Revenge

It's been months since I posted, but the last post from September is a good one, 'cause guess what? That student sure showed me.

Several days ago, just before the holidays began in earnest, I got the statistical reports back from my two sections of the "foundations" course that I had been teaching. Two sections: same syllabus, same lesson plans, same assignments, similar grade distribution. The earlier section was somewhat less talkative, and had fewer pure standout students, and the later section seemed to be running preternaturally well, but by-and-large, these were the same class, held back to back.

So when I handed out course evals in each class, I figured that they would look quite similar, and that (since both courses felt like they'd gone in familiar ways) both sets would look like most of the other sets of evaluations I had done in the past.

So, last week, when I looked at the statistical reports, I was pleased, but not surprised, to see that the later section (the first set I read) gave me quite good scores--on a 1-5 scale, most of the average scores were 4.7 and above. Statistically, these evaluations were the best of any course I'd ever taught that didn't involve an actual trip to London.

I didn't expect the next section's scores to be quite as high, but for a moment, I believed that this first batch confirmed what I had believed: that this particularly rigorous version of the course that I had designed had been successful. In addition to the three graded papers that each required conferences, I had students complete 20 written exercises that sometimes took particularly ambitious students 3 pages to complete fully. I had asked them to work quite hard, but for all but one student (and not the one you may be thinking) that work had yielded sometimes transformative dividends in their thinking and writing.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the pdf for the other section and discovered that these scores were flat out the worst of my entire teaching career. A couple of mean scores dipped below the 4.0 mark (which for me is pretty shockingly low, and were in some cases in the 10th and 15th percentile across all university courses)

Whaaaa?

Now, part of this stems from what seems to be one student who (I would argue, in bad faith) simply gave me straight 1's. And my guess is that the student who produced that document was the same student mentioned in the below post. But even accounting for that student, these were still statistically low evaluations. How do I account for this? Some possibilities.

1) A poisoned well: This student was so disenchanted with me and this course that hir bitching and moaning when I wasn't in the room colored the perceptions of everyone else in the room. This is something of a possibility, but this was a fairly quiet student, so it's hard to attribute the entire anomaly to this effect.

2) My optimism about the course and how well it had gone is somewhere in between the two, and the rosy view of the "better" section is no more a precise measure than the scathing ones were. I certainly want to believe that the great scores were the true ones, and the poor ones were a statistical anomaly, but perhaps to a certain degree they are both statistical anomalies.

3) The difference in student populations between the two courses had a bigger effect on student perception than I had imagined. This is possible, but this theory is contradicted by other courses in my experience. Of the 10+ sections of the survey course I've taught, my perception of student ability and enthusiasm is usually irrelevant to their perceptions of the course, and sometimes they actually seem inversely related. Now, I went for "rigor" more vociferously here, and if anything (outside of actual learning) seems likely to produce lower course evaluations, it is more writing and "stricter" grading policies. In this case, then, the section with the fewer high performing students seems to have fostered a classroom culture that less thoroughly bought into what I was aiming for in the course.

So some lessons to learn here:
1) As I think we all know, course evaluations are an imprecise, if not downright inaccurate way of measuring how well a given instructor is doing in a given class. Certainly trends over several sections can be telling, but the caprice that seems to have determined the wild divergence in these two sets disrupts many sureties we may have about these assessment tools.

2) Perception may matter more than actual learning in student evals. I think we all knew this too, but it underscores a dangerous trend, and one that many assessment initiatives are unable to account for. This is, given that my merit raise is keyed to my annual evaluation, and that evaluation may in fact suffer from the comparative dissatisfaction of, maximum, five students, I am monetarily incentivized to move away from the practices that I believe created the conditions for these poor evaluations. And in at least one case, I think that practice was simply this: intellectual honesty with a poor performing student who is ill-suited for this discipline. So, what? when I meet a student like this one in the future, I smile and nod and say, "Sure, the civil right movement was about rainbows and ponies. What original thinking!"? No, of course, not, but when that choice may in fact literally cost me hundreds, and even thousands of dollars over the course of my lifetime (Since merit raises are a percentage of base pay, so the effect compounds over time)? Whew, that's a hard one. I understand why some folks have decided to simply punt on rigorous courses.

3) This is the one more personal to me: I care waaaay too much about this. This has bothered me for over a week now, and has unsettled my thinking in a number of ways. While, sure, it's weird, I shouldn't still be talking about it, or at least bringing it up in casual conversation. But the fact is, Like many of my students, I derive a not-small chunk of my self-worth from external validation--it used to be grades, and then conference paper acceptances, and now articles and book contracts and yes, on a predictably regular interval, course evaluations. Five students should not have this kind of sway over me, but dammit they do. And like the student with whom I believe I was intellectually honest (or so I strongly suspect), I have taken this personally. And I shouldn't.

Why not to major in English

So this semester, I’m teaching two sections of intro to the major, a course that is often a “service” course, but since we’ve just recently introduced a foundations component into our major, I’m one of the folks who are really piloting it as a key component of the curriculum. So functionally, nearly half of the class of 2014 in the English major may have ended up taking this course from me.

I’ve designed the course around three papers and a series of 20 written exercises. Some of these exercises are analytical stepping stones for their papers, some are creative-writing responses to texts we’re reading, some are reflections on their favorite pieces of writing, etc.

The standard analytical prompts (e.g. “choose a concrete image in this poem and in a 5-8 sentence paragraph, make and support a claim about how that image contributes to a specific theme in the poem”) have posed few problems, but the less analytical ones have been a mixed bag. Now, I stand by these different types of prompts.

Not only do I want to introduce them to the different tracks within the major, but I want to introduce some metadiscourse about the field, one being the idea that literature is itself a way to think through issues—analogically, polysemantically, allusively, etc—a claim advanced by Marjorie Garber in her recent book The Use and Abuse of Literature which we’re also reading in this class.

This last creative response (in your own creative text, re-work a metaphor found in one of the poems for this week, using the metaphor in a new context for different, though perhaps complementary, effect) seem to bring out the drama, though. One student’s response is a straight up journal entry about depression and the help she’s been getting. OK. But how do I grade that? Uggh (answer: I didn’t. I responded with a long, supportive note, and a request that she try something a little less personal for the assignment itself. Extension granted.)…

The one that really got me was a poem that reworked a Harlem Renaissance text as a poem about the power of positive thinking. Deferring one’s dreams, it seems is only the result of a poor attitude. Not, you know, centuries of virulent racism.

