professor's suggestion.  "Mankind" was replaced with "human," and since I don't like picking or switching gender in papers I've just gotten into the habit of shaping my writing so I won't have to.  This isn't anything radical, really-- it's a general trend in academia.

So I was surprised when I started grading papers at my new job and kept running into un-self conscious usages of "Man" and "mankind" in my students' essays.  It's weird to read sentences like "Wordsworth believed in a symbiotic relation between Man and nature" and I never know how to respond.  It's neither incorrect, nor am I teaching a class on philosophies of social justice, nor am I at a small, overtly granola liberal-arts college, nor am I a charismatic old tenured man.  These are all cop-outs, of course, and the fact that I resort to these excuses makes me feel like there's some merit to the recent NY Times article on the apolitical attitude of young professors.  When I read it I was instinctively indignant, but I'm not so sure anymore.

Are we spineless?  Sometimes I think we're so crushed by the pressures of graduate school and the dismal job market that by the time we land jobs we're freaked out and too frazzled to do anything risky.  And honestly, as much as I'd like to discuss the effects of gendered writing with my students I'm not sure how many of them actually care.  Despite what many conservatives think, a lot of professors really do have symbiotic intellectual relationships with their students.  It's hard to be an activist in a vacuum.

 

War and Poetry

I have a strange relationship with poetry.   I've never read it for pleasure, although these days I rarely read anything for pure pleasure.  Either by design or subconscious leading everything, it seems, feeds into my academic interests.  Or I read half a chapter of a kid's book as a nightcap.  

But when I do get around to reading poetry, mostly for the classroom, it can give me such intense pleasure I wonder why I don't read more.  I realized this year that  I teach a lot of poetry for someone who seemingly works with the novel and is nervous about discussing or writing about poetry.  I've been fortunate enough to teach some spectacular novels, but no prose ever makes me feel as swoony and rapturous as Keats's descriptions in "Lamia."   I think my nervousness about poetry stems from traumatic early-college experiences with Wordsworth, a blowhard Romantics professor, and Paul Fussell.  For years I couldn't read "We Are Seven" without feeling profoundly stupid.

Although early 20-cent. literature is perhaps my least favorite period, I do love the war poets. On a fundamental level my research is devoted to ripping apart any pretense of an idyllic pastoral 19th-cent. Britain, and yet I have tremendous sympathy for the power of that vision.  Or at least, I understand the nostalgia for certain kinds of pasts.  I came across one of my favorite Edward Thomas poems today while sifting through mounds of paper, and reading it took me back to a summer I spend it Cambridge several years ago.  I remember standing on a bridge looking at the fens and feeling an pleasurable ache for being.  Although I find parts of it a bit schlocky, it's still a haunting piece of verse. 

The Glory

The glory of the beauty of the morning--

The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;

The blackbird that has found it, and the dove

That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;

White clouds ranged even and fair as the new-mown hay;

The heat, the stir, and sublime vacancy

of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart:--

The glory invites me, yet leaves me scorning

All I can ever do, all I can be,

Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue

In beauty's presence.  Shall I now this day

Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,

Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start

And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,

In hope to find whatever it is I seek,

Hearkening to short-lived, happy-seeming things

That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?

Or must I be content with discontent

As larks and swallows are with wings?

and shall I ask at the day's end once more

What beauty is, and what I can have meant

By happiness?  and shall I let all go,

Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know 

That I was happy oft and oft before,

Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,

how dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,

Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.

It makes me wonder what sorts of literature will emerge/is emerging from the current spate of global crises.

 

Teaching, genius, time

Last semester I didn't bother to read my student evaluations.  For one, my university has a new and idiotic scan-tron system that completely negates my ability to judge the validity of the evals.   Now that the students no longer write down their thoughts, I have no idea whether the low score for "class was intellectually challenging" was because the texts were too easy or because the student happens to hate the course, his fellow classmates, and the institution in general.  

