palimpsest

Art of (Class) Participation

Every wonder what class participation has to do with sprezzatura? Sage advice, via Kari Kraus.

Reading aloud in class

One of the more puzzling discoveries of my first year on the tenure track has been my students' hostility and bafflement at having to read aloud in class. (And what's prompting this post is one of my wife's students' attacking her for "wasting time" reading aloud, so it's not just me.) I've had grad students and undergrads alike say that no other professor asks them to read aloud in class, and a few have been brave enough to say that they don't see the point, unless it's to compensate for people who haven't read.

A few benefits to reading aloud:

1. With poetry, it's an instant reading check. (Sometimes with fiction, too.)

2. The blindingly obvious benefit is that it brings the sound of the text to the class's attention in a visceral way. How else would you raise questions of prosody?

3. It can focus discussion. Rather than having an abstract discussion of, say, doubling in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you can work from the language of a specific passage, tracing the way syntax, diction, and figuration work together to create aesthetic (or, if you insist, ideological) effects.

4. It brings an element of performance into the discussion. Frequently different students will read a line slightly differently from one another, and we can talk about the consequences of these shifts in vocal emphasis.

There are days when reading aloud feels like the best thing we do in class. (And students routinely say that they hear things in the reading aloud that they don't see when they read silently.) Students, however, frequently declare that they would rather voice their own opinions than read aloud, and they report that "no one else" makes them do it. I didn't quite believe this, but I can offer two pieces of evidence in support of their position:

1. A senior colleague and one of my office mates report that they never ask students to read aloud, in part because students frequently are slow readers.

2. When I was observed at my last job, the observer reported that reading aloud was one of my "traditional, yet effective" tools (the other? Writing on the board.).

This reaction has puzzled my wife and I, since (obviously) we picked up the practice from our (somewhat overlapping, but generally not so much) professors. So it's not like we've invented some shiny new pedagogical technique. Do others have students read aloud? Why/why not?

(Crossposted from The Salt-Box, where George connects reading aloud to quoting in a paper.)

general principles: planning a new course

My first semester teaching was fall of 1993, but I learn new things about teaching all the time from my own experience and from peers. With this post, I'm soliciting input on general principles for planning new courses.

I'll be teaching three new courses next year plus a revamped version of a course I've taught once before:

• Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing, described here.
• Introduction to Shakespearean Drama, which I'd like to teach with a focus on film adaptations, perhaps something like this.
• A graduate seminar, for which I have a working title, Reading, Writing, and Race in the Eighteenth Century, and some ideas (too many) for primary and secondary texts to assign.
• A section of the second course in the composition sequence: English 225, in which I plan to focus on information technologies and literacy.

My questions for Palimpsest authors and readers are these: How do you go about planning your courses? How do you move from the original spark of an idea to the semester- or quarter-long plan? To what extent do you borrow ideas from others? How much re-reading of texts do you do before the semester starts? How much does your reading in the scholarship on a text affect how you discuss the text in class?

imagining free textbooks

A user reviews five free calculus textbooks on Slashdot, which got me thinking (preliminarily, I'll admit) about how it might be possible to teach certain courses without requiring students to purchase any textbooks. For example, when I taught freshman writing at the University of Maryland, we used a workbook created by faculty and grad students in the department, and it would be easy to make such a document available onlinle in PDF format. Granted, the student would need to print out much of this workbook, but if colleges and universities provided enough of a print quota, this might not be too much of an obstacle. As for literature, the primary texts I regularly teach are well out of copyright, and so the challenge of an all-digital course would be to find good, scholarly editions. The well-known Project Gutenberg is a goldmine of texts, but I'm not so sure how faithful they are to the originals. The challenge is to find works in a digital format that not only represent reliably the original edition(s) of a work, but that perhaps also are annotated in a way that would be useful to students. [As an aside, I'll say that the Blake Archive provides better access to the poet's work than just about all the print editions I could ever imagine assigning.]

So, yes, this post is mostly just thinking out loud about the possibilities of free editions of literary texts designed for teaching.

What's Textual Analysis?

Sometimes you teach students already experienced at analysis. Sometimes your course is their first college-level exposure to the study of language and literature. The following, via Jill Walker, is about as elegant a description of the basics as one could hope for (emphasis added):

Anders [Fagerjord] proceeded to do a wonderful job of presenting what a textual analysis is, and how it's similar to and different from other kinds of analysis. He gave the students simple steps to follow (ask a question, find relevant material, read slowly, take lots and lots of notes of details, group your findings, present it making sure you answer your question rather than just describe the site), talked about how he had worked to do the analyses (or readings, if you like) of the web texts he wrote about in his thesis, and gave us some examples of his analyses. Manna from heaven. Just what we needed. Watching others teach your class is a great learning experience, too. I'll be stealing a few of Anders's tricks next time I teach this course. Or maybe I'll just ask him to come back next year...

Every single one of those steps is fraught with complications (what kind of question do we ask? what counts as relevant? how do we group things?), but that's where much of the fun comes in, isn't it?