Duveronymous Yawp

Since I posted a list of CofC’s student evaluation questions/prompts back before the 4th of July, I have seen several other discussions of student evaluations, on their shortcomings, and most recently, in ProfHacker George Williams’s call for thinking about making the most of the opportunity, even if it is flawed.

I have been collecting links on delicious on the discussion and will be adding to them as I see more: you can see them here.

NOT the CofC's evaluation form.

I just got my student evaluations from last semester (which were a mixed bag).  I have been thinking about evaluations and teaching a lot lately, even doing some reading on it. I’m alternating right now between Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do and Teresa Huston’s Teaching What You Don’t Know. I am always thinking about my teaching (usually through the lens of regret for not having done as well as I wanted to or in anticipation of changes to upcoming classes).  An added impetus to my reflections these days is the tenure and promotion binders I have to put together by mid-September, which will include a brief, reflective teaching narrative. Continue reading →

We’ve redesigned the English major.  And I am, accordingly, redesigning English 344, Late 19th Century American Literature, a course I am teaching in the fall.  Below is a quick and dirty rundown of some of the changes and some ideas for how my course will be changing.

The English major used to be based on a national/historical period approach: you took two sophomore British lit surveys and one American lit survey and in the upper-division, two classes of Brit lit before 1700, two after, one American lit before 1900 and one after, and three electives — whatever you want, so long as it is upper division and in the department.  (I should say that “used to” isn’t exactly right — that is the major still for the majority of our students).

The new major, effective for all new majors starting this fall, still maintains the surveys, but adds in an Continue reading →

I just read “Beyond Critical Thinking,” a short article in the Chronicle Review by Michael S. Roth, which has been languishing in my “to read” folder since January, when it came out. It’s well worth the read if you are a teacher or student of the humanities.  Roth, who is President of Wesleyan University, argues  that the “unmasking” function of interpretation that we teach as a defining feature of critical thinking (CT) and which becomes the defining feature of CT for many has value but also can yield unfortunate consequences.  “In a humanities culture in which being smart often means being a critical unmasker,” Roth contends, “our students may become too good at showing how things don’t make sense,” and this can encourage a “guardedness” that may not serve them well.  A skepticism so thorough as to make any position untenable may make it impossible to see how any position (however flawed or despicable) may have made sense to anyone at all and, thus, undercut opportunities for learning from such positions. Continue reading →

I still don’t know, officially, whether or not my summer evening graduate course, which would/will start in 6 days is officially on. I have five CofC students signed up, and the graduate director at the Citadel told me last week that we have three on the role there.  Eight should do it, but when you teach in this joint program, at least this is true from the CofC side, you can’t keep up with enrollments in the other institution, so you find yourself having to email the other school’s grad director to get the basic information.  There must be some way to fix that.

In any case, I am proceeding with course planning.  The web site is in place, and I continue to update it.

UPDATE 6/26: the class canceled due to insufficient enrollment.

Unless the enrollments drop considerably, I’ll be starting a new graduate class in two weeks on American Regional and Local Color writing in the late 19th century (course website under development).  Here’s the course description, in draft:

This course examines the literary history, generic conventions, and cultural concerns of regional and local color writing in the US at the end of the 19th century. By all accounts, the flexible regional/local color genre of fiction was dominant form in its time; thus, its study yields a greater understanding of American literary culture as a whole, shedding light on other, perhaps more widely studied genres in the period, realism and naturalism.  Regional/local color writing addressed some of American culture’s salient areas of concern at the turn of the last century: gender, race, class, sexuality, immigration, capitalism, technology, urbanization, to name a few.  The significance of the genre–in both reflecting and constructing American culture along these lines–is hard to overstate.

Here’s a tentative primary reading ist: Continue reading →