Literary Style Shift: When the Honeymoon is Over



From Bad Teacher Film

 Oh boy, I had to drag myself to campus tonight. I am not sure what is up with me, but I am not having the most productive week. I always wonder if my students can see these mood changes in my face. I also wonder if they notice how my routine changes from the beginning of the term to the middle and end. For example, I wear a modest amount of makeup - foundation, blush, and mascara. Then I switch my jewelry up to make it seem like I am doing different things with my "look." However at the start of every term I use eye liner and eye shadow (tasteful amounts of both) because I like that look on me - it makes me feel pulled together. Lipstick does not even enter into the equation - I mean, come on, it's a teacher's nightmare to be lecturing for an hour with a red blotch on your teeth. Now we are mid-semester and the eye liner and eye shadow are no where to be seen. I definitely do not take the time to put on makeup on non-teaching days. And there have been more than a few days when I have walked out of the house with only earrings and no necklace or only one eye with mascara on it. Damn. Do my students notice? Do they sense other shifts? Like my slow move from sytlish shoes to comfy flats? Or my creative multiple-piece outfits to slacks and sweaters? Finally, why does this happen? Well anyone who teaches can probably come up with more than a few reasons - swamped with grading, emails, lesson planning, and syllabus changes, one had less and less time to sacrifice to personal style over the course of an average semester. Of course maybe it is like a romantic relationship - three months in and you have to love me anyway (or you'll get an F!!!!!). Okay, I am going to sign off now in an attempt to stop while I am ahead, and possibly to get some work done before my night class starts.

Literary Night Class

Borrowed Image

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.

Frankenstein Monster and Dracula Photo Project

Frankenstein Monster Hay Bale

Happy mid-semester everyone. I am not going to lie - I am dog-tired already, and I have been extremely productive. I guess I should update you. I am currently teaching two classes, organizing two workshops, watching my baby sister for the month of October, and about to pick up a third class this week. Not to mention that "other" stuff like writing my conference paper for November and that pesky old dissertation proposal. Let's just say my plate is full. I also want to give a shout out to all the single working moms out there - this sh** is tough. Even though my charge is helpful and obedient, it is still a full-time job on top of my other jobs. I guess the upside is that I find myself working like a dog between the hours of 7am and 3:30pm since she is in school and I have uninterrupted work time (except on the days I teach of course). The other upside is that I have to wake up at 6am every morning - what, this is an upside? Well let's just say it is an upside and a downside - upside: My butt is up early enough that I can get a lot more work done; downside: did I say it was 6:00 a.m.? This will be more of a downside when I pick up my third class and have 17 hour days on T/Th.

Mickey Dracula Candy Dish

Okay enough whining from me for the time being. What I really want to post about is this idea that hit me when I was madly dashing around town with my sister running errands like groceries and prescriptions. While we waited in CVS, I noticed all of these toys/decorations/candy-holders that were different interpretations of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster. Then I thought, "it would be nice to know if my students are thinking about this sort of thing when they are out and about." Extra credit opportunity! I set up a Forum in the Discussion Board so that they can post pictures of different monsters/draculas that they see between now and Halloween -there is also a writing/critical thinking component of course for the credit. But what a fun idea, right? Well I hope they see it that way anyway. I see it as another experiment in including creative projects in my mostly analytic course structure. I also want to gear them up for thinking about how these texts are culturally produced and reproduced today - how do we view/construct Dracula and Frankenstein's monster in this postmodern age? I am off to introduce this photo project to my class, so I will let you know how it goes.
Send a little positive energy my way if you can - this month is going to do a number on me.

