Inexorable

Today was my last day teaching spring semester classes at Framingham State: on Saturday morning, my students will submit their final essay portfolios online, then on Monday and Tuesday mornings, I’ll proctor their final exams before spending the rest of the week grading, grading, grading. Through long experience, I’ve learned that semesters move forward as inexorably as seasons: in some ways, it feels like the end of the semester has been a long time coming, and in other ways, it feels like the end of the semester has come (again) before I’m really ready for it.

The last week of classes is always a bittersweet time. On the one hand, I’m always tired and eager for the (brief) respite that comes at the end of the semester; on the other hand, I’m always mindful of how much grading stands between the last week of the semester and Done.

When I taught at Keene State, the last week of the semester was typically when I’d find myself looking out my classroom windows at Old Silver, the sprawling silver maple I’d nicknamed the Failure Tree before he collapsed with an earth-shaking thud three years ago.

Old Silver had a lot of help in his final years from the Keene State College grounds crew, who tethered his trunks together with wire cables, and I always took quiet encouragement looking out the window at him during the final weeks of the semester, when I was daunted by my paper-piles and unsure whether my students had really “gotten” anything I’d tried to teach them.

Old Silver stood alongside me for most of my teaching career at Keene State, but he never really listened to any of my lectures, preferring to figure out his own approach to “tree-ness.” Sometimes the most lasting lessons happen despite everything a teacher does—or fails to do—in the classroom, and the last week of the semester is when I find myself quietly hoping that my students got something useful out of my class, if only by osmosis.

I haven’t (yet) found an acceptable equivalent to Old Silver at Framingham State: I’m still getting to know the trees there. The closest candidates are the two massively sprawling oak trees on Larned Beach, the grassy patch of real estate between Hemenway Hall and Whittemore Library. Both of these oaks are estimated to be a couple hundred years old: one is hale and hearty, the other is dying after being struck by lightning, and both are slated to be felled later this month to allow room for new construction.

If you’ve been alive and paying attention long enough, one of the lessons you eventually learn (if only by osmosis) is that even the oldest and sturdiest trees eventually fail and fall. Some, like Old Silver, choose their own time, defying gravity with a little help from attentive groundskeepers. Others, like Framingham State’s two massive oaks, have their times chosen for them, progress moving inexorably whether you’re ready for it or not.

 

It’s time to teach human, again

One interesting characteristic of being a college instructor is the way you’re frequently asked to present a statement of your teaching philosophy. I don’t know if this ritual is limited to college teaching: I know that entrepreneurs write mission statements for start-up companies, for instance, but I don’t know if the proverbial doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief is ever required to articulate her or his professional philosophy. Do plumbers, mechanics, or firemen ever sit down to explain their philosophy of plumbing, machinery, or firefighting, or is this an exclusively white-collar or even Ivory Tower thing?

I don’t know how it is for other professions, but in my field at least, having a statement of teaching philosophy is as necessary as having an up-to-date copy of your CV. A CV and teaching statement aren’t only required when you apply for a new job; they’re also included in the teaching dossiers many schools require you to assemble to keep your job, whether that means applying for tenure or seeking reappointment as an adjunct. If you’re a college instructor, it’s not enough to simply do your job; you also need to be able to articulate why you do your job the way you do. What implicit philosophy underpins and inspires your teaching?

I recently realized that although I’ve written various versions of my own “Statement of Teaching Philosophy” over the years—a new, updated one every time I came up for reappointment as an adjunct instructor at Keene State, for instance—I’ve never written a statement of my online teaching philosophy. Just as the teaching tasks and responsibilities of an online instructor are slightly different from what is required when you teach face-to-face, these two kinds of teaching require a slightly different philosophical outlook. Having recently crafted a statement of my online teaching philosophy, I thought I’d share. If you’re wondering why I’ve recently had reason to articulate the philosophy behind ten years of online teaching experience, I won’t say anything other than “Keep your fingers crossed.”

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

A recent series of television commercials touts the customer-friendly approach of a particular bank. In the ads, customers go to a competing bank that is ominous and impersonal, with a cavernous lobby studded with grim gray pillars. There are no human tellers in this nameless corporate bank, only a disembodied voice admonishing customers for stepping out of line, tugging a pen tethered to a counter with an impossibly short chain, or daring to arrive a minute after closing time. After reassuring viewers that the customer-friendly bank doesn’t have rope lines, provides free pens, and is open both nights and weekends, a voiceover suggests it’s time to “bank human, again.”

I start with a description of these bank commercials because I think they match many students’ worst nightmares about online classes. No one wants to feel like their bank is peopled by robots who ignore the niceties of human interaction, and no one wants to feel like their college classes are similarly impersonal. When students log into their online classes, they want to know there is an attentive, qualified, and responsive instructor behind the electronic interface: a human being who will gladly answer their questions, encourage and respond to their participation, and provide constructive feedback on their assignments. Given the understandable desire on the part of students to be treated with decency and respect, it’s time that online instructors “teach human, again.”

I’ve taught face-to-face college writing and literature classes for twenty years, and I’ve taught a mix of face-to-face and online classes for the past ten. During this decade of teaching both online and face-to-face, I’ve learned that all my students want the same basic things. Students want an instructor who knows their name, reads and pays attention to their papers, responds to their emails, and treats them fairly. Students want to know their instructor is “there” even if they need help outside the stated office hours. Students don’t expect their instructors to be available 24/7, but they appreciate a prompt, considerate response to their questions and concerns. Students want their instructors to be engaged enough to notice if they skip class and to care enough to ask why they might be struggling.

Anyone who is a teacher or a parent knows you can’t watch all of your charges all the time: those stories about teachers who have “eyes in the back of their head” are, unfortunately, the stuff of myth. But even though human instructors can’t be “there” for their students at all times, modern technology makes it possible for instructors to be remarkably responsive to their students’ needs. Years ago when I first experimented with Blackboard, I wanted a way to keep in better touch with my face-to-face students even while teaching on multiple campuses. I quickly learned that an online learning management system made it possible for me to hold virtual office hours from home the night before a paper was due and thus be more “connected” with my students in their dorm rooms than I was when I sat in my isolated and Internet-free campus office.

In my face-to-face classes, I notice with regret how students’ personalities sometimes hinder their academic performance. There are always a few extroverted students who dominate discussions, for instance, while their more introverted but equally intelligent peers are less eager to participate. In an online class, however, no one can sit in the proverbial back of the room where an instructor might overlook them. In an online class, everyone participates, and everyone has a chance to think before they contribute. In an asynchronous threaded discussion, you can easily refer to something a student posted earlier in the week and connect that comment to something another student said today. In an online class, all students’ contributions are recorded regardless of how outgoing they are in person.

Because of the electronic footsteps students leave in their online classes, instructors have a wealth of data they can use to ensure student success. Whereas a student can sit in a face-to-face class and quietly nod even though they don’t understand the presented material, in an online class, silent nods aren’t enough. In an online class, students need to articulate their understanding of the material, and that gives instructors like me a clear indication of whether students truly comprehend course concepts. If I’m concerned a particular student isn’t doing well, I can review that student’s discussion posts, blogs, and other assignment submissions. Given those indicators of student comprehension, I can reach out to students who are struggling and need more help. Instead of waiting for confused students to approach me, I can take the initiative to reach out to them.

Regardless of whether they take classes online or face-to-face, college students spend a lot of time and money on their education, and like any consumer, students want to get something of value in exchange. If we are going to give online students an education worth the time and money they invest in their studies, we might take a page from the playbook of that customer-friendly bank I mentioned in my opening paragraph. Both bank customers and college students want to be treated like human beings, and one way to assure that is to hire real live humans to help them. Given how faceless much of our mechanized modern life has become, online instructors should make a conscious effort to be engaged, responsive, and respectful, bringing the niceties of human interaction into their virtual classrooms.

 

In the right direction

Today was the first day of classes at Framingham State, so I spent the break between my morning and afternoon classes in my office writing, as I did last semester. Last semester, my office was beastly hot, so I’d open a window to keep from sweltering; this semester, my office is a bit chilly, so today I found myself wishing I’d brought a sweater.

We got a dusting of snow overnight—just enough snow to cover everything with a thin film of white, like the powdery bloom on raspberry stems—so I had to brush off my car before commuting to campus this morning. It’s cold outside—in the 20s, and windy—so I took an abbreviated walk around the block and back, just far enough to take a handful of pictures.

The first day of any semester feels a bit like a first date, or at least what I remember first dates being like. There’s a certain amount of nervousness all around: you’re trying to decide if you like your students, and they’re trying to decide if they like you. Everyone is nice on the first day—everyone is trying to make a good impression—and you can’t yet tell whether that good first impression will last. Despite all the niceties, you can’t help but think ahead with a bit of trepidation to that point in the semester when your students will get sick of you and you will you get sick of them, in turn.

The first day of any semester is full of promise and potential: a fresh slate. When my department chair gave me my course assignment for the term, she mentioned that teaching second-semester freshmen is different from teaching first-semester freshmen, as the students are no longer fresh and dewy, eager at the prospect of starting a new phase in their lives. But although the mood among second-semester students might be different from the students I taught last term, I still sense a feeling of new beginnings, perhaps because spring semester starts so soon after the New Year and its associations with self-improvement and new resolve.

Second semester students might be a bit wilier than first-semester students—they’ve been around the proverbial block, having discovered that boring college classes are a lot like boring high school classes and allow the usual methods of shirking work—but such students often want to redeem themselves from the previous semester’s indiscretions. Second semester freshmen have survived their first term—they have gotten their initial rebelliousness out of their system, and they’ve watched their less-conscientious peers fall and fail. Second semester freshmen aren’t as dewy as the students I taught last semester, but they also aren’t as naïve. Having discovered their own limitations, second semester freshmen are willing to revisit the lessons they didn’t master last term, having learned from experience that those aforementioned tricks for shirking work will get them only so far.

I find myself wanting to promise my students on the first day that this class will be different, that we’ll avoid the pitfalls and traumas that make so many of them dislike reading and writing. “This will be a fun class,” I want to gush, “because I’m a fun teacher.” I don’t say this, though, because I know it’s only partly true: there will come a time when the novelty of a new semester, a new class, and a new instructor will wear off, and all that’s left is the unavoidable reality of nausea: Peter Elbow’s term for that stage of the writing process when whatever you’re working on seems hopelessly awful, far beyond the reach of revision. I can’t promise my students that reading and writing will always be fun: I love to write, but I’m the first to admit that writing is hard work. But even if I can’t promise that my class will be a constant source of fun, I can promise that I’ll try my best to treat my students and their writing with respect, I’ll try my best to make writing a bit easier for them, and I’ll try my best to give the most helpful feedback I can.

So that’s my vow as we start this optimistically named spring semester: I can’t promise to be perfect, but I promise to try my best. Whenever J and I are out walking and get stopped by a passing motorist asking for directions, J reminds me of the goal of any good direction-giver: even if you can’t give flawless turn-by-turn instructions from Here to There, at least get the driver closer to their destination so they can ask another person to guide them the rest of the way. I think a similar goal applies to teaching: no one instructor can teach every lesson, but each instructor should try to move her or his students another few steps in the right direction.

 

I no longer believe this

One of the interesting things about maintaining a daily writing practice is the way you can compare today’s mindset with what you were feeling last week, last month, last year, or beyond. On any given day, I might scribble words into my journal, type words into a file I save on my laptop, or post words to my blog. On some days, I might do all three. The result of so much daily writing is a cumulative record of my own psychological weather patterns: a vast supply of data chronicling my own inner climate.

Two weeks ago, for example, I re-read an essay I’d started to write about a month ago. I’d intended to post it as a blog entry illustrated with photos I’d taken at a football game J and I had attended in September, but I never got around to sorting through those photos, much less polishing and posting the accompanying essay. I’d started the essay about a month into the current semester, and the novelty of the term is apparent in every line: this is something I could have written only near the beginning of the academic term, when I was still feeling fresh, eager, and energetic.

Two weeks ago when I re-read that essay, I was in the midst of a phenomenon I’ve come to call the “dark night of the semester,” that point in every academic term when you’re tired, overwhelmed with work, and frankly feeling like you’ve lost your way. During this dark night, you look at your own syllabus with disgust, realizing nothing you’d intended to do with your class makes any sense; you lament your career choices, feeling you are the last person on earth cut out to work with undergraduates; and you find yourself silently muttering much too frequently a mantra of “I’m too old for this shit.” During the dark night of the semester, the thought of facing a classroom full of students, a folder full of student papers, or your own endless to-do list fills you with nausea, and the thought of trying to teach anyone anything makes you want to curl up and cry. If this dire ebb in your morale and motivation happens to hit when your students, too, are feeling sick, discouraged, and depressed, heaven help you all as you face a perfect storm of academic ennui: a dark night of despair that threatens to derail the entire semester.

Usually, my “dark night” arrives around week five of the semester: a little more than a month into it, when the novelty of the new term has worn off. This year, perhaps because I’m still new to Framingham State, the semester had more than the usual share of novelty hanging around it, so the dark night arrived around week ten: later than usual, but undeniable all the same. Even when the dark night tarries, I’ve learned, it never fails to arrive, eventually.

One torturous aspect of the dark night of the semester is being subject to the syllabus, assignments, and other teaching materials you’d designed months before, when you were feeling optimistic. Looking at the number, kind, and frequency of writing assignments you’d chosen to require, for instance, you can’t help but wonder what you were thinking. Who was I way back when I thought assigning X or requiring Y was a good idea…and who am I now that I’m actually having to grade the stuff I asked my students to submit? Because of my daily writing practice, I have a written record of both of these people: in my words, at least, I can watch Dr. Jekyll gradually transform into Mr. Hyde.

Years ago, when I was researching Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brief career as a Unitarian minister, I read that he recycled his sermons as he traveled from pulpit to pulpit, revisiting and revising the ones he delivered on multiple occasions to various audiences. Writing and delivering a fresh sermon every week is a daunting task: what about weeks when your faith is ebbing or inspiration is difficult to find? Because of this practice of re-using sermons he’d written previously, Emerson once stopped in the middle of reading an old sermon, nonchalantly remarked “I no longer believe this,” and then continued reading as if nothing unusual had happened.

I have to admire and even envy the gall, gumption, and grit Emerson displayed in this instance. For all the creeds we proclaim in churches, temples, or shrines, who among us has the nerve to state, loudly and proudly, “I no longer believe this”? Emerson was a life-long journal keeper, so even though he stopped writing (and recycling) sermons when he gave up his career as a Unitarian minister, Emerson never gave up the daily writing habit. The same man who famously wrote that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” had ample opportunity in his daily writing practice to watch his mind change, backtrack, and contradict itself. “Speak what you think now in hard words,” Emerson insisted, “and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” You simply have to love the nerve of someone who dares to waffle with such bold intensity.

It’s difficult—the hardest thing on earth, perhaps, a task even harder than teaching—to remain true to our own convictions. Given the optimistic statements uttered at the beginning of an academic term, how closely can you hold to those ideals when the dark night descends? “I no longer believe this” is what I wanted to shout from the rooftops when I re-read that essay two weeks ago, but at the same time, I fully recognized that when I wrote it, I believed it entirely. So which utterance is the full and simple truth: an optimistic declaration of what I believe on a good day, when I’m brimming with energy and ideals, or a fatigued and despairing recantation of everything that statement stands for?

Today was a brisk and bright day, and I enjoyed an afternoon walk even though I’m still buried in last week’s paper piles. This past week’s classes went well after I’d tweaked my original approach, and I hope that tomorrow’s classes will go well, too: even if we can’t accomplish everything I’d set out to do this semester, I’m seeing small steps in the right direction, and I cling to that hope. This morning when I re-read that essay from nearly a month ago, I found myself nodding with nearly every word. It seems the dark night of this particular semester has abated a bit, with a glimmer of light presaging an eventual dawn.

Today’s photos come from a walk I took last weekend, starting at the Brook Farm Historical Site in West Roxbury–where 19th century Transcendentalists tried (unsuccessfully) to establish a pastoral commune–and wending toward nearby Millennium Park and back.

 

Office in a bag

I call it my office in a bag. “It” is a large and durable laptop tote with room for file folders, textbooks, my journal, Kindle, chalk, dry erase markers, pens, index cards, staples and a stapler, cough drops, tissues, a water bottle, and an emergency bar of dark chocolate. On days when I leave my laptop at home, my office in a bag is big but easily portable; on days when it’s fully loaded, my tote is bulging and heavy, the kind of burden I’d love to sling over a llama’s back or hand off to a Sherpa. Make no mistake: teaching is only partly about ideas. It’s also about the stuff you’ve learned you can’t function in the classroom without along with whatever organizational method you’ve devised to make sure those materials are always close at hand.

When I was an undergraduate, I remember my professors striding into class nearly empty-handed. They’d carry whatever text we were discussing that day, and they might carry a folder containing their lecture notes or a slim grade-book for taking attendance. On days when they returned assignments, my professors arrived with a fat stack of papers scribbled with red marks and ringed with coffee stains, but that was pretty much it. In the days before laptops, my undergraduate professors were “wired” only on caffeine, and they seemed to assume (accurately or not) that whatever classroom supplies they might need to deliver their lectures would be present in the classroom itself. Particular professors might have idiosyncratic needs—one, for instance, used to consume an entire package of menthol cough drops over the course of a single lecture—but for the most part, my undergraduate professors didn’t come to class carrying a large bag overladen with office supplies. Instead, they just walked into the classroom, ready to Deliver Knowledge.

