Literary Night Class

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Night Class. This is the major culprit for my lack of blogging these days. I picked up my third class for the term, an 8 week second and it meets from 7:30-10:20pm. Oddly enough I have reached that point in my (still short) teaching career where I do not even worry about how to fill nearly three hours with talk about literature to a bunch of students who would rather be doing anything else in the world on a Tuesday or Thursday night. In fact, the time flew by me last night - or possibly they sped up the clocks at break :) For the last week I have dreamed of coming home and blogging since I need a little time to unwind before bed anyway, but all my reflections and ideas go out the window as soon as I see my bed at around 11pm or so (what, early in the night you say? After teaching three classes on two campuses and getting up at 6am to get your sister on the bus? I think not). And all the while my blog post on 100 Years of Solitude is just sitting here waiting for its time, but I don't have enough for it right now, especially because I really want to do it justice.

Despite all this, my night class is going very well so. I can already tell which students are going to drop or force me to drop them due to absences, but the remaining group seem bright, committed, and open to some of my crazier teaching stunts. This is the American Lit class that I wrote about a while ago - it has been a long while actually since I have cracked open an AmLit anthology. However, I am enjoying the prep for these classes. We read Henry James' Daisy Miller: A Study for our first text - and at least 5 of them raised their hands when I asked if anyone really enjoyed reading it (none of them had read it before). Because this class is a literature class and not a composition or even writing in the discipline class, I arranged it to be almost exactly like the AmLit surveys I took in college - in-class writings, mid-term, paper, exam. There is also group work, some peer review, and discussion activities, but that is mostly it. Both my students and I are a little nervous about that final (and only) paper since I am used to classes where they have at least two opportunities to bomb an essay before the final paper, but I am trying out a different system modeled on the one in which I learned. Not that I am leaving my students out to dry - I have devised what I consider to be clever critical analysis group work where they take what I call "quote clusters" from the text and use them to build a critical argument about the text. This does not sound revolutionary when I type it out like this, but I had immense pleasure in watching them try to figure out their argument in their groups last night. I could see the wheels turning, the themes of our discussion clicking, the purposeful way that they used the quotes! It was like a teacher dream-come-true. Now I just have to see if they can write this way.

I must sign off now, but one more fun fact. One student went ahead and admitted in his writing sample that he picked my class because he needed it and because I had the best rating on ratemyprofessor. So I guess students do look at that. Of course I am pretty sure there are only two or three of us that teach this particular class, so I am not sure the flattery says much. In any case, it made me chuckle.