But then, at the end of the student's explanatory note (I ask them to contextualize their choices), I get a long rant on how this student just isn’t a fan of poetry. After all, why bother with burying your point in flowery language? To quote: “I believe all of the metaphors are a silly guessing game. Interpreting these poems because the authors were too complicated to express their feelings in a straight forward [sic] manner frustrates me to no end.”

!!!

And so my question: Why are you an English major?

No really. I believe that the skills we teach are important, and that the critical thinking skills we teach here are crucial, but when you believe that nothing less than artfulness is the obstacle to your sense of the language, why would you choose to be in a major that revolves, frequently, around artfulness of language?

More to the point: one of the goals of the class is to provide a clearer entry point into our field, and thereby work as a bit of affirmation for our new majors. But what about this student? Would it not be in everyone’s best interest to say to this child, “I really don’t think this is right for you”?

The student wasn’t in class today, so it’s quite possible that that last outburst was a parting shot before she withdrew from the course. While I usually don’t like to have students drop my classes, in this case, it may just be the best thing possible.

Floating an idea: The Humanities Academy

So Tenured Radical has moved over to a new blog at the Chronicle, where she has a fascinating post up. The central question is how might we in academia employ a development model based on a liberal capitalism that privileges long term infrastructure growth and smart innovation (rather than a privatization model that rewards short-term growth often at the expense of long-term institutional health).

She makes two assertions in particular that I want to pick up on here:

1) "Recognize that some students will feel well-served by [the humanities] and others won’t. Ask the students who feel served by the humanities why, and invest in those students. Release the others from humanities requirements."

2) "Look around your institution, find something that doesn’t work as it should, and fix it. This requires dedicated faculty-administration partnership."

So BRU is a fairly large state flagship institution that is currently going crazy over STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in a geographical region where the cultural values are generally pretty suspicious about liberal study anyway. The message that I as a humanities scholar lately has been that while my place at the university is basically important and sound, the amount of resources coming our way will be shrinking, and that we must continue to justify any new initiatives, faculty hires (including line replacements), and even some maintenance procedures in relation to the privatizing logic of money making; We have more than once been asked, then, to frame ourselves and our needs as subservient (not just below, but in service to) the more lucrative STEM fields that the university loves right now. As we lose literature faculty lines, for example, we gain technical writing lines.

At the same time, the students who are coming to my mid-level English classes are sharply divided: English majors looking to fill in electives sit on one side, while majors from engineering or journalism sit on the other. Classes are often initially at least split into affinity groups, and meeting the needs of each of these groups is a juggling act, and often only really successful in isolated moments.

There are a lot of other factors that contribute to the particular ways that humanities are being constrained from thriving most majors can only count 42 hours from a single discipline toward graduation, which means that we end up losing our most dedicated majors at the end of their junior year because they've maxed out their English credits and are off to fill out a second major.
So what I'm looking for is a way to shore up the humanities, not just for their own sake, but for the good of the undergraduate students in our program (who are often literally not permitted to get the kind of humanistic education they come to desire), and for the institution.

We are also an institution that is sufficiently isolated such that we cannot follow TR's suggestion to share faculty among institutions, which also means we're the only (reasonably competitive) game in town for at least an hour in any direction. There are, in fact, very few SLACs in our state, and frankly, none of any particular prestige.

So forgive me while I float an idea here, a pretty half-baked one, but still...

The Humanities Academy
The idea of a humanities academy somewhat follows the model of the Living/Learning communities that popped up in the 90s, the idea of the small college within the large university. But whereas those had students beginning their university careers within small academies, and then moving out into the larger university for their upper division work, this would have students doing some or even much of their general education work early on, and then entering a smaller, more concentrated SLAC-style program within the larger university. In short, I'm imaging starting a new SLAC that draws on the resources of its host flagship state u.

Let's say we admit students during their third semester, having completed (or enrolled in) at least 33 of the required 41 credits of general education (That leaves 2 or 3 of their gen-eds to fulfill over the course of the remaining 5 semesters). With the remaining 75-90 credits (depending on how expediently they move through the program, and how well they planned their pre-academy courses), they take 4 semesters of an additional language (already required by BRU's College of Arts and Sciences) and take a double major, one of which is a traditional major and the other of which is a multi-disciplinary humanities major.

Many students already follow this path, actually, but there would be add-ons here:
1) Every semester, students enroll in a 1-or 2-credit humanities discussion section where faculty from each of the participating disciplines run open-ended discussions on trans-disciplinary topics that are guided as much by what students are taking in their other classes.

2) Students would get guided advising that guides them specifically through their home-department's most rigorous options and through a thoughtfully planned selection of other participating disciplines.

3) Home departments would offer one or two sections per semester that were limited to Humanities Academy students, which would help create the kind of small-college community that is currently sorely lacking in this large university.

4) Although students are currently required here to take a capstone in their home department, the Humanities academy would offer interdisciplinary sections of the capstone course that would have students from different home-disciplines working together on somewhat more rigorous final projects than they might otherwise.

5) The initiative of the Humanities Academy might also allow our current (very small) multi-disciplinary studies program to hire one or two dedicated faculty to teach in areas that we currently don't have departments to fully support. I'm thinking particularly of Classics here (Latin is taught at BRU by a retired chemistry prof.), but other fields that might specifically supplement a humanities education that couldn't otherwise thrive in a STEM-crazy flagship might could also be useful.

If we were able to make such a program fly, we might be able to concentrate together our most talented humanities students, allowing them to reinforce each others' interests and habits of mind instead of having them always suffer silently in the corners of rooms stocked largely by gen-ed students who are frequently working hard but are just not at the same level. It would also provide a focal point for the university to highlight student accomplishments in the humanities, instead of finding them dispersed across academic departments where they are too isolated from one another to achieve much in the way of critical mass.

Such Academy-dedicated classes would also likely be invigorating places to teach as well, and could provide a bit of a cyclical boost for faculty (tenure-track and "teaching-track" alike) who spend many classroom hours in lower-level courses.

What would it require? A lot of work, first off. Buy-in from participating disciplines, and especially from individual faculty from each discipline, whose participation in the academy would help anchor a sense of real scholarly community. More time resources than fiscal ones, though in terms of faculty hours, those are interchangeable in some ways.