Plagiarism Again

Right now I really want to talk about plagiarism. You may be tired of hearing it - but then I also realized that never did tell you the outcome of my last brush with it this semester. So you all remember the first incident where I was waffling on what to do, but then the student dropped - so it was a moot point. And then there were four. I caught four students in the first paper assignment who plagiarized off similar websites - and one who obviously plagiarized, but for whom I could not find the source. Anyway, I played hardball and contacted all of their previous English teachers to see if they tried this before. Most of them had. Then I went on the attack - laying out their options which basically boiled down to two: 1) Accept a zero on this paper, accept that I will place you on record with the college, and never try it again or I will fail you for the whole course or 2) drop my class and accept that I will still place the incident on record with the college. Most of them were more freaked out about the record than in the penalties of my class - even though, to be honest, this particular campus has a uber-wimpy policy on handling repeat plagiarizing offenses. Most of them apologized.
So I gave the class another warning with the intention of spending half of an upcoming class talking about plagiarism until I bore them to death or they stop plagiarizing, whatever comes first. But we had fall break, then an exam, etc, so I have not gotten around to it yet.
Anyway, enter the most recent problem. This particular student received an F on the first paper because it was an F paper. I offer a revision opportunity for the first paper, though, so this student meets with me to make sure that he/she does it right the second time. I think we have a great discussion, and feel good that she later on sends me a draft of said revision so I can make sure it is on the right track. Then I notice that almost all the worthy parts are plagiarized from the same source - an online site which offers to write papers for you. Damn it! It is a draft, of course, so no "zero" penalty, but this student has the first warning and it will go on record. I mean, come on! I handed this student a perfectly viable outline in our talk, and I get this crap. So next time I meet with this class, I am spending half of it talking about plagiarism and how mean I am when I catch my students.
I mean - I set aside "the first thing of the day" for this student - to provide feedback on the draft. Do you know how important that slot is in my crazy life? I do my best work in the morning, and then sadly peter out around late afternoon (I do get up early, though) - so needless to say I am feeling frustrated. This coming on a rather stressful week. On a lighter note, the paper grading for my other class went really well - I am pleased with their first assignments. *Breathe* I am going to press on now, but enjoy this little treat that I found on PhD Comics:

Borrowed from PhD Comics

Literary Book Club - Midnight's Children

Thanks to Snarkasm for this pic

It has been a rough weekend, my dear readers. I am at the point where I feel like I am just keeping my head above water. And yet, it is not all bad. I am making some great progress...but possibly at the expense of my sanity.
At last, I am finally getting around to blogging about my Book Club experience. Some of you may remember that a while ago I was asked to help lead a discussion of Rushdie's Midnight's Children for a local book club. They found me through the department, and I was more than a little flattered at the invitation. I should be grading papers, but I am not in a good head space to be assigning grades - believe me, this procrastination is for my students' benefit.
Anyway, so I spent a couple happy weeks in August rereading Midnight's Children and preparing some material for discussion. You may also remember that I have never attended a book club as an adult. I have been invited to at least one, but it never aligned with my schedule. So I did not know what to expect. Let me preface this by saying that these ladies have been attending this club for the better part of two decades, and are very well-read individuals. They also start off with appetizers and wine (yum). Then they begin the discussion by going around and stating briefly (in 20 words or so - which no one obeyed) what they found compelling about the book (so as not to get stuck with "I hate it" or "I love it"). This was interesting to me, and also fun. Seeing this book through new readers' eyes was a pleasure. They all liked aspects of the book - the narrative structure, the characters, the details. They asked me a few questions here and there, and I occasionally got a word in to ask them some of my questions - how they perceived this or that. Not all of them went over well. I had to keep trying to reformulate my questions because they sounded too teacher-y. Also, I had to keep telling myself that this is a long, complex book, and they were not exactly approaching it like my students or fellow grads would. Still, I was pleasantly surprised with the turns of the conversation. They made some great observations about the story (which made sense to them despite its twists and turns), and most of their questions had to do with the "real" history about which Rushdie was writing. So I brought some maps and "facts" and such to help fill in the gaps since they all confessed to not knowing anything about the history of India and Pakistan after the partition. They also liked discussing his influences - and it became like a game to try and pick out his literary allusions: Wizard of Oz and The Arabian Nights. And I can clearly see Marquez's influence on Rushdie in this novel (more to come on that dear readers).
I had ended up preparing way more material than we would get to - we got side-tracked here and there. We ended the evening around the table eating delicious Indian food with mangoes for dessert. We talked about my work and my teaching - it was all very fun. One of the things I will take away from this experience is a comment that one woman made about he e-reader device. I might have mentioned it before, but she said that half way through the book she couldn't take reading it on the device (I think it was a kindle or nook) because of Rushdie's run-on prose style. So she picked up the actual book to finish it. Interesting, right? It did not occur to me that it would be even more challenging to read a book like MC on a tiny screen.
Not bad at all for my first Book Club experience. I also have ample material with which to teach Midnight's Children...oh ambition, ambition. Right now I just need to survive October. Wish me luck and do not be surprised if I skip a day or two this week. In the works, however: a literary review of 100 Years of Solitude. So stay tuned.