So, what has changed? First, there’s a difference between the classroom technology of today and the classroom technology of my undergraduate days, way back before Al Gore invented the Internet. When I was an undergraduate, chalk was pretty much the only pedagogical tool my literature professors needed, if they used even that. When I was an undergraduate, most of my professors either lectured or peppered their students with questions, Socratic style, and all they needed to do either task was the voluminous information contained in their own skull. On rare occasions, one of my undergraduate professors might show a video on a big, boxy TV that he or she wheeled into the room on a bulky cart, but that was it. Had the power gone out in most of my undergraduate classrooms, we could have easily continued class by huddling our chairs together, discussing that day’s assignment by candlelight. Back in the old days, professors lectured and students took notes, and this pedagogical approach required very little equipment.

In today’s undergraduate classroom, most instructors do more than lecture, so they need more than a textbook and a stick of chalk. Most of the classes I teach don’t follow a strict lecture format: instead of me talking while my students take notes, most of my classes consist of me presenting several activities that students do either in groups or individually. If small groups are summarizing their impressions of an assigned reading or brainstorming tentative essay topics, I might ask them to write these down on index cards; if we’re doing a grammar workshop, I might ask students to write on the black- or whiteboard selected sentences from their own essay drafts. Since few classrooms are reliably stocked with chalk and dry-erase markers (much less index cards), I always carry my own supply: anything to get my students actively engaged rather than falling asleep over their notebooks as I did when I was an undergraduate sitting through long lectures.

For any day’s class, I typically prepare my notes as a Word file that I post to Blackboard along with whatever web links I’ll be sharing, so students can refer to those materials later. If we’re talking about David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, I might show students a photo essay from the Brooke Army Medical Center; if we’re discussing grammar, I might show one of Taylor Mali’s spoken word routines. Incorporating multimedia resources into the college classroom keeps students more engaged than words scribbled on a dusty chalkboard, but it means I have to lug my laptop to classrooms that aren’t equipped with an instructor workstation. It also means I have to have a Plan B in place in case the Internet is down, the projector isn’t working, or some other technical difficulty forces me to use an actual blackboard rather than Blackboard. Although I suppose my students and I could continue class by huddling our chairs together and watching YouTube videos on someone’s smartphone, that isn’t a pedagogical technique I’d recommend.

But there’s another significant difference between the way I currently teach and the way my undergraduate professors taught. My undergraduate professors were professors, not “instructors,” “lecturers,” or any of the other euphemistic terms colleges use to refer to their part-time, contingent faculty. My undergraduate professors didn’t have to carry an entire day’s worth of teaching material in a single bulging bag because they had an office where their books, files, and office supplies lived. If Professor Z realized on his way to class that he needed a particular book, journal article, or brimming coffee mug, Professor Z could simply stride back to his office down the hall and retrieve it. When you’re a contingent faculty member teaching on multiple campuses, though, you learn to leave very little (if anything) in any of your offices. Not only do you share those offices with other contingent faculty, you learn by experience there’s nothing worse than realizing on your way to Class A on Campus X that you forgot the textbook in your office on Campus Y.

I’ve come to the point where I can recognize my contingent colleagues by silhouette: they are the ones who are slung all around with bags as they trudge like pack-mules across campus. I’ve seen several colleagues use wheeled bags or carts to carry their things as if they’d just returned from a weekend getaway, but so far I’ve resisted the siren call of the wheeled carry-on. Carrying my office on my back like a turtle seems more dignified than dragging it behind me like an ox, and my still-pretending-to-be-youthful pride recoils at the thought of using anything even remotely reminiscent of an old lady’s folding shopping cart.

In her memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed names her huge, looming backpack “Monster,” a load whose weight rubs scabbing sores on her back. At one point in Strayed’s journey, a more experienced hiker helps her sort through and jettison some of her things, many of which seemed essential when she was preparing for her trip but turned out to have no useful relevance once she’s actually hiking. In my case, however, my “monster” is huge, hulking, and heavy because I’ve been on the trail long enough to know the things that are essential are often difficult to find if you don’t carry them with you. When you teach out of your bag, you need that bag to be ample, expansive, and well-stocked.

 

Theme for English B

Today I met with a new class of first-year writing students. As one of our first-day exercises, I asked my students to read Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” which I’d included as the final page of the course syllabus. My students and I had spent part of our class time meandering around our classroom interviewing one another, trying to learn one interesting thing about each person present (myself included), so the poem Hughes’ speaker offers in response to his teacher’s prompt to write a page about himself seemed to be an apt way to conclude class. Given the opportunity to describe yourself in a single page, which details would you include, and which details would you omit?

Before our next class, my students’ homework is to take the instructions in the poem and write their own page:

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

I’ve taught this particular course–Intro to College Composition–before, but only online, never face-to-face. Although I’ve read “Theme for English B” with first-year writers in the past, I’ve never asked them to try out the poem for themselves, writing a page that is “true” because it “come(s) out of you.”

This is, in other words, an experimental assignment: something I’ve never tried with a real live classroom of students, and it’s a writing prompt I’ve never even tried myself. Faced with the seemingly simple instructions in Hughes’ poem, what would I write? I’m not sure–I’m both excited and intimidated by the prospect of the blank page this assignment assumes–and this is why I chose to start the semester with it. Sometimes it’s interesting to try something completely new–something you’re not sure will work–something that actually frightens you a little.

I remember one of my own college instructors once making a distinction between “real” and “fake” questions. When a teacher asks you something she already knows, that’s not a real question: it’s a fake question, something designed to test your knowledge or even trick you. When a teacher asks you what you thought of Hughes’ poem, for instance, is she honestly asking what YOU thought of it, which she can’t possibly know unless you tell her? That’s a real question, because there’s no predicting how you might respond. But if a teacher asks you what you thought of Hughes’ poem while secretly expecting you to interpret the poem the same way she did, that’s a fake question. That teacher isn’t asking for something she doesn’t know; she’s asking for corroboration of what she already assumes to be true.

I honestly don’t know what kind of pages my students will bring to class on Thursday: this assignment is, in other words, a Real Question. Will my students bring poems? Lists? Song lyrics? Will anyone bring a resume? A personal ad? An ode or epitaph? Like any first-year writers on the first day of class, my students spent a lot of time today trying to figure out “what I want” from this and future assignments: how much do page lengths really matter? How much do I care about document format? How many points will I deduct for This, and how many points will I give for That?

As a teacher, I need to care about official course outcomes, policies, and other formal requirements, but as a writer, I want to say, “Surprise me.” Where’s the fun in reading a pile of papers that all give me what I want, as if I could describe exactly what that would look like? If I were given an assignment like the one I gave my students today, I’d be both terrified and a bit exhilarated, wondering just how creative my teacher wants me to be. Having given this assignment to my students today, I’m more than a bit excited, wondering just how creative they dare to be.

 

Preparatory

Last Thursday I spent the day at Framingham State, tending to a handful of preparatory tasks before classes start this Wednesday. In the morning, I attended an English department retreat with other first-year writing instructors: a chance to mingle, share assignment ideas, and swap syllabi before the semester begins. After that, I crisscrossed campus, finding the classrooms where I’ll be teaching, submitting HR paperwork, and getting both my parking decal and faculty ID. Apart from some last minute tweaks to my syllabus, assignment sequences, and Blackboard sites, I feel ready to start the semester…or at least as ready as I’ll ever be.

When I arrived on campus early, a semicircle of Adirondack chairs sat bathed in morning light in an alluringly green and grassy spot. It was an idyllic scene that made me wonder what kinds of conversations will happen here over the coming year as students arrive and settle into the business of mingling, sharing stories, and swapping insights. Sure enough, when I left campus in the still-sunny afternoon, two young women were lounging in the chairs, chatting. Who knows how many more conversations will happen here in the coming months?

 

(Almost) back-to-school

Yesterday I went to a faculty orientation for the “Introduction to College Writing” course I’ll be teaching at Framingham State University this fall, and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. There are many logistical details to attend to when you start teaching at a new institution, so I’ve been navigating a byzantine process of signing contracts, submitting paperwork, and acquiring various logins and passwords. I don’t know where my office will be, I don’t know whether I’ll have a campus mailbox and phone number, and I find myself spending an inordinate amount of energy worrying about getting a parking decal and ordering textbooks. All the things I normally would have taken care of months ago, in other words, are still up in the air because I’m a New Hire, and that means Everything Is New. It’s both exciting and a bit intimidating.

Amidst all the novelty, though, are some small victories. So far this week, I’ve managed to log into my new email and Blackboard accounts, I’ve discovered where to access my class rosters, and I’ve figured out where my classes will meet even though I haven’t actually set foot in those buildings yet. I’m simultaneously nervous and excited, wondering whether the textbook I chose will be a good one, whether my students will be moved by the common reading we’ll be discussing, and whether they’ll be engaged in the writing assignments I’m designing. I’m feeling all the emotions, in other words, that my students are presumably feeling, or will be, as the start of classes rapidly approaches: eagerness, anticipation, excitement, and more than a bit of anxiety. I want to be ready for the first day, but I also have a nervous, unsettled feeling that it’s impossible to be entirely, completely ready. You can do your best to be prepared, but at a certain point, you just have to dive in and brace yourself for the overwhelming sensation of full immersion: “C’mon in: the water’s fine!”

Starting school as a new instructor or a new student is really a lot like life itself. You do your best to plan ahead, but you also have to be ready to abandon your carefully crafted plans when it becomes painfully clear that what you expected isn’t what the Universe is handing you. Plan A might have been wonderful, but Plan B is often what you end up working with.

I’m reminded of the main lesson I took away from Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard the first time I read it–a lesson that is reinforced every time I re-read the book. Before traveling to Nepal to accompany the biologist George Schaller on an expedition to study blue sheep, Matthiessen asks his Zen teacher for advice. “Expect nothing,” the teacher exhorts…and then Matthiessen spends the rest of the book describing how his various expectations for the trip are frustrated. Matthiessen hopes to reach the legendary Crystal Monastery, study with the revered lama there, and see an elusive snow leopard, believing that each of these milestones will mark a progressive step in his spiritual development. But in typical fashion, life doesn’t go according to plan, and nothing that happens on Matthiessen’s trip conforms with what he’d expected.

I arrived at yesterday’s “Introduction to College Writing” orientation with nearly 20 years’ teaching experience and a nine-page draft syllabus, and I left wondering if even 50 years’ teaching experience would be enough to teach this class, and with plans to completely rethink the syllabus I’d drafted. None of this is entirely new to me, of course: my typical approach to planning a semester usually involves radically revamping whatever I did the previous term. I once read that colleagues of the writing teacher Peter Elbow sometimes call him “Write It Wrong Elbow” because his insistence that students write (and then revise) crappy first drafts, and I think this “no worries” approach to making mistakes applies to teaching, too. Sometimes you have to Do Things Wrong in order to figure out how to Do Them Better, if not Right. I’m headed into this coming semester with a lot of experience teaching writing the way I taught it at Keene State College the past 10 years…but the courses I taught at Keene State are distinctly different from what I’ll be teaching at Framingham State in the fall. I’m in a situation, in other words, where past performance isn’t indicative of future results, so I’m having to revisit and revise things accordingly.

As a teacher, I often urge my students to take risks and try new things: this is, after all, what teachers do. But how often do teachers themselves try new things? It’s easy to get settled into your set routine of teaching Pretty Much the Same Thing to subsequent classes of Pretty Much the Same Students, wearing a familiar path from the beginning of the semester to the end. This term, though, I’m having to re-think and re-visit pretty much everything I’ve been doing the past ten years. What got me here won’t necessarily get me there…and that’s exactly the experience my students will have over the coming semester, the techniques that worked for them in high school not necessarily working in college. The thought that I’m responsible for helping them over that gap–that impressive learning curve–is both inspiring and daunting: a real (and awe-inspiring) challenge.

It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that if you cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s on your semester syllabus, you’ll somehow keep Chaos and Complete Semester Meltdown safely at bay. I’ve been teaching long enough, however, to realize things aren’t that simple. Even the best designed syllabus can fall apart in the middle of the semester, and sometimes the things that work for one class simply don’t work in another. There is always an aspect of chance and risk in any endeavor, and teaching is one of those activities where you do your best then hope for the rest.

I have just under two weeks to prepare for the start of classes: just under two weeks to worry and fret over contracts, paperwork, parking decals, and office space. I have just under two weeks to revise, rework, and revamp my syllabus, not just once but probably several times. (Next week is the English departmental retreat, for instance, where we’re supposed to bring several copies of our syllabus for peer feedback. The thought of showing my syllabus-in-progress to my new colleagues fills me with an odd combination of excitement and dread: presumably the same feeling my students will feel before their first essay peer review.)

This time next month, the semester will be underway, and I’ll be subsumed with the actual demands of teaching, struggling with the disconnect between what I’d expected or hoped my students and semester would be like with what they actually are. Whether I see the pedagogical equivalent of a snow leopard this next semester, I’m sure my experience of teaching will be nothing like what I’d expected. It’s a journey I know no amount of planning can completely prepare me for.

Today’s photos come from a rainy day stroll at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, from J and my recent trip to the Midwest. Click here for more photos: enjoy!