So that's the rough sketch for a big idea. Is it anything more than a nice idea? Problems of potentials I haven't seen yet?

Off to London!

My usual bloggy silence will be interrupted with a different sort of bloggy silence: I'm heading off to London fro Spring Break to do the second iteration of the London Theatre Tour, which some readers (both of you), may recall I blogged about last time in 2007.

Some highlights:

• This time I have a PhD student doing an independent study and coming along, which will add a bit of peer-camaraderie to the mix.
• While I'm not as excited about the plays that I was able to secure for my students, our existing schedule leaves a few evenings open for additional theatre, and I'm hoping to catch both Caryl Churchill's Fen and Blank and Jensen's documentary play The Exonerated.
• The weather forecast currently has every single day forecast for sunny and low 50s. I'm packing an umbrella anyway.

In the meantime, I staying in the Lancaster Gate/Notting Hill Gate area, just north of Hyde Park. Any dining recommendations in the area are very very welcome. In the meantime, I'm off!

True Stories: a Reading List

I'm teaching a 200-level Contemporary Literature course next semester, which I've taught 3 or 4 times already, and I'm thinking I want to switch it up a bit. Instead of roughly following a "greatest hits of postmodernism" kind of thing, I'm going with the theme "True Stories" focusing on literature of the last 50 years that focus on purportedly true stories that, in their execution, raise issues about the instabilities and the uses of the true, either in terms of life-writing or of history (or, frequently, the intersection of all those things). I haven't quite set my list yet, but I'm looking for other suggestions to add to the list as well. Some possibilities include:

• David Foster Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram"
• Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Jeannette Winterson, Oranges are not the Only Fruit
• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
• Doug Wright, I Am My Own Wife
• Rita Dove, Museum
• Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
  
• Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
  
• Tim OBrien, The Things They Carried
• Art Spiegelman, Maus
• Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
• Robin Soans, Talking to Terrorists
  

This list is already too big, and I have some ideas of which texts to cut, and why, but I'm looking for a great text to act as an exclamation point on the semester, a "good read" that raises interesting questions at a point in the semester when many of those questions have already been raised, and when students are also overwhelmed with end-of-the semester work.

So, my friends, if you have any advice on good texts to add to the list (particularly the very contemporary), or experience teaching any of these texts to a broad swath of students, from gen. ed. students to senior English majors, I'm all ears.

Pop Quiz, Hotshot

Quick: name, in your experience, the single best poem, pre-1900, to teach close reading to new English majors. Bonus points if it involves sex.

Readings on "Why Major in English"

A few years ago, either Profession or PMLA had a "Why Major in English?" forum. I want to use those readings, or perhaps others clustered around them, for the gateway course that we are implementing this year. So, does anyone remember where that forum appeared, and also, has anyone had particular success with other readings about the discipline?

Ti-i-i-ime ain't on my side

I have begun to hit something of a rhythm in managing the summer grad class, which is turning out to be a really fun, interesting group of people on what is to me an immensely engaging topic. Who wouldn't have fun with two consecutive days on authorship?

(On a side note, I think that for many cultural-studies-trained folks narratological formalism seems archaic and a historical, but these discussions on the building blocks of story-making, with old questions like the place of authorial intent, are not useless to today's graduate students, and indeed continue to provide and effective vocabulary and critical framework for how texts carry cultural information.)

I have in fact hit enough of a rhythm that I am now dipping my toes back into the writing pond, finding that the waters aren't as chilly as I'd imagined they'd be. A paragraph of an old article on Tuesday night, some brainstorming notes on chapter 3 last night, and today who knows? The problem has been that these little bits of writing time have been stolen moments: 15 minutes here while Willow read the twins a bedtime story, 10 minutes there as I pulled over on the road, opened my laptop, typed in some ideas, and got back on my way to pick up Imperia from a playdate. No article, let along book manuscript will be successfully produced this way.

No matter I suppose, Summer Session I is over in three more weeks, after which a 6 week vista opens up for me to write, write, write, at which point I will have little choice but to do exactly that.

The Summer Grad Class

You perhaps have seen references in the sparse previous posts about a summer graduate class that I'm teaching, one that is a lot of fun already, but is killing me. I've devised a way to make the reading more manageable to the students--by making half of the essays "supplementary" and then assigning 2 people to present the arguments of each one, I've cut the reading from 16-20 essays a week to 10-12. It's still a lot of reading for them, but they seem to be doing it. I however, am still reading 16-20 essays a week.

This has meant that I've had to put writing on the back burner, and will instead have to write like a fiend through July and August. In the interim, I'm going to try to clean up a few article drafts I have laying around, to perhaps get them out to readers in order to supplement my tenure file, which goes forward this fall.

Lesson learned? Teaching a summer grad class is a great deal of fun: laid back and focused at the same time. But I shouldn't ever count on doing anything else with that time.

Snow Days and Voluntary Classes

On Monday, we had the first declared snow day at this institution in eleven years, a combination of good fortune and sheer cussedness in the face of the moderate elements. But a new provost and fourteen-odd inches of snow kept us out yesterday. Today, we were back on, despite some lingering treacherous conditions.

Faculty had been urged to exercise consideration for students who might have a difficult commute, but I hate that particular judgment call. Nothing worse than getting an email from a student that they can't make it to campus, only to see them at the gym right after class. So on such days (when I can afford it on the syllabus) I take a different tack, and send an email to tell students that while I will be having class, I will not be taking attendance. I remind them of the value of the material, but the way I structure my syllabi, rarely is the material of any given day "must-know."

In effect, the day is a free absence, and the students who end up coming to class are the students who actually want to be there. No surprise, then, that the postmodernism class saw about 1/3 attendance, while the amazing survey from heaven saw 2/3 attendance (and many of those who missed were the less-engaged in this highly-engaged group).

But the ones who were there in the postmodern class ended up making it a banner day there. We were talking about Ashbery's "What is Poetry" and "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" both highly playful poems that play around with the way that language functions as pure sign. In fact, one student mentioned the ideas of Derrida (though she could not remember the name), which prompted a quick explanation of differance, in a 200-level class. As importantly, contemporary poetry is not my bag, so while I had a few bon mots to offer, I struggle through his poetry just as much as they do, and so the interpretation they arrived at as a class was ultimately more convincing (or at least more interesting, and maybe both) than the one I'd walked in with.

