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.