Teaching, Week 4

I'm settling into the teaching here better than I was earlier. I am generally pronouncing my students' names correctly, I have a regular schedule, and I am leading a lot of discussions -- pretty much the same things I do on the other side of the Atlantic.

I have been working with a master's candidate, Elizabete, in two courses that only meet every other week, one in 20th-century American literature and one in 20th-century British literature. She is incredibly enjoyable because she's a master's candidate and has a lot of knowledge under her belt already. So instead of starting with the usual Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, we're reading more challenging and, well, odder Orlando. Next on the agenda in the American course is Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, a play I don't know at all, so teaching here is giving me a bigger portfolio of texts that I've read, digested, and about which I have figured out something relatively intelligent to say. It's nice to only have a single student in a seminar, which really has become the English model of a tutorial, and I have never worked with a master's student before because my home institution doesn't have any graduate programs. And Eliza is an absolute delight -- smart as a whip and intensely curious about books that she hasn't read yet. When she told me that her favorite novel was Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, I knew that we'd hit it off, if only because it's such an offbeat choice.

My other classes in which I am guest lecturing while my colleague Irina recovers, a survey of 20th-century American literature and a history of the English language course, are equally fun. I'm surprised at how dedicated the students who come to lectures are, given that I am not the most gifted of lecturers. (I don't think that I am terribly well organized, for example; I go off on tangents a lot, not always completely aware that I'm doing so.) Students are sort of expected to attend lectures, but many do not, and I'm not sure exactly what the stipulations are about attending. For that matter, students in the U.S. are technically not required to attend classes, but given that they or their parents are paying for them -- and often paying dearly -- there may be more incentive to be there. But those that come, especially at the 8:00 am ones, are there and busily taking notes. Note-taking seems to be much more of an ingrained habit here, I suspect because there are serious final exams and some courses consist only of lecture: the lecturer lectures, and the students are expected to take it all in and present it at a later date in some written form. But I have to admit that watching students write down everything I say always makes me a little nervous, as if I am some kind of final authority.

I much prefer the seminar classes, which are geared toward discussion. I have prefaced every seminar class with the caveat that I give at home: the only way to construct meaning as a community of readers is to not assume that I have some kind of correct answer buried in my brain, and that your job is to burrow in, uncover it, and present it to the class. In other words, I tell students, when I ask you what you think of a text, I literally mean what you think of a text, not what you think I think of a text. I can't tell if this puts them at ease or not, but once the discussion starts, we start constructing meaning, and the valid interpretations start sorting themselves out from some of the more invalid ones. I am guessing that this model might be new for some students. If they take anything away from having me in front of the class, I hope that it is this.

The first-year students in my colleague Jeļena's British literature survey are still quieter than the other classes, which are third-year students. I was invited to lead the seminar on Beowulf, a text I teach frequently. It seemed that the students were a bit puzzled by the idea of interpreting literature this way; they were pretty quiet, and getting them to comment on the text was like pulling teeth, very slowly and without novacain. (In all fairness, they were very quiet when Jeļena asked questions of them in the lectures too.) They will take some work, and in all fairness, Beowulf is a peculiar and fairly foreign text. But we have time.

On the plus side, the other fun aspect of being in classes like this -- with Jeļena in the class and Irina when she returns -- is that I get to watch other colleagues teach. Jeļena's discussion of Christian and pagan cultures as a preparation for reading Beowulf is so good that I am stealing it entirely. (Luckily, I was taking notes too.) And that's really the value of a Fulbright: being in a different system with different colleagues and different students, all of whom have different expectations, really energizes your own teaching. I did not expect William Faulkner's stories to resonate so much with a Latvian until I explained to Eliza what Reconstruction was and how it changed the South. She immediately pointed out Latvia immediately after Soviet times was in much the same boat: people could not get their moorings in a culture in which all the rules changed, all at once, and everybody had to adjust to a new model of society while it was in the process of being created. These sorts of parallels, showing how literature is one powerful way of providing the key to how we differ in values -- and ultimately, how we also share them -- well, that's what we teachers live for.