Into the breach

Monday tips us squarely into Week 3 of the undergrad academic calendar and my maiden experience of teaching undergrads in a UK university. Strangely enough, it is neither very different from what I imagined nor from what I've done other places, other times, with other students; the biggest surprise was that the Creative Writing students all but refuse to speak, while the critical students appear to have an abject horror of silence.

I've been given two seminars of a lecture/seminar based class called Writing Texts, which turns out to be one of the foundational theoretical modules for the entire Literature degree, and includes reading by Barthes and Bakhtin and Kant and Nietzsche and Auerbach and Aristotle and lots and lots of linguistics and theory and things that one can't simply pretend to have read. Naturally, the students in one of my seminars continuously attempt to pretend that they have done the reading, which leads to lots of silences that they seem to find ravingly uncomfortable. Not being a student any more, I have nothing but love for the awkward silences, and watching them avoid eye contact by any means possible in the hopes that I won't call on them, and I wonder if all of the professors I had in undergrad felt the same way. The best part of it, though, is being faced with material that I've never seen before (linguistics, Bakhtin) or haven't seen in years (Aristotle, Kant) and having to know it well enough to explain it in several different ways in time for the seminar class. The worst part is that the lecture component, which I have to base the seminar discussion on, takes place 25 hours before my first Texts seminar, so I have, at best, half a day to really wrap my head around the material, make a seminar plan, and figure out some exercises for them to do in class that will really be helpful instead of just give me some breathing room. I'm surprised that the challenging part is getting the material cold, rather than having to keep myself composed around human beings for an extended period of time. 

Somehow, I also wound up with an Intro Creative writing class. And someone, some how, screwed up the room bookings for this term, so I have all three classes on Tuesday. Which might not sound like much, but it's the absolute maximum number of classes that the university is allowed to have a PhD candidate take on, and with seminar planning and marking and three hours of office hours a week it means that Friday is the only day I really manage to get any of my own work done. Creative Writing especially takes up quite a bit of time, since I essentially wrote my own syllabus, plan my own assignments, select my own content, write my own exercises, read the material that I make them write, and determine how much lecturing I'm actually going to make them sit through on a given week. So planning for the writing class takes up at least double what planning for Texts does, and I can't do either too far ahead of time or else I forget what I meant when I wrote "Nietzsche's first metaphor and second metaphor - what is third metaphor/relate to Ong on translation." 

But all in all, I'm enjoying teaching. The material is challenging, and the students are interesting, and I get ridiculously happy when the Texts students make a difficult connection or suddenly understand something. The writing students always make me ridiculously happy, as, unlike pretty much everyone else I've ever taught/tutored/lectured to they seem to really want to be there, and they throw themselves fully into the prompts that I give them. 

Besides the teaching, my critical supervisor has said that I should start looking into publishing some thesis content in a peer reviewed journal, since I've already blazed past the length requirement and am only halfway finished. And The Shore comes out in two months. So all in all, life is good. 

A brief interlude (real information to follow when the deadline has been met)

I'm sitting at my (mostly clean) desk at the moment drinking hot toddies and wrangling with the same critical chapter that I've been working on since July. Fortunately, this time there are no elf footprints involved, though I do have the 1973 edition of a fiction textbook open next to me for reference. A fiction textbook, may I say, that manages to consist entirely of extracts from popular children's and young adult fiction (of the time) and yet only contains four female protagonists in nearly six hundred pages and approximately 35 pieces of fiction; they are a whale (of indeterminate type), a dragon, a little girl of the everyday sort, and a princess.

I have read this book at least a dozen times so far; the extracts that I've picked specifically to support my arguments I've been over more frequently. But it's been mostly fun, because quite a few of the pieces in the book are extracted from novels I read as a kid.

Which made me realize something.

Most of the fiction that was available to me as a child and young adult was about boys becoming men and girls becoming their doorprizes; all of the books that stuck with me were about boys struggling to find their places in the world so that they could be recognized as Men. And since there weren't any other fully fleshed out characters around, I identified with those boys; and when I was a confused adolescent I identified with their struggle towards an elusive but noble Manhood. And then after all of that vicarious living, my parents were mystified at my hostility to their insistence that I act like a lady. I knew, by then, exactly what happened to ladies: even if they didn't get killed so that the boy-man could have some personal growth or emotional epiphany, nothing worthwhile really happened to them.

I'm still waiting to be called on my quest, to be given the sword that proves that I am the long-lost son of whomever, and to fight my way to take my place as rightful king of nowhere and rule with a firm but kind ethos. And I still wonder why, when I've been give the option to see myself as the lost prince, the once and future king, the assistant pig keeper, I'm expected to choose instead to be the baby-minder who never gets to go anywhere.

Oh look, it's January again.

This weekend I had a first that I never anticipated: my spouse-thing loaded my stuff into the car and drove me up to school. As opposed to my parents doing it, or me doing it myself, which is how it's always happened. And then he did the unforgivable and left me there. Granted, he took me to get a second bookshelf first, and took me to the really big grocery store that I can't walk to, and carried all my heavy stuff up to the fourth floor. But when we ran out of weekend he left, and I sulked. And then I realized how much I have to get done, and I stopped sulking and started panicking.

I've said before that one of the unfair things about academia is that January is smack dab in the middle of the year for us, as opposed to the new beginning that 'most everyone else gets. It also happens to be, I realize now, a serious crunch time: there are funding deadlines, and coursework deadlines, and submission deadlines, and tax deadlines, and all kinds of other nasty deadlines, and all I want to do is sleep until it starts staying light out for more than six hours of the day.

In the plus column, I now have the module outlines for both of the classes that I start teaching in exactly one week! Teaching is a special source of terror for me, because it highlights all of the cultural differences that I usually get to blissfully ignore. What do I call my superiors? Is the thing I'm teaching technically called a module, a class, a seminar? Am I missing something that a person that was educated in this system would take for granted, and that the system takes my knowing for granted? Luckily, both my course conveners are incredibly sweet, so I'm hoping that the term won't be an unmitigated disaster. And, as terrified as I am of any occasion that involves me interacting in person with anyone that I'm not married to or sibling to, I'm actually kinda excited that I get to teach. It makes me feel like almost a real adult.

Also in the plus column, one of the three modules (classes? sections? pluots?) I'm teaching is Intro Creative Writing, and, as long as I don't change the graded work guidelines, I get to put whatever I want on the syllabus. Funnily enough, 'my future creative writing class' is something that I've thought about before, and I even have a file where I've been stashing favorite exercises and handouts from classes I've taken, just in case I ever get to teach my own. I say 'funnily' because last summer my mother was shocked that I'd never done the same for 'my future wedding.' Diff'rent strokes, Ma.

Speaking of weddings, I've meant for a while now to write something about that, because it was a seriously surreal experience. When we got engaged at the beginning of the year I told Dave that I was worried about all of the traditional trappings, and he told me I was being paranoid; six months later we got one card too many addressed to 'Mr. and Mrs. David W---' and he went off on the most wonderful rant against the patriarchy I have ever heard. But that will have to happen after I've written the syllabus for my (!) creative writing class.

To Hemingway, or not to Hemingway? That is the question.