My Fall Semester

At the end of each semester, often on the last day, I pass out a sheet listing all of the ideas we have  covered, discussed or read about in my courses.  I ask the students to look over this list and circle, star, or in some way note those ideas or texts that made an impression on them.  

Maybe they found an idea or reading intriguing, useful, disturbing, or maybe it caused them to fling the book across the room in exasperation.  Whatever, so long as they had some reaction.  Maybe, too, they talked about it with someone, or used it to make sense of something, or saw how it connected to one of their other courses. The resulting starred list then becomes the outline for their reflection paper during the final exam period.

I've heard my colleagues in the Nursing Department talk about "the conversation."  This occurs when it's clear a student in the program just isn't going to make it and needs to be counseled out of the Nursing major and into another one.  

Someone--an advisor, a prof in the department--has to sit down with the student and have a heart-to-heart. In the best case scenario, the student already knows he or she is failing, and "the conversation" just formalizes the exit process.

The nice thing about teaching for a long time is the acquired knowledge that no matter how bad a day you had, it usually gets better.  I had a dreadful day in the classroom last Tuesday, but that was then. Since Tuesday, things have improved.  In fact,  I've actually experienced two salvific rarities in teaching: a leaner and a lingerer.

Leaner is my term for a suddenly switched-on student.

I knew yesterday was going to be a lousy day in the classroom.  I knew it as soon as I woke up and saw that winter was making a curtain call in all its cold, sleety and windy glory.  I half-entertained a few rationalizations for cancelling classes, but then rebuked myself and went into work.

Shakespeare's King Lear is a play about losing things.  Characters lose their power, their exalted positions, and even their trust in a providential universe. They also lose family members, and many end up losing their lives. 

By the end of Act V, there are two stabbings, two hangings, two apparent trauma-induced heart attacks, a pair of suicides and one fatal poisoning.  That's quite the tally of losses.  But now I'll add one more. Last Tuesday, I let go of Lear.

We covered poetic imagery this past week in my Aesthetic Appreciation course, which means--as always--we spent a little time in class with Elizabeth Bishop's poem The Fish. I love teaching this poem, mostly because of the way it so intimately weds imagery to its action. In the opening lines, the narrator simply says she caught a fish. We are not even told what kind of fish. Bishop won't say.

This semester I took on a first-year comp and rhetoric section, a course I last taught when I was a grad student in English at Iowa State over three decades ago. To be sure, I have been teaching writing in one form or another throughout my career--and to a lot of first-year students. But in those courses, I was teaching with writing rather than singularly focused on writing. I have to say it has been fun so far to flex pedagogical muscles that have gone unused for a long, long time.

Each semester I am assigned new groups of students, but also new rooms in which to teach them. Over the years professors find that there are rooms they like to teach in, and those they don't.  Sometimes we even start to believe that the room itself is the difference maker in the success of a course.

In May of 1991 I was living in St. Paul, Minnesota, stringing together a subsistence living as a part-time tour guide for the State Historical Society and also as a weekend "night man" at a group home in Inver Grove Heights. I would show up around 10 pm Fridays and Saturdays, just as the residents were taking their meds and heading off to bed. I would vacuum the halls, do a few loads of laundry and watch late night movies until I was relieved at six a.m.

Recently an op-ed entitled "I Teach the Humanities and I still Don't Know What Their Value Is" appeared in the New York Times.  In it, Agnes Callard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, lamented

As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is.