Although in graduate school I received a great deal of training as a teacher (and I was somewhat privileged to have been allowed to teach a wider range of courses than many of my fellow students) I was, understandably, never given any instruction whatsoever in teaching upper-division courses. I imagine that this is more or less the norm. Graduate students in English teach Freshman Composition and, perhaps, Introduction to Literature—classes whose purpose is something incredibly vague, such as “introduce students to literature.�

This semester, my first as tenure-track faculty, I have been handed all upper-division courses. I have, of course, never taught these courses before, nor have I ever taught anything like them. The only exception is a single section of Introduction to Literature, which I have taught a handful of times.

I should say out front that, although they are grading-intensive, courses like Freshman Composition are relatively easy to teach, and once you’ve taught them for a few years, you can pretty much do it in your sleep. That’s about the way I am with them, and I’m pretty sure I have actually taught some of my classes in my sleep.

This semester is shaping up to be something of a transitional one for me. In composition classes, or even introductory literature courses, I spend most of my time on nuts and bolts kinds of things. Did they understand what I’ve asked them to read? Can they make arguments about texts? Can they write coherently? Can the critique other students’ work effectively? And so on. In this way, lower-division classes usually break down into a standard series of exercises each day: discussion of the reading, some kind of in-class writing, some kind of peer-review. Although I put together lecture notes for each day, I could very easily simply walk into a class a “wing it.�

This is no longer the case.

A while back I was talking to a colleague who told me that, for the first few years of a tenure-track job, every single class you teach is a new prep.* He’s right, of course. This semester, I am teaching four distinctly different classes, and each of them requires a different preparation. It takes time for the daily schedule of these preparations to settle down. But I’m working on it. I’ve started going to my local coffee shop to grade when I leave work, since I can’t get any work done at the office. I’m doing almost no grading at home these days, and I find myself playing less and less catch-up on my classes.

The requirements in my classes are all a little different, which means that it’s incredibly difficult for me to remember what I’ve assigned/requested/said from one class to the next. When you teach four sections of the same thing, this is not really an issue. Some of my classes have hand-written reading responses with two parts. Some of them have typed reading-responses with three. Some of my classes are using commonplace books. Some of them are using blogs. Until the first couple of weeks of classes had passed, I felt like each of these classes were flying apart at the seams.

Things are settling down now, and the day-to-day operations of each class are becoming more and more routine.

My Introduction to Literature course is moving along exactly as I expected, although lately I have grown tired of talking, and so I’ve taken to typing up questions each evening before class, cutting them into strips of paper, and then having them group up and pull a question, quite literally, out of a hat. I’ll get their first batch of essays soon, so we’ll see what happens.

My Advanced College Writing is another matter. This is my first upper-division course, and to be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. I asked around about what people have done with this course in the past, but I was unhappy with what I was told. I did some reading on the subject, and came to the conclusion that although a course like this has been on the books for nearly 50 years now, no one knows what it is supposed to be. As I’ve written before, I decided to make it into a kind of “writing for English majors� course. We shall see what happens. We’re about to end the first 6 weeks of the course, which has been little more than an introduction to literature course with some critical articles on the pieces we’re reading. Next week, we begin the meat of the course. For a month, the course will be a mini-conference with the students presenting papers on what we’ve read. Later, they will revise these papers into longer, full-dress essays.

I am not entirely convinced this will work, and I’m planning on teaching the course differently in the Spring. The demographic is not what I’d expected. There are far more non-English majors than I anticipated, and so I need to make some changes. I’m thinking of keeping much of the class as it is in the Spring, but making it far less “literature� oriented and much more devoted to an investigation of sustained arguments. Right now, I’m thinking of using McLuhan, Postman, and Birkertz as the texts.

We’ll see.

