Stealing Things

Dear Bobby,

I am so thrilled that we agree about using one anothers work. In fact, I'm not really sure how logical it would be to start over each time with something new, be it style or an entire curriculum. Especially since many grad students get thrust into teaching really quickly, I think it is necessary to borrow and learn from one another. Without the help of my peers I would be drowning with unhappiness and crap lesson plans and sobbing in the corner as my students beat me with their tiny fists, demanding I teach them.

"Teach us thesis!" they will cry.

"What is Synthesis! We must know!"

"Gretchen in World History won't date me because of my split infinitives!"

Gretchen, you know, is turned on by unsplit infinitives. She's classy.

Anyway, there is not much more to say, Boice. It's been such a pleasure perusing you this semester, and I wish you the best, especially as you reside on my bookshelf. Among some other books. Looking like a book. Ah, such a life.

Cheers and smoochies,
A

Sharing the Work Load

I enjoyed reading Boice's CH 7 about sharing the work-load of teaching. When I taught High School, this was the motto. Steal, Borrow, Steal, Steal, Steal. Just do whatever works. I have gained a lot more appreciation for this practice over the course of the semester by observing others teach. I sat in on Devoney Looser's Jane Austen seminar several times and observed the way that she structured her class. I especially appreciated the way that she handled class discussion. She gave the student's the control! She made them responsible for creating discussion questions for each class period. I was also thrilled to see how she incorporated interesting lecture pieces throughout the course period in a way that didn't feel dull. And, of course, she shared. She shared about herself. I always share about myself, mainly in ways that are embarassing.

Like Toby I tend to spend the first few minutes of class talking about trivial things: sports, weather, news, silly things my dog has done recently. I feel like it helps me get in touch with my students. By opening up to them, they in turn open up to me in an honest way. Don't get me wrong, I've had this go awry before and I definitely think that there is something about and English teacher especially that makes students feel like they can tell you things that you don't want to know, but a lot of times I appreciate it. I appreciated my students' free-write about an especially busy week and altered out syllabus to hold more in-class discussion and writing that week so that they could devote time to writing when they were less distracted. This definitely helped in the quality of writing that they produced (and that I in turn had to grade).

The Possibilities of Time Travel

I have a student this semester who I realized, too late, was a repeat CI offender. I’ve dealt with difficult students in the past, usually heading off the problem early on with an honest conversation. I’m used to more extreme problems in the classroom—students yelling at other students, etc—so this kid flew under my radar. His problem, I think, is that he cares too much about his academic success and is used to being right about everything. He talks too much, interrupts me, interrupts classmates, questions everything. And on top of that he has a catalogue memory of movie quotations he breaks out when nervous. He’s also prone to extensive sneezing fits. I’m at risk of sounding really evil here, so I should say I don’t think he intentionally sneezes sixty times to interrupt class. But maybe it’s his body’s way of rejecting any voice of authority louder than his own? No, definitely not. But, you know, it can feel that way.

Really, he’s a nice kid, but his absolute ignorance of social cues and his chronic know-it-all-ness has shut down the classroom conversation all semester. Students who were eager to talk early on have become quieter and quieter as this loudmouth dismissed everyone’s opinions but his own, mine included. The point is, I’ve been so trained to see CI as call-campus-security problems that I overlooked his behavior as simply obnoxious and missed the opportunity to shut him down early with a simple conversation. No doubt he would have listened and been more respectful, as I don’t think it’s his intention to be disruptive.

Instead I dealt with his interruptions on a case-by-case basis during class. So if he broke into a page-long quote from The Nightmare Before Christmas (in character), I quietly told him to hold on and redirected the conversation back to the original subject/speaker. I could have saved myself a lot of teeth-gritting and faking nice if I’d just told him in September, “Listen, we all love what you have to say, but you need to let other people get a word in edgewise. And maybe not go off on so many tangents about the possibilities of time travel and the merits of Star Wars over Harry Potter.”

If any of you have this kid in future English classes, you’ll know it’s him, and you can do better than I did. Shut it down early and enjoy the semester without all the interruptions. But I can’t help with the sneezing.

Open Things Up

I have to say that I really enjoyed reading chapter 7. I find that making connections with other instructors has helped me immensely in my own teaching. I did have the privilege of visiting Jonas' classroom, and it really gave me some insight into how a different approach can work. There were a lot of little things that I noted during that visit that I have packed into my teaching toolbox.

Another thing that Boice recommends is telling students about yourself. This is something that I felt very hesitant to do at first. I was worried that if I became too familiar then students would devolve into trying to be my "buddy" and not respecting my authority in regards to grades, deadlines, etc. While I still certainly think that it is a mistake to be too casual or familiar with students, I find that casual talk and talking about myself really helps the classroom.

My students know that I love medieval literature and Tolkien. They know that I like The Office and that I completely obsessed with video games. In almost every class I begin with 2-3 minutes of talk about trivial things. I talk about myself, things I do, things I have read. I ask them what they did over the weekend and what the craziest things are happening in the dorms. I ask them about their other classes. Sometimes I try to work in a joke. During this period students know that they can just talk to me or each other--it is essentially casual time. While it may seem like this wastes what little time I have, I have found that since initiating it, the rest of the class becomes much more productive. The students are relaxed and not afraid to ask questions.