 

What makes a poem?

This week in my “Buddhism, the Beats, and Beyond” class, we talked about Buddhist poetry. I told my class I am not a poet; I told my class I didn’t understand all the poems we read, either. But we talked about poems anyway, and we tried a version of the Natalie Goldberg exercise where you freewrite a list of statements all starting with the same opening phrase.

We took as our lead Allen Ginsberg’s “Why I Meditate,” which several students had been confused by. In our poems, we chose some other thing we do daily–why I walk, why I sing, why I dance, why I read–and we each made our own spontaneous, sometimes illogical list. The logic of our lists didn’t matter; what drew us in was the litany of the words themselves, ever-echoing that opening phrase: “I ______ because…”

I walk because the earth is round
I walk because my feet touch earth
I walk because my lungs breath green air
I walk because it rains invisible mist
I walk because you are here
I walk because sitting is too still
I walk because the earth is love
I walk because my body never tires
I walk to pump the billows of my heart
I walk because some people can’t
I walk because outside is bigger than inside

I walk because the afternoon is long
I walk because life is short
I walk because death nips our heels
I walk because the dog paces and whines
I walk because it is cheaper than gas
I walk because my feet can’t be still
I walk because the body is made to move
I walk because my brain never stops
I walk because I can’t stop
I walk because you aren’t here
I walk to find things I haven’t lost
I walk to chase the sunset
I walk because time marches on
I walk to meet a future version of myself.

My students are open and forthcoming, so a question soon arose. What makes a poem? How is a poem different from other things? Can a quick-jotted list be a poem? What about a story told in ordinary language like prose, but with line breaks?

We talked about Walt Whitman and his lists, and we listened to several of Diane Di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letters.” What makes a poem different from a letter, and what makes a poem different from a political rant? Sometimes the two sound the same, so what makes a poem unique?

My students and I quietly drafted our own ideas about what a poem is and what a poem is not, and we compared the results, which were remarkably similar. We seemed to think poetry is looser than other literary genres: poetry can take a form, but it isn’t limited to that form. We seemed to think that a poem isn’t defined by the particular arrangement of its words and rhythms–it can follow the format of a haiku or epic, list or refrain–but it is defined by the fact that its words are arranged with some sort of intentionality (whether formal or informal) chosen by the poet to express some sort of truth.

We read Gary Snyder’s “Riprap” after having listened to Snyder read several other poems, and we concluded that Snyder’s definition of poetry is as good as any. In “Riprap,” Snyder suggests poets lay words like rocks–carefully, intentionally–to create a path to truth. The way up Cold Mountain is slippery and steep, but a path cobbled together with whatever rocks are close at hand–shattered shards or polished river rubble–can make the way more passable. You still have to walk the path yourself; your experience of the mountain of truth will be uniquely yours. But a line of carefully laid stones can save your life along the way.

 

The blank page

Last Tuesday I started teaching a summer school class I’ve never taught before: a 300-level class focusing on Buddhist-inspired literature. Although the content of the course isn’t new to me, the format is: the course is a “blended” class that combines once-a-week class sessions with online activities, and I designed the syllabus and assignment sequences last Monday, less than a day before the class started. Less than a week into the class, I already feel like I’m learning as much from teaching it as my students are learning (I hope) from taking it. You can talk about living in the moment, or you can teach a class where you’re more or less making things up as you go along, trusting the course content to pull together in ways you hadn’t entirely envisioned.

This past week, I’ve also been re-designing from the ground up an online Literary Theory class that I’ve taught for years and am now currently teaching. I’m switching textbooks, revising assignments, and completely re-doing the weekly Lecture Notes in order to create a standardized course that other instructors will use. It’s a huge project because, once again, I’m familiar with the content but am re-envisioning how to deliver that content. The assignment sequences, discussion prompts, and Lecture Notes that worked for the “old” class I’m currently teaching just won’t do for the new, standardized version…and I find my head spinning with ideas while I juggle the “old” and “new” versions of the same material.

Working with a proverbial “blank page” can be terrifying, invigorating, or both: a truly “blended” experience. On the one hand, you don’t know where the next assignment, lecture, or discussion prompt will come from; on the other hand, you’re amazed to see how the simple process of re-thinking something invariably leads to something new. It’s easy to fall into a boring routine of teaching the same old classes the same old way, expecting your students to learn something new from material you’ve milked dry. Occasionally it’s important to become a student yourself, either by trying something completely new or by “just” re-visiting and re-thinking the tried-and-true things that never fail to surprise.