And yet, the prospect of evaluation nags at me because, like most of us, I really want my students to like me.  And fear me.  And find me approachable.  And be blown away by my intellect.  The contrary expectations for educators are almost as bad as those for women.  I think the mental hat-switching necessary to fulfill all these expectations contributes to my schizophrenic pedagogical personality.  I am a really weird teacher, and I mumble a lot.  My anxieties are compounded by the fact that I come from a line of illustrious teachers. Both my grandfather and mother have the ability to make earwax a scintillating topic of discussion, so why must I resort to bad jokes about Byon's sex life?

I've been teaching for quite a while now, ever since my second year of graduate school, when I was responsible for leading a discussion section of a lecture course on a topic I was mostly unfamiliar with.  We got absolutely no information/guidance on teaching, leading discussion, syllabi-writing, or anything.  So a few years later when I took the university-mandated "teaching course" for grad students, I felt more than a little contempt for the course's premise.  This dislike was shared by my classmates and, it seems, by academia in general.  What could an article teach me that semesters in a classroom couldn't?  Besides, another stereotype of teaching is that it's a gift.  

Now, years later, my opinions have changed.  For one, I'm startled by how many bad teachers there are in the academy.  Throughout this past semester I noticed my students often discussing the horrible teaching they encountered in their courses.  And these weren't petty complaints or grade-gripes-- many of them seem to have serious and legitimate concerns about shoddy, negligent, and very seasoned teachers.  As I've discovered, it is possible, though not advisable, to teach on autopilot.  It's even easier to just let the students sit around and discuss sex for fifty minutes.  I think I could really benefit from a refresher course of some sort.  

The instinctive-teacher model, however, is a more tricky subject.  I'm now sure that with enough diligence, one can be trained to be an effective and thorough instructor.  But I'm still afraid that great teaching is simply an innate skill.  As I look back on my years spent in the classroom, I'm not sure that I see the kind of growth that one might expect.  In fact, I sometimes feel like that first section on Spenser I taught was one of my best classes.  I have no way of knowing for sure.  I certainly can't rely on student evaluations to tell me anything of substance.  

Perhaps teaching is always a sisyphean process.

Feminism, commercialism, authorial sensibility

 This Sunday's New York Times Magazine cover article confirms my worst ideas about blogging.  It also proves once again that the paper has a weakness for both unsubstantial "lifestyle" articles (like most of the ones about student life at at the Ivies) and interesting "lifestyle" topics that are written by the wrong person.

But this isn't the main topic of this post.  I saw "Prince Caspian" yesterday, which is in keeping with my fascination for literary adaptations.  There was much to be mourned, a little to be celebrated, and a trope that left me bemused and uncertain.  

In keeping with the movie franchise's aggressive commercialism, the film greatly expanded on battle scenes Lewis mentions briefly or in passing.  I was sad that many of the novel's delightful details were omitted-- like when the kids and Trumpkin have to slaughter a bear and keep "squashy" packets of bear meat with them--and the whole Susan-Caspian near romance was terrible and terribly acted.   I've always found the novels' lack of teen-romance undertones positively refreshing.  On the other hand, I thought the movie's exploration of certain psychological issues (it sucks to be a kid in London after being a king) a nice expansion of issues Lewis touches on or flat out ignores.

What struck me most about the movie, though, was the role of Susan as teen-warrior extrordinare.   Lewis resolutely keeps the girls in his novels far away from actual battle.  Susan is a good archer, but as far as I can remember, she never shoots to kill.  In fact, in the first novel Santa Claus (of all people) tells the children explicitly that women shouldn't fight in wars.  Lewis's female protagonists are resourceful in other ways, but the author's sensibility is resolutely old-fashioned: all of his children-heroes ultimately cleave to strict gender divisions. 

The feminist in me like the idea of an arrow-brandishing, man-bashing character.  But the New Historicist scholar in me feels like it's a ridiculous corruption of the author's entire novelistic vision.  Can you really appreciate Lewis unless you also understand his whole postwar, nostalgic, Christian philosophy?  For me, his portrayal of girl heroines is part and parcel of that: courageous Girl Guide types who nevertheless know their place.  As much as I chafed against Lewis' proscriptions while reading the books as a child, the myth(os) crumbles without them.  Why must we try to modernize the antiquated in order to make it acceptable?