I have found that students really are interested in their instructors. They have asked me what I think about certain books, they laugh at my ancient cellphone and my confusion about Facebook (I play up the backward medievalist trope). They ask me what I did on Thanksgiving break.

I don't think Boice really addresses it, but I do think there is a danger of taking all of this too far. In the end, I don't want to be their buddy, but I do want them to see me as a warm, but strict, mentor. I think that I am successfully negotiating this balance in my classroom, mostly through social intuition I suppose. We shall see what the teacher evaluations say!

Incivilities

In Boice’s discussion of “classroom incivilities,” he points out that many new graduate students begin their TA careers with little or no idea of what “regular” college students are like. I believe this is true. As a college student, I managed to surround myself with people who were just as nerdy as I was, so it hardly occurred to me that some college kids might not even want to BE in college. When I first arrived in grad school and had to teach, it was quite shocking to realize the huge range of possible student responses to college.

Something that’s been weighing on my mind throughout the semester is the utter lack of teaching training that I received as an advanced undergrad/prospective grad student. When I was thinking about applying to grad school in Classics, the only things I was encouraged to consider were “do I want to study the Etruscans?” “How is my Latin?” “do I want to study 2^nd-style Pompeian wall painting?” et cetera. All of my classes in my junior and senior years as an undergrad were focused on preparing myself to study Classics. In some vague way, I understood I’d be teaching as a grad student, but nobody suggested to me that I should prepare to do this in any way, and this idea certainly didn’t occur to me either. Teaching wasn’t “the point” of being a grad student in Classics, or indeed of being a professor of Classics—the goal was to become a scholar, not a teacher.

But I learned that teaching was not a skill I could just “pick up.” I have to work at it, and it’s as hard to do well as translating a passage of Thucydides. I want to emphasize that I don’t mind being a teacher. In fact I'm learning to like it. But it frustrates me that my whole conception of the professorial career, when I was set to begin training for it, left out the actual day-to-day exercise of being a prof: Professing. So then when I entered grad school for the first time, I got the (implied) message: “Surprise! Congrats on studying all that Catullus. Now you have to learn an entirely new skill set that has nothing in the world to do with the literature of ancient Rome. Good luck.” I’d been had.

I think that teacher-training should really begin when one’s a senior in college, and we should stop pretending that professorial work is mostly scholarship—because God knows that’s not true. I’m not annoyed about the nature of the job, though. What I’m annoyed about is the lack of preparation I really received for it at the start. In what other career track is this the case for its trainees? It’s really too late to begin learning to teach when one arrives in grad school. Teaching involves so many specific skills that it’s impossible to learn competence in a single semester, or even a year, and we should stop expecting our grad students can do so.

Perplexed and Confused About Chapter 8

I was very surprised by the inclusion of chapter 8 in Boice’s book. This surprise, however, is not to suggest that I doubted Boice. In fact, I think I have, in a sense, been holding my breathe a little, waiting for him to tackle some of these issues. To some extent, I feel as thought I have been playing the believing and doubting game throughout the entire book, just knowing that he will eventually be compelled to take on what he calls the “classroom incivilities”, or CIs (which I cannot help but comment on the pleasant nature of this name). And, now that we are finally at this point, I am a little curious to know why he places this chapter at the end of section one, particularly as he touches on several legitimate issues that new instructors face. Would it not be useful to bring some of these practical issues to the book’s forefront, so that, after he works his magic and diffuses the tension surrounding these CIs, the reader can be at a greater level of ease and more open to what Boice presents in the rest of his chapters.

Speaking from the reader’s perspective, I am not entirely sure I understand why Boice has chosen to end his section on teaching with such a complex and problematic topic. As I read through, I even find much of what he has to say extremely useful, but these tips seems to lose their effect by their placement in the book. Therefore, while I have enjoyed this journey that we have taken with Boice, I, reflecting back, think I would have appreciated this discussion of CIs much earlier, in that—whether we like to admit it or not—these issues are what new instructors often struggle with as they begin to teach. So wouldn’t it make sense to begin with issues? I only bring this point up because it seems to me that this way we would be able to overcome whatever small or immediate issues were interrupting our focus and be more open to thinking about how we perceive the bigger picture of how we teach.

Boogers and Eye-Rolling

I must admit that I’m a little nervous about encountering an “uncommonly traumatic kind of CI” on my student evaluations. I don’t have any reason to think that this may actually happen, but I’m hyper-aware of the fact that my students stare at me for three hours a week. What if they comment on my frizzy hair? The fact that I tend to wear the same shoes every day? What if I had a booger? Am I the only one who thinks about these things?

I really liked the fact that this chapter addressed classroom problems that are caused by students, by instructors, and those that are the result of both students’ and instructors’ bad vibes feeding off of one another. I have been very lucky this semester, I think, because my students and I get along really well, and we respect one other enough to avoid most of the problems mentioned in this chapter. Except for one student. For the first half of the semester, she talked to the student next to her all through class, rolled her eyes any time I asked the class to do anything, and basically made me feel like I was teaching at a middle school. After our first conference, however, all of that stopped. When she talks in class now, it’s to add to the discussion, and I haven’t noticed any eye-rolling. I’m not sure what happened; maybe I just became human to her after we had a conversation. I will definitely be taking Boice’s advice on having conferences early in the semester next time.