Literary News: Nobel Prize 2011

Friday Cocktail Time!

European Press Photo Agency NYT

I woke up this morning with mixed emotions - happiness that it is Friday, exhaustion from the week, and extreme pleasure at some good news I received in my email box. Unfortunately I am missing out, today, on what I know will be an excellent presentation on my campus because I am swamped (also, thanks to the geniuses who plan infrastructure changes, it now takes me nearly 2 hours to get to my campus before 9am). Nevertheless, I am taking a moment between my new caretaker duties (sewing holes in gym shirts and finally shopping for groceries) and my piles of work (20 papers to grade, proposal pages to turn in, workshops to plan) to provide an interesting and relevant cocktail tidbit.
Thursday this week a Swedish Poet Tomas Transtromer won the Noble Prize for Literature. The Prize is meant for any author who produces "outstanding work in an ideal direction." It has been awarded to some amazing authors since its inception in 1901. The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993. I am not familiar with Transtromer's work, but I do know that he has plenty of fans world-wide. Mr. Transtromer unfortunately suffered a stroke which prevents him from speaking, but he can still write.
This news comes after an interesting observation I recently made regarding Rushdie's twitter feed (more to come on this dear readers). I noticed the other day that Rushdie tweeted a thank you for a Huffington Post article which offers and argument in favor of a Nobel Prize for his work. It is a fairly persuasive article, but I am also aware of a few authors who are considered "ahead" of Rushdie in this regard.
Anyway, I am copying below some translated works of Transtromer so you can see for yourself a sampling of his genius. If any of you know of other great translations, please pass them along. Happy Friday, and a hearty congratulations to Tomas Transtromer!

Haiku by Tomas Tranströmer I A lamasery with hanging gardens. Battle pictures. Thoughts stand unmoving like the mosaic tiles in the palace yard. Up along the slopes under the sun – the goats were grazing on fire. On the balcony standing in a cage of sunbeams – like a rainbow. Humming in the mist. There, a fishing-boat out far – trophy on the waters. II Cool shagginess of pines on the selfsame tragic fen. Always and always. Carried by darkness. I met an immense shadow in a pair of eyes. These milestones have set out on a journey. Hear the wood-dove’s voice. III Resting on a shelf in the library of fools the sermon-book, untouched. My happiness swelled and the frogs sang in the bogs of Pomerania. He’s writing, writing… The canals brimmed with glue. The barge across the Styx. Go quiet as rain, meet the whispering leaves. Hear the Kremlin bell. IV The ceiling rent open and the dead one sees me. This face. Something has happened. The moon lit up the room. God knew about it. Hear the sighing rain. I whisper a secret, to reach all the way in there. A scene on the platform. What a strange calm – the inner voice. V The sea is a wall. I hear the gulls crying – they’re waving to us. God’s wind at my back. The shot which comes without sound – a dream all-too-long. Ash-colored silence. The blue giant passes. Cool breeze from the sea. I have been there – and on a whitewashed wall the flies are gathering. Birdmen. The apple trees in blossom. The big enigma. Translated by Robert Archambeau and Lars-Håkan Svensson

