Serendipities

A roundup of the best of this summer’s blogging on the early modern period can now be found at Early Modern Notes. Thanks to Sharon for another wonderful edition!

I have a new addiction. It’s a mix of curiosity and greed. It’s time-consuming and has not yet led to any concrete results. It’s funda.nl.

Funda.nl is managed by the Dutch association of estate agents. I’m looking for a house in Amsterdam, and this is one of the sites that helps me look. It’s incredibly addictive, not only because it features many terrific, though expensive houses, but also because it allows you to look inside other people’s living rooms. The photos of the interior are the first thing I click on. Never mind such details as the size, the prize, the monthly costs - what does it look like? Sometimes it’s hard to look past the inhabitant’s clutter in a photo, and sometimes I just love a wooden floor, a door handle, or a kitchen cupboard, and am ready to buy the entire apartment because of it. Ah, the virtual house hunt…

I’m in a big, anonymous building, where endless hallways keep appearing around corners. I am supposed to be teaching a class, but I am not armed with books, and I have not prepared anything. I am looking for the room where students are waiting for me, but there are only locked doors. I feel terrible, and I know that even if I find the room in time, I will not know what to say.

The semester has not even started, and I’ve already had my first anxiety dream. Staring at the ceiling, I decided that apart from preparing the content of my classes, I should also learn more about the techniques of teaching itself. I surfed to my favourite used books store and ordered a pile of books on teaching literature.

The first book on the pile was Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). I learned a lot, and will write a short review here. Also in, still to be read, are:

• Wilbert J. McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers (1994) — which comes warmly recommended by Showalter
• Richard L. McGuire’s Passionate Attention: An Introduction to Literary Study (1973).
• Milla Cozart Riggio, ed., Teaching Shakespeare through Performance (1999).

The crucial thing that all these books make you think about is not what you are going to be teaching your students, but how you are going to teach them. I have taught before, and found ways of teaching that work well for me — I try to stimulate discussion, questions, students’ critical engagement during lectures as well as seminars. I have some tricks up my sleeve to achieve this. Some of those tricks I invented, others I learnt from my own experience as a student. The good thing about these books on teaching is that you learn new tricks, and start to think critically about your style of teaching. They also make you consider what you really want to be teaching your students: is it knowledge, is it the skill of reading literature, the skill to talk or write about it, or is it to make them think critically, to form their own opinions about life? Or is it all these things? And how do you achieve that?

Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature discusses theories and methods of teaching literature, and looks at different methods for different genres (poetry, drama, fiction, theory). She lets you share not only in her own experience as a teacher of English literature, but also in the wisdom of a wealth of her colleagues. Throughout the book, Showalter cites stories and ideas from other university lecturers. I met with many different styles of teaching in her book, and was able to define my own style by comparing it to others’, and by taking from them what I liked. I also enjoyed the advice on stimulating active learning even in lectures with large groups of students (such as a shift of material or approach every fifteen minutes, buzz groups, problem-solving, and Q and A sessions to keep students engaged throughout).

I hope my subconscious read along with me, because Showalter’s Teaching Literature does not only provide many ideas and examples of ways to teach literature, but also acknowledges the anxieties that come with the profession (in her dream, Showalter is six weeks late for class; others discover that they need to teach in Latin!). Emphasising the joys of teaching as well as the worries that come with it, the book really made me feel more comfortable, and gave me lots of ideas to work with. I look forward to the start of the semester, and hope to be blogging more frequently. Reviews of the other books on the pile will follow. In the meantime, you are warmly invited to share your teaching wisdom and/or anxiety dreams in the comments!

Update: New Kid on the Hallway has a great post on student motivation today, with lots of inspiring comments. I was particularly thrilled by Tiruncula’s idea to make small groups within a class ‘responsible’ for a particular theme throughout the term, enabling them to function as experts in discussions. I love it!

• Blackwell’s site on the book, with sample chapters
• Interview with Showalter in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin