Professional Check-up

so, ten years in, how am I doing?

actually, it’s more like sixteen years.

it’s impossible, I guess, to spend a decade and more doing things a certain way without falling into certain patterns, i.e., ruts--

I have no pedagogical method except going in and doing what I do. I wave my arms and yell, enthusing about a set of things in what I hope is an intelligent manner. I try to be encouraging and yet also rigorous. It requires a huge amount of energy and effort. If I ever get to where I cannot stride around and make jokes, etc., I’m not going to do well.

I try to be welcoming and accessible to my students without inviting the familiarity that ends in contempt.

As I get older and they get younger, I have to try even harder to keep my own opinions and general curmudgeonliness from getting in the way. For instance, I see young men in particular for whom I feel some pity . . . I want them to embrace my own silly & archaic brand of Roman/Ben Jonsonesque stoicism . . . even as I know that I’ve always been that way and can hardly expect others to do the same.

I do have the conviction that studying literature is about filling your brain with “stuff,” and the only way to be a learned person is to read everything you can. I do believe that I’m not teaching to shape anyone ideologically, but I am hoping to convince them that the opportunity of free will and choice is a blessing and a burden, one not to be abandoned or ignored.

I read an article by Cary Saul Morson and commented on it earlier this year . . . and in it he asserts that he reads to his classes from their selections precisely because by doing so he can model an intelligent reader’s “voicing” of the parts. I have to admit that, given the examples I had in grad school from Professors S., and G., and especially B., I agree. It’s what I do . . . I have been gently mocked for using different voices while I read, and yet, I think it helps them. They are so uncomfortable reading stuff like this.

The students here like me. I am comfortable in front of the classroom and have the reputation of a tough but fair and inspiring instructor.

This is year eleven. I fear the rut.