Literary Experiments

The Wife of Bath

So I have been dying to write about two teaching experiments I tried recently in my Introduction to Literature class. Let me remind you that this class is a bizarre medley. I have students who can barely write complete sentences all the way to those who can thoughtfully analyze literature. I can pretty much teach any type of literature, in any order, and arrange the literature/writing balance any way that I want. I am not going to lie; this is a frustrating course. The range of ability levels and understanding is challenging enough without the added burden of getting them to an acceptable college writing level.
In this environment I thought I would try going outside of our required textbook in order to give them a wider range of literature and introduce them to texts that they otherwise will never read (I am betting). So to begin the poetry unit I assigned Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and Samuel Coleridge's "Christabel." You may remember that I blogged recently about teaching this last work in my other class.

For "The Wife of Bath's Tale" I restricted it to the prologue of the wife and her tale. I also used an edition which had a "translation" line by line from the Middle English (I was not about to have them read hundreds of lines like "To speke of wo that is in mariage; For, lordynges, sith I twelve yeer was of age" - yes, this is an example of Middle English). I was surprised to find out that some of them had read a couple of the tales before - in high school or in another college English class. However most of them did not know that the Canterbury Tales existed let alone any history about medieval England, pilgrims, or medieval texts. So I lectured briefly on each of these subjects to sort of "set the scene." I had handouts showing illuminated manuscripts and scenes from the tales. Then we moved to the text itself - boy was this hard. Hindsight being what it is, I probably should not have assigned the whole prologue. I forgot just how long it is and how many things it references. Even with the translation they could barely answer me on basic details offered in the text. Luckily I had thought to print out selections of the poem organized under specific headings. We also read out loud which helped them understand it considerably better than when they had read it by themselves. I had higher hopes for the tale, but I think the prologue bashed in any chance of them understanding it. Most of them could not even tell me what the "message" was. At one point I veered off this track and used youtube to save the discussion. I played a cartoon adaptation of the Wife's tale (Check it out -it is short and and interesting adaptation - I promise you'll laugh!). They laughed, and finally understood what the tale was about. I was pleased that they laughed - because this is what Chaucer is for me. My lovely roommate recently made fun of me because I said "Oh Chaucer is hilarious." To me, he is the first English comedian. I laugh out loud over parts of his tales and the interactions between the characters. I wanted this hilarity (yes, I said hilarity) to come through to my students. Sadly it did not in the text itself, but it did in the youtube clip. The result of this experiment is mixed - I am not for giving it up entirely should I teach this class again, but I will approach it differently. I have a few ideas in mind to hopefully make it a more productive experience.
The experiment with "Christabel" was much more successful. I only assigned the first part, having learned my lesson with the Chaucer text, and it went over better. I think the language still stumped the students. I could tell that my ESL students had a hard time grasping what was going on. Even my non ESL students missed key plot points. Despite this, and after some group work, we came to a point where the students were actively engaged with the story. They were thoroughly excited over the mystery surrounding Geraldine's identity and her supernatural gifts. They had a riot of a time with the intimate encounter between the two ladies. I will definitely use this text again. However, I have decided that it would be to my benefit to spend more time introducing the texts to the class before they read them - telling them just how to approach them, what to watch out for, etc. I find that this would help immensely in their reading.
Have you ever read either of these texts? Do you find Chaucer hilarious like me?
I am taking the night off tonight - no grading, no lesson planning, and I am giving my poor brain a rest! I plan on making rice krispie treats with my sister. Until tomorrow then.

Literary Square One

I am guiltily taking time to write this blog post. I have precious little since I promised certain people some substantial work today which is only in the notes phase. Yes, dear readers, I am back at the drawing board for my proposal. What is this, number 7? Anyway, I had an enlightening, kind of confusing, and somewhat inspiring meeting of which I will spare you the details. Of course I have been saddled with piles of grading, lesson planning, etc, so I have not made as much headway on the new work as I would like. Now they are clamoring at the gates, not unkindly, but my weary soul is struggling to find the sense of duty I owe them. By the way, my readers, you may attribute this overly dramatic language to my having been absorbed into Jane Eyre for the last week. Yesterday I could barely summon the energy to have dinner with my sister (who is solely in my care this month), and today I am still sluggish.
I promise you, I have a post in the works about my Book Club experience as well as a fun post on teaching Chaucer and an exasperated post on the current state of plagiarism in my class. In the meantime, I leave you with this fun little image that made me laugh out loud:

From Phd Comics - helping me survive Grad School

A Literary World Without Books

Author Unknown

This is something about which I have written before, but lately it has been on my mind at least once a day. What with the news stories about the Google Books suit, the publishing industry, and e-reader developments, I can hardly stop thinking about it. Working with last week's meme reminded me that I am definitely not the most technologically up to date scholar in the world. I still don't own an e-reader! I know I have "ebooks" saved to some program through my campus library, but I never consult them after I save them. Don't I spend enough time on the computer?
Some recent blog posts about the subject have got me thinking about this so-called future where the world of print is gone. What would a library look like without books? How about a college learning experience? Is this ultimately a good development (saving trees, providing infinite access around the globe, decluttering)?
I can see some of the advantages of this potential development. I cannot count the number of times I wished professors would have scanned book chapters instead of forcing us to copy them, for example. I do hate, hate, hate moving books - they are way too heavy (btw, a solution to this problem is to move them inside wheeled suitcases instead of boxes). From a commuter student's perspective, having digitized collections is golden - I cannot pop into my school library whenever I want. Having easily searchable databases (which have been around for a while) is awesome. Some of the practical objections I used to think about (what about checking out books in local libraries?) are being thought through with e-reader programs that act like a netflix for books.
Given all this, I have also read about some serious obstacles to a bookless world. And not just the "how can you curl up with a computer" type objections. These objections directly affect graduate students and teachers everywhere. For the full post visit The Little Professor. To pick up on a few of her thoughts, though, consider the following questions:
1) What about documents, manuscripts, and books that cannot be digitized because they are too fragile to withstand the process? And a huge part of scholarship for these works is handling them in person, in seeing the documents up close, and understanding the impact of the physical act of reading on these texts. No matter how you slice it, we will still need special collection libraries for these items.
2) What about access - right now if your institution cannot afford access to a mass database full of information, you could presumably purchase the book you need or find a *gasp* hard copy of it in another library for loan. Moving to a world of complete digitization would present challenges in this regard, not the least of which would be -
3) Everyone would need a computer or e-reader device - there are still thousands of Americans alone without even a desktop in their homes. It remains to be seen if these devices could be subsidized by the government.
4) There are still huge practical problems with collections that can be easily digitized and accessed - consistency in the scanning (some are almost unreadable), formatting (I tried to save and print political cartoons from a database once and they came out horribly stretched and fragmented, and the quality of the scans for documents that have unique attributes (fonts, plates, images, page formats, etc).

On a more personal note, I recently experienced an interesting brush with the practicality of using an e-reader to read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. In the book club session that I helped out with recently, one of the women said that she got half way through the book with the e-reader, but that because of Rushdie's writing style it was becoming unbearable to continue on the device. She bought the actual book for the last half and found it much more enjoyable. What she meant was that Rushdie's sentences often go on and on, with little structure and a lot of repetition. I did not even consider it, but it would be difficult to read it on a small device screen. On top of this, it was challenging for her to "flip" through the book when we wanted to discuss a certain passage or event. People sometimes forget that authors often take nearly as much pride in how their books "look" as they take in the actual work - many still stand over the printers to make sure the vision comes out the way it is supposed to. In any case, it was an interesting experiment with book clubs and e-readers.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of challenges which lay ahead for a world without books (and does not even broach the subject of a digitized publishing process), and neither is it a complete list of the advantages of such a world. I encourage you to contribute your own pros and cons about using technology for reading, for keeping collections, and for the act of scholarship.