These were the last texts in a unit on textual play (Borges, Barth, Calvino, Stoppard, Ashbery), and we ended with a casual discussion of simply "what you thought of these texts taken as a group." The discussion ranged far and wide, and touched on nihilism, readerly vs. writerly texts, and the place of pain and anguish within formal play. And I suspect that this was due as in large part to who was not there as to who was not.

This is not so much a dig on those students who might be bringing the class down as it is a reminder of the intellectual joy that arises when you know that the people in the room want to be in the room.

On Calvino

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm teaching Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler to my undergraduate class on postmodern literature. I'm teaching it following a week of Borges stories, so it is at once a natural follow-up, and at the same time, overkill, especially for young (mostly female, in this section) readers raised on the funnel-cake-and-cotton-candy diet of Rowling, Meyers, and Sparks.

I didn't read it until I was an MA student, right after taking a narrative theory course that I loved. So the pump was primed, so to speak. And for someone who loves formal play, Calvino's novel is pure joy. The second person narration begins with a near-perfect mapping of narrated Reader and the flesh-and-blood reader, and slowly but inexorably spins into pure fictional world, ending up in the literary police state of Ataguitania. And then there is the series of ten novel beginnings the reader encounters, each one a pastiche of a literary style or even a particular author (I can pick out at least Kawabata and Marquez). Add to this winking references to perversions of the 1001 nights, ingeniously contructed mise-en-abymes (an author in the book imagines writing a book that looks exactly like the book we're reading), and some striking metaphors for reading-for-pleasure.

In fact, this last idea is the central argument for the novel: that pleasure is the one pure-and-true motive for picking up a novel. In fact, he ties reading to not only physical pleasure, but sexual pleasure throughout: sex becomes an ongoing metaphor for reading, and when it happens, reading becomes a metaphor for sex (a trope Jeannette Winterson improves upon in Written on the Body). This, of course, was the way in to the most successful lesson with this class so far. Since the Other Reader of the novel is also an ideal (and idealized reader) the frame story of the novel is something of a love plot between the Reader (you) and the Other Reader (Ludmilla), even as it is a quest narrative to find the end of one of the frame stories.

So the idea of reading for pleasure and sex for pleasure are conflated into the same plot, and of course, the novel ends (a full narrative after all) with "you" and Ludmilla married. yay, and all.

The thing is, this idealized plot is peppered all the way along with bad readers: Irnerio, the sexually ambiguous non-reader who only sees books for their value as beautiful objects; Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, the shriveled, dusty professor of a dead language who is caught up in grammar, syntax, and punctuation; the general of Ataguitania, who uses his control of access to books as a means to power; Cavedagna, the hurried little publisher who has lost the pleasure of books to the bustle of putting books together; and most disturbingly, Lotaria (a purposeful re-gendering of the Lothario, who is in it not for the love of it, but for the chase). Lotaria is Ludmilla's sister, and is as passionate about books as her sibling. But Lotaria is a ball-breaking, militant feminist, who reduces characters, settings and situations to "general concepts" (and a litany of academic jargon is inserted here). Later in the novel, she reduces writing down further, processing it electronically to garner word frequency, thereby deducing the major themes.

Now it's hardly coincidental that Calvino's book, which doesn't hold up too well to feminist scrutiny, chooses a feminist for his radical academic target. But add to this the fact that each of these bad readers is, in some ways made either sexually undesireable or sexually suspect, and the critique gets a little more vicious. The insinuation (and I might, under such a reading, be compelled to take this personally, as a somewhat sexually ambiguous, feminist, professor of literature) is that folks who read in these bad ways, are both undesireable as readers, and therefore ineligible for the pleasures of reading.

Well, harrumph.

The thing is, those students in my class, the ones who both identify as "pleasure readers"--they were the students who inevitably complained about the novel's frustrated beginnings: a string of coitus interruptus if you will. They complained that they were so frustrated with the stops and starts that had it not been for class, they'd have never finished the novel. Conversely, the students who enjoyed the novel found themselves mocked via the figures of Lotaria and Professor Uzzi-Tuzii.

I wonder whether, in much of today's reading climate, Calvino hasn't created a novel that can only (or mostly only) be loved by those it mocks, while it shuts out those readers it adulates. That is, I first read this novel for pleasure. and every time I've read it since, I derive a kind of pleasure in it. But I've also always seen my own reading practices mocked somehow.

But perhaps I am the audience. Perhaps Calvino is invoking the Lotarias and Uzzi-Tuzii's of the world, and reminding us that there is still pleasure to be had in books, not just politics, or even a livelihood. I'm not ready to renounce my politicized interpretive strategies or even my pickiness about grammar, but I do need to remind myself now and again that not every book needs to be the subject of my teaching and writing. Unfortunately, I've got enough of a backlog on that, that the pleasure reading will wait.

A Class is its Students

At the beginning of every semester, I tweak the syllabus, look at the roster, check the room out beforehand, and think about which lessons will still work and which need to be revisited, or created from scratch.

And despite all of that work, how well a class goes often depends not on that immaculate preparation but the ten or twenty-five, or forty people in the room. Take for example my later British Lit survey. In the past five years, I've taught roughly 11 sections of the class. I've had some really solid ones and one or two stinkers (and even those had bright spots). But I'll admit: even after switching up some themes and texts last fall, I'm still kinda bored with the class. Evals have been very good, but have sort of plateaued off, and the occasional negative or even constructive comments I get are of the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't variety (seriously, the two lowest aggregate scoring ones said, on one hand, "more open class discussion," and the other said, "more lecture"!). The point is, I feel like I've kind of maxed out my own personal reward from the class.

Until this semester. I expected the same-old-thing, but the 27 people in the room are totally rocking it out. I didn't need to do the whole "Crazy Ol' Blake" routine, and when I started up my riff on Wordsworth's sorta self-serving and kinda arrogant criteria for the poet (Really, you think your soul is more comprehensive than mine?), the students totally stepped up and defended the entire project--using evidence from the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. I mean, that's the ideal scenario, but it's never gotten even close to happen. These folks have ideas about texts, and the backbones to express and defend them. I'm totally in love with them.

Meanwhile, my course of postmodern lit (a gen-ed) is only in its second iteration. The first one started off fairly roughly, but ended up being a lot of fun. So I made some fairly substantial modifications to the beginning of the course, and was really excited to get back into it this semester. But after the very full first day of class, and I discover that most of my students think postmodern lit is written by Stephanie Meyers, Jodi Picoult, and Nicholas Sparks. I've been pulling all of my best tricks out of the bag in the first three weeks, and I'm dying here. I got a moderately good discussion out of the conflation of reading and sex in Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night..., but I had to resort to some pretty cheap tricks to do that.