I have two other upper-division courses: a tutor-training course and a critical theory course. The tutor-training course is, well, strange. I only meet it once a week. On most Wednesdays, the students go to a special training session for certification. On Fridays, they have their staff meeting. And yet it’s a 3-hour course (something with which I disagree rather violently). I thought that it made little sense to hit them with a bunch of writing center theory out of the gate, so we began with some sample student essays as a kind of confidence-building exercise. That went well, but it managed to foster an incredibly lax atmosphere, against which I am now struggling. For the next 3 weeks, we read some of the seminal articles in composition theory. My thinking was that it would do them some good as tutors both to have a sense of what their tutees are being taught and why and to have a sense of some of the problems surrounding the teaching of writing.

We’re done with that, now, and are onto the meat of the course: tutoring theory and practice.

My critical theory course is the killer. I like the course. I like my design. It seems to be working. We do more or less two weeks on the major theoretical approaches (although only one on the older or less complex ones). They have a kind of low-brow theory primer, which, I have to admit, is pretty good. The first week of the theory, they read the appropriate chapter from the textbook and a Grimm Brothers folk tale. We discuss the theory and apply it to the folk tale. The next week, they read a more serious, primary source article alongside a piece of literature. This way, they get a week of broad strokes followed by a week (this is a night class) of what the stuff is really like. They write short position papers each week. I like it. They seem to like it. The class began with full enrollment and has (to my dismay) remained so after the drop date.

The problem is that this is an absolute bear to prep for. Certainly, I can talk about all of this in broad strokes. Certainly, I can bullshit my way through a superficial discussion of poststructualism or reception theory. Certainly, I can waltz through a vague discussion of psychoanalytic theory. But the specifics of Derrida? Foucault? Lacan?

No way.

Last week we covered psychoanalytic theory. I know my Freud well enough that the initial bits were no trouble. Id. Ego. Superego. Psychosexual stages of development. Dynamic and economic theories of the mind. I can do Jung in broad strokes. Frye.

But Lacan? No way. This is where the upper-division-ness of the class kicks in. I had had some experience with this from teaching honors students, but because that experience was limited to lower-division courses, I was absolutely unprepared for the kinds of questions upper-division students taking the only required English course could ask. And I feel compelled to know the answer. I’m supposed the know the stuff well enough to talk about it, aren’t I?

So I prepare and prepare and prepare.

“Can archetypes be conditioned out of the mind?â€? “Did Freud consider…?â€? “Would Frye have responded to…?â€? “Was Lacan religious?

It doesn’t bother me to say “I don’t know� when the issue is purely factual. But if the question is theoretical, it’s a different matter.

A few days have passed since I began composing this piece. Actually, more than a few days. I managed to prepare a “Lacan for Dummies� lecture for them, in hopes of clarifying most of the issues that had confused them the previous week. I delivered the lecture Wednesday. I do not like to lecture. Few people do it well, and I don’t think that I am one of them. But I delivered it as a lecture nonetheless.

In the end, it was only a partial lecture. They interrupted me, asked questions, we discussed and debated amongst ourselves, and finally, when it was all over, some of them actually applauded. And when I set them to their major task for the evening—applying the theories of Freud, Jung, Frye and Lacan to a short story we’d read—they were really something to see. They got it. There they sat, in small groups of 3 or 4, haggling over how all of this worked and, in the end, plowing through the theory, turning it over in their minds. It was something to see.

I began this post in a period of something that was not quite exasperation, not quite desperation. But I don’t feel that way anymore. Yes, the multiple preps are unwieldy and time-consuming, but I have a schedule that I usually stick to, and so it’s getting better. The routines are becoming more routine. The classes are becoming more real in my mind.

And the discussions, while taking serious time to prepare for, are a sight to behold. Today, one of my classes held a sustained discussion on Life of Pi that was just stunning. Broad-ranging in subject—religion, reality, faith, belief, metaphor, archetypes, psychology, you name it. It was there. Several of them had brought in interviews with the author and brought them to bear on the discussion. Some had found book reviews containing ideas they wanted to share.

In short, it all seems to be working

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* “Prep� is short for “preparation,� by which teachers mean the number of different classes they have to teach. In my profession, this can mean having three different novels to be prepared to discuss a day.

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I’m very nearly finished with my syllabi for this semester. I’m only supposed to teach 2 sections in the Fall and 3 in the Spring, but that course reduction is a politically contentious issue around the department, and so I volunteered to teach an overload of one course, introduction to literature, which it was assumed wouldn’t make (there’s a long story about our introduction to literature courses that I don’t fully understand, but suffice it to say that they usually don’t make). And then a colleague going through the adoption process discovered at the last minute that it would be twins rather than a single adoption. After much consideration, she bowed out of her “critical approaches to literature” class, and she recommended that I teach it. I agreed, mostly because I’m unbearably excited about a semester with no freshman composition whatsoever. I don’t think I’ve ever not taught some kind of freshman intensive-writing course.

When you are exiting the Ph.D. and getting ready to go on the job market, you are encouraged to construct “fantasy courses,” because in interviews you’ll be asked something along the lines of “What can you do for us that we can’t already do.” And believe me. You’d better be ready to answer that question. You’d also better be ready to answer that question in a way that doesn’t make you sound like you’re obsessed with the most esoteric subject on earth and are uninterested and perhaps incapable of teaching anything outside of that narrow subject.

But there will come a time, and this happened to me last week, where your department chair will come up to you and say “What do you want to teach next semester” (meaning, what do you want to teach 6 months from now), and, after teaching nothing but Freshman Composition for nearly a decade, you will stand there like a deer in the headlights as if someone had just asked you, for no particular reason, “How much money would you like me to give you?”

I have four courses this semester: “Advanced College Writing,” “Introduction to Literature,” a course about training writing center tutors, and “Critical Approaches to Literature.” This may sound like a lot, but I actually don’t have that many students and one of the classes I only teach one day out of the week, so it’s really not all that bad.

When I was handed the Advanced College Writing course, I did some reading which revealed that for 50 years now, no one has known what the hell it means or is supposed to be. I consulted with my department chair, who told me that I could pretty much do whatever I wanted with the course. I asked about the demographic, and I was told that the course would be made up of exclusively English and English Education majors.

At that point, I asked myself a relatively simple question: when I was an English major, had I been required to have taken a writing class, what would have benefitted me the most that I didn’t have? The answer was relatively simple: I was never taught how to write an essay like the ones that would be required of me as an English major. Hell, I was never taught how to write essays, period. Greg taught me that (or at least, he showed me what I was doing wrongly and helped me figure out how to fix it). But the point is simply this: it is generally assumed that Comp 1 and Comp 2 will teach the broad parameters of the academic essay. Thesis. Quotation. Argument. That kind of thing. After that, if you’re an English major (or a History major, for that matter), it is simply assumed that you will learn how to write English essays through a process of trial and error.

I decided that I would teach make this a course about essay writing for English majors. I’m going to run the class more or less as a workshop. We’ll read a handful of texts at the beginning. They’re write a conference paper. They’ll do a little research. They’ll write “treatments” of academic essays. They’ll maintain a commonplace book in which they will talk about examples of good academic writing. But the bulk of the class will be focused on their major essay, which we’ll workshop heavily. This is a complete experiment, but I’m hopeful that it will work out.

So that’s that.

I’m also teaching introduction to literature, which I’ve taught before. I’m actually making a major change in my teaching of it this semester. In the past, I’ve been told to think about Introduction to Literature as “Composition 3: Writing About Literature,” and so that’s what I did. We read a smattering of literature and covered all the genres, but I didn’t spend much time on poetic forms or meter or definitions of plot and structure and metaphor and whatnot. More often than not, the students had trouble following simple plot or interpreting an image, and so we spent much of our time in class trying to make sure the students simply understood what was happening in what they had read. This should come as no surprise, really. Most students entering university at a big state school read very little, if at all. If they do read, it is usually limited to magazines. And if they read books, they tend not to be any good, or are read only for plot. I am hopeful that Oprah’s book club is going to help this out. Seriously. Anyway. We’re reading mostly standard stuff: some classic poetry and short fiction, Hamlet, and then Yann Martel’s wonderful novel Life of Pi, which I’ve been pushing on my colleagues, friends and family left and right since I read it a year ago. But unlike in the past where I’ve approached the class as “sitting a bunch of kids in a room and introducing them to a bunch of literature,” I’m going to try to cover some of the mechanics of it all.

Because I’m the director of Composition, I’m team-teaching a course on “writing center tutor training” with the writing center director. But she’s no longer the writing center director. She’s my assistant. My understanding is that she’s going to stay on in an interim capacity until they can hire someone new (we keep pushing them to hire nationally for the position). The course shouldn’t be that difficult. I’m in charge of the theory days. The WC director/my assistant is in charge of role-playing and nuts and bolts. And then one day a week they go to a special meeting for some kind of certification.

Last week, I was handed the course on “Critical Approaches to Literature,” which all English majors have to take and which is a pretty standard course in English departments around the country. I got the syllabus from the previously-scheduled instructor and began tearing it apart (we approach the course the same way; I just didn’t like her texts). I’m teaching the course in a pretty conservative way. There’s a short textbook with an overview of the various schools of literary criticism (New Criticism, Marxism, Feminism, Structuralism, the New Historicism, etc.) and we’ll spend two weeks on each section (with the exception of New Criticism). For the first meeting, students will read the overview and, generally, a Grimm brothers’ folk tale. For the second meeting, we’ll read a few primary theory-texts and maybe a short story or poem. There will be some other literature spread throughout. They’ll write a short paper (a close-reading of a single texts through a particular critical lens) and a longer paper with more complex guidelines.

Now, I knew that there were debates about theory in English departments all over the world. But when people find out I’m teaching this criticism course, I find myself in the strangest conversations. Last week, I wound up having an hour-long conversation with two colleagues about the course and its somewhat controversial history. It seems that there was tremendous debate about what the course ought to be, with one camp arguing that it needs to be a “how to write essays if you’re an English major” course and another arguing that it needs to be a theory-based coure. At one point, one of them told me that I needed to make sure that students in this 3000-level class could use quotes and cite things. I told him that that’s what they should learn in Freshman Composition. Then I was told that this class should really be about getting them used to thinking about literature in a critical way. I told him that that was what my Introduction to Literature class was about. Then it happened. The theory bomb exploded. As I said, I knew that there were debates about theory in English departments—Marxists versus New Critics, that kind of thing. What I didn’t expect was this: a debate about the value of theory itself. Generally.

I understand that it’s frustrating when, after assigning that first essay of the semester, a student comes to you and asks “What critical approach do you want me to take on this? Feminist? Marxist?” And I am sympathetic to the arguments of my colleagues that day about the commonly-used metaphor of the “toolbox” to describe a class like this one. The toolbox is a poor metaphor for this, since it doesn’t recognize the fluidity with which these approaches may be applied. And as I put it to my colleagues, this is an issue that must be addressed throughout the teaching of the course. This is not a “theory” course, and I understand that. There’s a delicate balance between offering a class that’s effectively the broad strokes—intended to provide the lexicon and a rudimentary understanding of the way these schools of thought operate—and a class on the way various schools of philosophy have been applied to literature. As I understand it, this is really what my colleagues were concerned about.

Nonetheless, I’m excited about this semester. This is my first group of upper-division courses, and after teaching just about nothing but Freshman Composition for nearly a decade, it will be refreshing to get away from it for a while.

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* I have deleted small sections of the original post for fear that they might sound as if I’m disparaging colleagues, and this act leads me to think about the relationship between blogging and work, which I’m hoping to discuss at 4Cs next year.

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