My ever-practical husband observes that the point of the movies isn't to explore Lewis' philosophy but to sell cereal boxes to impressionable 10 year olds.  He's right, of course, but that just depresses me further.  

Marginally Central

Being a professor in the humanities means resigning oneself to a ridiculously low pay (in most cases), an often-stifling sense of job confinement, Third-World-esque funded departments, and a baffling amount of attention from conservative circles.  We are simultaneously made to feel marginal and useless and like mind-controlling leftists who exercise undue influence over the impressionable young.

This contrary (despite their fondness for labeling presidential candidates as such, conservatives are the champions of the mixed-message) perspective has asserted itself in an interesting way at the University of Colorado, where the outgoing president "Bud" Peterson is raising a fund to endow a chair of Conservative Thought and Policy.*  As is usual at CU Boulder (see the recent and ridiculous hiring of the new and very conservative president, Bruce Benson), faculty have no say in this appointment, which will supposedly serve to correct the campus' left-leaning.  The appointment seems like a double slam at the campus' Politics department and the professionalism of the faculty at large, who will now be policed from within.

 

Peterson and his ilk's vesting of faculty with such authority (and potential for mendacity) seems rooted in an almost wholly mythical, outdated, "Dead Poet's Society"-ish idea of the English/History/ Philosophy professor's personal influence over a young and pliable student body.    Contrarily, my students are a fairly diverse group-- many are older, all are struggling to acquire enough credits to graduate, several have time-consuming jobs, and most of them evince an almost-dismaying skepticism for the radical ideals of Shelley, Byron, Godwin, and co.  I would be a tremendous educator indeed if I wielded the authority to mold 50-odd different minds as I wish.  

Instead of wasting 9 million dollars on a useless, factionalizing faculty chair, perhaps Peterson and his ilk can hire more English professors so that my students can actually graduate on time.  My department doesn't have enough faculty to teach the courses offered, and there are hordes of hungry and talented English Ph.D.'s on the job markets every year looking in vain for a minimally-paying job that will allow them to live (barely), teach, and plot the coming revolution.

*This Wall Street Journal link will only be available for a few days.

Update (5/23/08): listen to Bud Peterson's interview on NPR here.  The complete lack of logic is terrifying: Peterson claims that a politically liberal academic with expertise in conservative thought could hold the position, yet he argues that the position is necessary to counter the inherent political biases in humanities departments even though he also insists that CU faculty are even-handed in their handling of political matters.  So the faculty are being judged not for their pedagogy, but on their presumed political leanings.  And if the need for parity is so great, why not fund a chair for liberal thought?  What's the purpose of the political science department, given the scenarios Peterson paints?  This sort of inane double-think is terrifying.

 

Ummm...I'm posting again?

I don't know.  My ambiguity about blogging and sheer laziness are mighty obstacles to overcome.

But...I've had an interesting year teaching, my first full year without a break for research, life, ice cream, whatever.  My brilliant conclusion is that it's much harder to teach two semesters back to back than one per academic year.

There are consolations, though.  Returning students are a big one.  I had six or seven students take a class from me both semesters.  Not only was a huge boost to my confidence (and meant fewer names to memorize), it was great to watch them develop over a whole year.  On the other hand, it made the usual semester letdown feel even worse. After spending so much time listening to and evaluating these people, having them vanish abruptly stinks (save the few obnoxious students I's happily drop-kick out the door if I could).  

The year has left me thinking a lot about pedagogy, something academics aren't really encouraged to do.  I think more students sense that than we think.  Most of them haven't a clue about the multitude of pressures academics face, but I'm still not convinced that we can simply throw teaching to the bottom of our "to-do" lists, despite all the administrative, collegial pressure to do so.  

Meh.  Perhaps I should finish grading, then ponder.