So I thought I'd have one great class, and one just-ok class this semester, and so far that's turned out to be true. But with the actual classes flipped around.

This reminds me that students themselves have a responsibility for how classes proceed. My sense is that we often enforce this with participation grades and such, and there are a variety of lesson-planning strategies built around hedging against this fact (several usefully noted in a recent post at ProfHacker). But I also want us to think about how we can convey that responsibility to our students.

One way that I do it is that when I do midterm evals, I ask students to make a column for things I can control, but also things that they can control, and then suggest that some of those suggestions will become specific criteria for class participation. But this is still a bit more whip than carrot. If you're reading, and have other ideas, I'd love to hear them. Once we've exhausted our own tactics for livening up a classroom, how do we convey to student their responsibility for doing so?

Stretched Thin

It's been a rough week. Junebug's virus has turned out to be RSV which has turned into bronchiolitis, and may have even developed into a mild case of pneumonia. There's an ear infection in there, too. So since Friday, we've been to the doctor's office four times, and again tomorrow, all of which is the alternative to admitting him into the hospital. Through it all, he's been a total champ, and as he begins to feel better (despite the somewhat labored breathing, and hideous cough) he's been super smiley, which is all the sadder with his face slightly puffy from the inflamed sinuses and coated entirely in snot and tears.

So in between the temp-taking and the oral medicine administering (we're on our second anti-biotic now) and the diffuser with albuterol vapor and blah blah blah, Willow and I are both trying to keep our semesters from falling apart. Willow, teaching comp this semester, has been in conferences this week for first papers, while I've been trying to pull together materials for texts as diverse as--seriously--Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, and finally, the pairing of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

I've been lucky so far with forgiving classes: while the postmodernism class has needed some pulling along (half of that class cites Stephanie Meyer, Jodi Picoult or Nicholas Sparks as a favorite author), the survey class has been totally rocking my world--today students asked questions like whether Wordworth's ideal poet's "more comprehensive soul" was innate or a learned quality, and whether the democratic impulses of his poetry actually translated into a readership that included the "common man" he so valorized. But still, I've got two Renaissance plays to prep for grad students on Thursday, and the insane Jan Svankmajer film version of Faust that I may want to screen some clips of to watch in class, and a set of quizzes to grade and a another set of worksheets on Borges to collate into one usable document and...

I'm on childcare duty tomorrow, with a Doctor's appointment at 11am.

Liberal Arts and the Public Intellectual

The usual roar of angst about the relevance of the liberal arts has not gotten louder lately, but it does seem to be taking on a particular tenor and timbre. In part based on Louis Menand's book about the professionalization of the humanities as an obstacle to creating public intellectuals, and in part based on a study done in sociology that both documents and explains a clear tendency toward liberal political affinities among humanities and social sciences scholars (h/t to Claire Potter at Tenured Radical), people doing the same job that I am doing are apparently not doing it to the satisfaction of someone else.

All of this hand-wringing in the general populace about the relevance of the liberal humanist academic to the, umm, real world is all sorts of things at once: troubling, democratic, anti-elitist, anti-intellectual, politically conservative, misinformed.

I do indeed understand the anxiety that the political middle and right have about the bias in the classroom--and of course its there, no matter how much we may hedge against our own politics. I do wonder though whether bankers, financial advisers, Army generals, CEOs of major corporations, even MBA faculty in the same institutions are as anxious about the political biases of their fields. Do we really think that those are politically balanced professions? As Gross and Fosse argue, these professions (English prof and army general and many others, too) self-select as much as anything, and I really do wonder whether the professoriate in the humanities really does have any out-sized influence: It's not like millions of conservatives didn't go through the same humanities coursework that is required in gen-ed curricula the nation over.

So whatever about political bias: I'm over it, and my tactic in the classroom is not to hide it, but rather to be crystal clear about my politics, and then invite debate. I want conservative students to speak up, and I don't try to "make examples out of them." Articulate conservative students are frequently quite persuasive in these (still infrequent) politically charged classroom moments.

But the review of Menand's book (which I hope to obtain and read soon) suggests that Menand's argument is essentially, ... Fine, the humanities are self-selecting. But the narrow band of folks who self-select academia tells us that the professionalization of the humanities has made it too insular to be healthy...

I agree and disagree. In the introduction to the co-edited collection on anti-disciplinarity (wow! in the top million in book sales! Who knew?), my co-editor and I argue that we do need to cut across the narrow disciplinary lines created by both the professionalization of and the state regulation of the academy. But we do not do so on the argument that this creates a more competitive marketplace of ideas (I so dislike the capitalist logic of that notion), but rather that doing so can better create conditions for a more politically engaged classroom space. Not the marketplace of ideas, but the town square of ideas, the speaker's corner of ideas. It's the academy as preparation for the democracy, not the market. I'm self-consciously training citizens, not consumers. And other disciplines do self-consciously train consumers, and even more pointedly, laborers. So the late-market capitalist bias functious right alongside my leftist one (though really, is teaching for democracy actually leftist?).

When we are told that English needs to better communicate its value to the job market, to the career preparation of its students, and in short, to produce better human capital, I get it. It's both a survival tactic for English, but also a cultural shift in the place of the academy, an argument made in turns cranky, troubling, and illuminating by William Chace recently in The American Scholar. But we also must assert our value in training citizens, something without a specific exchange value, but is, as the MasterCard commercials say, priceless.

While Menand [eta: rather Gideon Lewis-Kraus, the Slate reviewer of Menand's book] wants a public intellectual who functions in the public marketplace, I want (and want to become) a different kind of public intellectual: the sort who engages the public sphere of our commonly owned government and governance. And for me that starts in the classroom, and in fact demands that I be the political provocateur that I sometimes become. I will tie Wordsworth's laments in "Tintern Abbey" to arguments over mountaintop removal. I will make clear that the imperial tactics in Heart of Darkness are primarily economic, and therefore still entirely in operation today in the under-developed world. I will note the particular nature of the construction of masculinity in Tennyson, and the ways that those constructions are still rooted to our sense of nation and empire as well as leadership and achievement. These are reading tactics that help my students translate the ideas of literature into the very practical world of their own, where their votes might well hinge on their beliefs about mountaintop removal, their sense of international economic policy, or their biases against a female candidate for the highest office in the land.

Now, Menand's argument (and Chace's and to a degree Stanley Fish's in Save the World on Your own Time and in the most recent issue of Profession) rests upon decrying (depending upon the specific argument) increased specialization, disciplinary fragmentation , cultural studies inflections, politicization, and professionalization of our research and writing. I think there's a legitimate claim in here that our published work does often reach only a very tiny coterie audience, needlessly speaking a specialized language. But I think there's a lot of factors here, including the very limited demand (again, marketplace, dammit) for the work of even the most accessible of public intellectuals. The Slate review of Menand's book holds him to the highest standards, but he doesn't sell nearly as many books than the intellectually mendacious Glenn Beck, or Dan Brown, or Nicholas Sparks, or Stephanie Meyer or ... or ... or (although admittedly his Amazon rank on all of his books are higher than for my co-edited collection...so...). So how many public intellectuals can we really sustain, after all?

But to become a kind of public intellectual in the classroom, we do need ways to converse and distinguish ourselves, and sometimes this means writing to each other, to our coterie audiences. The texts I write about appear seldom on my syllabi, especially at the undergraduate level. Sure they make cameos. but I'd never dream of writing about Shakespeare in any concerted fashion, and yet I teach his work constantly in the genre classes on drama. This is its own marketplace of ideas (or idea-havers), and runs (devastatingly for most on the job market or in contingent positions) with its own cruel logic. If we add the consuming public to the machinery of that particular market, we make our demands for scholarship nigh on impossible.

But, perhaps there is something usable here, something about opening up the standards of the discipline, rather than building them up by accretion of demands. Perhaps we do need to be thinking more broadly about "what counts" not just toward tenure, but as labor. Does the demand for public intellectual production extend to activism on the local, state, or national level? Does it include op-eds or even the occasional letter to the editor? Does blogging belong in this discussion?

Or, is all of this sturm and drang another pissy set of cliches that is aimed at deflating academic egos? Does the critique amount to little more than bitching about somebody else getting paid to do something that too many people believe that a) they could do and b) isn't really work. Or alternatively (and sometimes simultaneously) that c) they were never able to do (often as students themselves) and d) weren't willing to put in the work to accomplish. There are old and mean biases against intellectual labor here, and they abound, and when cast in ideological turns, they get vicious.

But really let's be clear about some of they monetary stakes here, because money does get mentioned often. I could be making more writing cheap ad copy for computer resellers (which I got more for per hour as a part-timer during grad school than I get now per hour on a 9.5 month 40 hour work-week basis). I'm not bilking America, or my students, or the state, or parents, or anyone. I'm doing my job, which is to think, write, and teach about literature, and I do it damn well. Most of my colleagues do, too.

All of this is to say that I think that, sure, academic reform is useful in places and ways. But rarely in these zeitgeist ways that make it onto bestseller lists or into the pages of the NYT or the WSJ. I'd love to become the kind of public intellectual who writes smart books that lots of other people want to read. But even were the figure of the public intellectual to emerge more prominently at the broader cultural level, the public appetite for public intellectualism in the humanities will still staff only a handful of actual English departments. In the meantime, everywhere else there are (often underprivileged) students to teach, and a democracy that keeps on demanding a citizenry that should, after all, know how to participate.

Me and My University Bookstore

Usually, I've had a perfectly functional relationship with my university bookstore. I porder my textbooks, usually on time, or very close, occasionally make a tweak or two to the booklist, and generally, the stuff is there when the semester begins.

This semester has been one message after another from the textbook coordinator, and while some of them have not been her fault, I have nonetheless am now moved to ire everytime I see her name in my inbox.

First: a major book for my grad class (admittedly over 20 years old from a smallish press) is out of print. Somehow, my department was able to get me a desk copy which I can now put on reserve, but the bookstore couldn't get it, or do anything for me. OK, fine. Monographs go out of print all the time. I can deal.

Then: A single edition play is on backorder. nevermind that it's the New Mermaids edition of The Spanish Tragedy, a text taught often enough that these contingencies should be accounted for. But. Both Amazon and another major online outlet that bears the name of the smae corporate entity that owns our campus store listed the text ass in stock and able to ship within days. And yet the textbook department couldn't lay their hands on 9 copies. Grrr.

And today: the anthology I'm using for my survey course has just gone into a new edition. Longman does this fairly often, enough to irk me, since everytime they change something, I lose things I wanted to teach without getting new ones about which I'm equally enthusiastic. I lost Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 four years ago, and have nothing of its functional equivalent in either the previous or the brand-new edition. So I ordered the old edition, thinking that surely there'd be enough copies floating around on the used market to supply my class. No dice. The bookstore has informed me that they can only procure 8 copies for my class of 40, and I've pretty much got to go to the new edition if I want the texts available by day 1. Of course, Longman has "conveniently" moved several texts to an online resource which is a pain-in-the-ass to access for me, let alone my students and has again gotten rid of a few things that I had been planning to teach. This is particularly irksome since I taught the same course last fall, and was really hoping to use the same syllabus two semesters in a row (heaven forfend!).

So now, classes start next week, public schools have been out of session 2 1/2 out of the last 4 days, and are likely out again tomorrow, and goddamn it, I've got to scramble to reconfigure my survey syllabus. Longman reps, if you're out there, I will not be adopting your anthology anymore. You revise it too damn often and cause me too much inconvenience.

The year in theater

It's getting on time for all of those year-in-review posts. There's that little facebook app that makes pretty little graphic out of random status updates, but all it does it tell you that we sold a house, bought one, had a baby, and have been raising him and his older siblings.

With all of that personal stuff going on, it might surprise you to know that it was a fairly eventful year theatre-wise--in terms of spectatorship and scholarship. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that I taught the Theatre Tour class in the spring, followed by and intro drama course in the fall, but I thought I might do a post that gave a little tour of some of the highlights of my theatre going year.

Scholarship: I published my Equus article in the spring, and while it was sort of a one-off--the offshoot of the first theatre tour, it felt good to have it out. It felt like a substantial contribution to the discourse on that once-again-zeitgeist-y play, and at the same time was fun to research and write. I also did a long talk for Nels on pain, performance and performativity which could someday be a full article. In May, I wrote an article on documentary performances surrounding the "war on terror," this for a collection on political theatre post-9/11. After the baby was born, the writing slowed down a bit, but I pecked away at the book manuscript that was once a dissertation, something I'm still working at.

In November, I participated in the fantastic Contemporary Women Playwrights session at ASTR. For that working group, I was required to read several plays, many new to me. Highlights include Judith Thompson's amazing Palace of the End, DebbieTucker Green's gut-wrenching Stoning Mary, Rebecca Lenkiewicz's illuminating her Naked Skin, and Marina Carr's lovely yet harrowing Woman and Scarecrow.

At the moment, I'm procrastinating on revising a draft of my upcoming MLA talk on Eve Ensler, which has to be cut down to 15 minutes, which means i'm having trouble getting to my point more than a page before the time limit is up. I may not have mentioned this, but I'm not a big fan. Come to my MLA talk and you'll hear why.

Plays I saw: several at the American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriars reproduction, including Hamlet and R&G in rep. There's a sort of commonplace about doing those two together, which is that you can't really do both well together. If you cast for an excellent Hamlet there's little chance to get the madcap feeling of R&G, but if you go the comic route for R&G, you get a ridiculous Hamlet. We got the latter, with an only-OK R&G to make up for it. The other Hamlet we saw was a University production that was quite ably done...better than the ASC production by a yard. ASC's biggest success of our experience was an eye-opening production of Middleton's The Changeling which brought what I had always imagined to be a pretty salacious text to very entertaining life.

We also took a trip to DC to see three productions. The most interesting was a vibrant, messy, provocative production of Brecht's Roundheads and Peakheads which turned out to be the last weekend of the final production of Catalyst Theatre, a cutting-edge little theatre venture that was an unfortunate victim of the economic bust. My students didn't love it, but that play, hingeing as it does on an unfortunate parallel with pre-holocaust Germany, getting its predictions quite wrong and risking always a nasty potential anti-semitic echo. This production shifted away from history entirely, which is fine, but removes one of the more compelling angles to even revive the play in the first place.

We also took in Albee's A Delicate Balance at Arena, with a crackerjack cast, including Kathleen Chalfant (Wit, Angels in America) and Ellen McLaughlin (the actual Angel of Angels in America). It was a beautifully polished production, if a little soulless. It was also the setting for one of the oddest experiences I've ever had as an audience member: I had asked my students to take notes during production so that they would be able to write about them in more detail. This is something I've been doing for years, and I've never gotten so much as a sidelong glance. But several of the students had seats in the front row, right in front of a spot on the apron of the stage that was sort of an imaginary window in the fourth wall, so Chalfant often delivered her lines from this spot, as if delivering them while looking out onto her lawn.

During the second intermission, a tech came out to us, and asked my students to please put away their notebooks: they were "distracting the actors." The two students who were addressed in particular looked baffled, but they complied. And during her first monologue in the third act, sure enough, Chalfant shot a glance downward at us, and seeing that those notebooks had been stashed away, visibly relaxed.

There was, understandably, no theatregoing during the summer, and this fall my options have been limited. The one production I was looking desperately forward to, though, was a campus production of Timberlake Wertenbaker's beautiful The Love of the Nightingale. Wertenbaker, a British playwright, is not a household name in the U.S., but her lyrical body of work is, to my mind, a highlight of feminist theatre's boom in the last three decades of the 20th century (the subject of my book). I've published on this play, and when I was working for a DC theatre company during grad school, it had always been one we'd hoped to do, but cast requirements were too big, and our budget too small. Whenever I interviewed for jobs that had a directing requirement, this play was one I mentioned as a great choice for university stages. So as you can imagine, I already had a pretty clear picture of it in my head.

I required my drama students to read it, and I had gotten some reports on it during rehearsals and such. It was, of course, hardly a perfect production, and the director made some choices that found a different emphasis for the play than I would have chosen to highlight, but seeing students do good plays well always carries a charge, and that the play made an important political statement about women and violence, I was happy enough to have seen it.

So that's the year in theatre. We'll see what next year holds!

Why I love October

October is, far and away, my favorite month. April is a distant second, followed by May and then June (especially a temperate one). September not so much, and November is just too cold. Here then, are ten reasons why I love October:

1. The weather: today it was 65 and sunny. Earlier this week it was 55 and rainy. by the end of the month, we might even have a daily high in the 40s. Who cares? It's temperate, and bit brisk, even, but it's rarely really cold here in October. Perfect day for walking to campus or driving with one window down.
2. Teaching in October: While it may be the fat part of the semester, when the blush has worn off, and the hustle hasn't yet begun, I find that this is the time when a class really begins to define itself, and some of the best individual lessons happen. Classes are more relaxed, and discussions can be a bit more wide-ranging.
3. The pumpkin patch, complete with hayride and the maize maze (although I will lament that hayrides apparently no longer feature actual hay. bummer). That makes for a damn good Saturday, with kids or without.
   
4. The leaves turn. Here the have just started changing color in earnest, and will peak in about three weeks. We have three beautiful seasons and then winter here. Of the three beautiful ones, fall is the most extraordinary. I've been told that some places in this state technically could be called deciduous rain forests, which doesn't surprise me. And as we know, wet conditions mean more color. It's been a wet spring and summer here, so I'm looking forward to extraordinary foliage.
5. Pumpkin-spice whatever. Latte, beer, bread, pie, toast, chocolate, meat, water, milk, cardboard. You name it, pumpkin pie spices makes it better. But only in October.
6. Clothing: The leather jacket comes out, as does my extensive collection of sweaters (many of them in lovely argyle). In the autumn, people start dressing like grown-ups again, and so I can stop pretending I am a teenager in cargo shorts and ill-fitting t-shirts. This is a self-serving thing to love, since my love of nice clothing earns me funny looks in the summer, and no looks at all underneath the bundling of the winter. But the autumn is the time to bring out the best outfits. In fact, I'm feeling a velvet blazer day coming on.
7. Brunch. I don't know why, but brunches are best in the fall. Since we've moved to the new neighborhood, we've developed a friendship with two other families of new faculty members, both of whom just moved in around the corner within a month of us. We've started having brunch every weekend, and there's really nothing like a brisk morning of strong coffee, bacon, fritatas, and mimosas, with Thistle-and-Shamrock on NPR, or African Jazz on the CD player, or whatever, and sunlight pouring through the windows. And then that full, drowsy, I want-to-get-inside-and-take-a-nap feeling afterwards. Good many times of the year, best in October.
8. Football: College, Professional, or backyard touch. I love a good football game, despite myself.
   
9. The twins' birthday on October 30. I am looking forward to when they're in middle school and high school (really one of the only reasons I am actively looking forward to them being in middle school), and the Claycomb birthday/Halloween party becomes an annual event.
10. Did I mention Halloween? Since the kids were born, I haven't been able to do much myself, but any holiday involving elaborate and/or creative costuming is going to be a favorite. Some of my past best costumes: The Universe, Route 66, and an illuminated manuscript.

Instant Feedback

While I tend to obsess over formal course evaluations (rate me! rate me!) I do often find them of limited use, if no other reason than that they reflect the vagaries of a distinct group of students after I have finished working with that group.

And so, I have begun to put more emphasis on the midterm course evaluation, which has been creeping incrementally forward from midterm, so that I tend to administer them around week 5, when there's been enough get-to-know-you time, but there is still plenty of time to make adjustments that will really affect the workings of the classroom.

The format I use is the stop/start/continue rubric, where students make two columns on the page (one for things I can control, and one for things they can control, individually and collectively). Then they label three rows: Things they'd like to see stop happening (group work, quizzes, classroom chatter), things they'd like to see start happening (candy, more group work, even participation), things they'd like to see continue that are already working (group discussions, paper feedback, tapdancing).

I've taught 9 or 10 sections of this particular course since I've been at BRU so on the one hand, I can anticipate many of the responses (as many students say less group work as ask for more), but that frequency often breeds ossification, and so I really do need to be responsive to trends in the feedback. This semester, for example, students would prefer that we slow down with the material, and make more time for a free-form discussion. This indicates a level of comfort with and respect for their classmates' opnions that--especially with a strong group such as this one--I'm thrilled to oblige. I also picked up a significant, if not overwhelming level of anxiety about the upcoming midterm, which is easy enough to address.

What bugs me, though, and has me even a little rattled, is the response that seeks to debunk the mechanism of the midterm eval itself. I got one response that insisted that the exercise was a joke, and that I was just "getting my jollies" by finding out what class really thought of me, and that I could tell everyone by their handwriting anyway, so it wasn't even anonymous. And while yes, I could correlate handwriting if I were trying, and I do enjoy getting positive feedback, this student is missing the point. Because I will say, I've focused more on hir individual response than any of the "love this course" responses that I get.

The rhetoric of "You're the teacher; stop asking us to do your work for you" is equally troubling, because of course this student is buying into an educational model that is at once passive and at the same time consumerist: "I've paid for your labor; now do the work for me." (The response also mentioned that the close-reading quizzes were little more than bs-ing).

Sigh. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but I can't help focusing on the one or two students who really are not responding to the work. But because the eval responses really are pretty anonymous, I'm not even sure whom to contact to check in with, nor am I sure if such a reaction would even prove worthwhile. So for now, I'll institute the tweaks to my classroom management, and hope that this person finds a way to obtain hir own education the way ze wants.

An Annoying Conversation and the Thing it Made Me Do...

So after a rousing game of squash yesterday, I was changing in the locker room, now far quieter than usual with so few students on campus, and my squash partner asked, "So do students write worse than they did 10 years ago? 20 years ago?"

A couple of other people jumped in the conversation, and they all seemed to unequivocally agree that students wrote worse than ever before. Those darned illiterate BRU students.

They're wrong. At least mostly. They cite all kinds of anecdotal evidence about the terrible writing sins their students commit, and how it seems to go downhill. There are many culprits: the internet, and No Child Left Behind chief among them. (The internet is a scapegoat, but NCLB might not be wrong).

But this is just an illusion: There have always been poor writers in college, a kid who couldn't tell a subject from a predicate. It's just that we didn't see them, either because we were doing work that demonstrated the (generally) proper use of Standard Written English, or because we didn't go to a Big State College in a Poor State. So no, friend, many of your students don't write as well as you did 20 years ago, or your peers at University of Chicago or Johns Hopkins. But students here 20 years ago couldn't write to save their lives either. You just weren't one of them.

I was so worked up about this conversation that I was halfway home before I realized...I was going to the old house...oops.

An Actor Prepares

I'm in Insurance City this evening, where a fellow blogger has invited me to campus to do a workshop on performance and composition pedagogy, and to give a talk as part of a fantastic humanities seminar. After a frustrating series of delays and a couple of bumpy flights (it was windy today) I arrived, and then had coffee with another fellow blogger. (on a side note: how great is it that academic blogging can bring together a rhetorician, a Victorianist and a performance theorist who would likely have never otherwise crossed paths for a random coffee hour for plain old good conversation?)

After a lovely dinner with a few of Nels's departmental colleagues, I am back at the hotel, brushing up the notes for the talk, and laying out my plan for the workshop.

It has occurred to me that when you are a performance theorist/drama guy, running a workshop on performance pedagogy, a certain level of performance on my part will certainly be expected. Now, I'm a bit of a performer by nature, and my costume is in the closet hanging out (velvet blazer of power, natch), so I'm not experiencing stage fright, per say, but I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't experiencing performance anxiety of a somewhat different sort--the kind that our students experience when they themselves sit down to write.

I think that I am surprised whenever I am regarded by peers (and especially by those further along in their careers than I), as anything like an expert or an authority in my field. Yes, sure I think about the performance element more than many, but I haven't logged the classroom hours that some have, and I can only claim to be a thoughtful participant in the teaching profession, not a thoroughly informed expert on pedagogy. What qualifies me to lead these people in a workshop?

It occurs to me, though, that my whole point is that thinking of the classroom as a space in which we are all actors--rather than simply an actor and an audience--should not simply be a thesis statement. It should be a methodology as well.

Last week, one of the performances that I took in with my students was put on by a company that takes as m.o. for its winter season the idea that a core group of actors will perform a play with no director, no costume designer, etc. They collaborate on the production, and while one lead actor may be the prime mover for many of the choices, there isn't a singular authority in the process. The production was a little ragged around the edges, but it was vibrant and thoroughly engaging. it was evident that every actor had a stake in the performance as an artist.

So as I plan for the workshop tomorrow, I'm fine in terms of content, but I am actively trying to think of ways to create an environment where every teacher there is an actor and not simply an audience member. And I must constantly remind myself about this in the classroom, too.