My First Literature Class*

I just finished teaching my first college literature course during the five-week intensive summer semester.  What a blast!

It was a section of English 2025, Introduction to Fiction; I had made my section a themed one on southern women writers.  We met Monday through Friday from 12:40-2:10.  The weekend before classes began, I had forty students enrolled in the class (plus a waitlist).  However, another instructor's course fell through, so the night before classes started I got an email that my class had been split into two sections, and that half of the students would be assigned to the new section. 

That meant that ultimately, I ended up with 17 students enrolled in my class--an aspect of the class that I think has a lot to do with what a wonderful experience the class was for me.  With 17 students meeting five days a week, I knew everyone's name much faster than ever before, and the class quickly became the kind of classroom community that I hope for each semester.  While I continued to break students up into smaller groups to encourage discussion (and mix up the groups, so that they worked with different people), pretty quickly most of the students were piping up in the full class discussions--what's more, I often had students responding to each other in the full class discussions and even disagreeing with each other.  Being able to stand back while students discuss the text among themselves was just delightful. 

It was so difficult to narrow the readings down--class daily for five weeks meant that I was even more limited in what I could assign.  One realization I had when planning was that I didn't have to assign the readings chronologically--as an intro to fiction, and not a survey class, I didn't have to be comprehensive.  That helped immensely.  With this realization, I started the class with Ellen Douglas's brilliant Can't Quit You, Baby (a novel that pre-dates The Help by a couple of decades and addresses similar themes in a much more thorough manner)--I'm quite pleased with this choice.  Can't Quit You, Baby set up most of the themes I wished to address in the class; throughout the course, students referenced the Douglas novel in comparison to subsequent readings.  And, though I didn't realize it when making the course schedule, many students found the novel's style--the narrator's direct address of the reader, the changing points of view, and the role of the imagination in narration--to require some adjustment, so it also started the course off with the sense that students were going to need to put forth some effort.

I put a lot of credit for the course's success in my "QHQ" assignments, which I did as a student in a graduate seminar and which a colleague reported having success with in teaching an intro to fiction course.  I had students submit online one per week, with a 500-word minimum.  Though at the midterm (i.e., two and a half weeks in) students across the board said they liked them and found them helpful, in the course evals at the end of the semester, many students complained that they were too lengthy.  I'm wondering if perhaps this fall, I might have them be 300 words.  Regardless of the length, I really like like them as an assignment--they lead students through a bit more structure than a more open-ended response paper.  I especially like the kind of thought that ending on a question leads to. 

Plus, as summer students, the students tended to be extra-motivated.  I love all of the readings I assigned.  Students consistently surprised me with insights totally new to me--even of texts like Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," a text I thought I knew backwards and forwards. 

We started with Can't Quit You, Baby, and ended with The Color Purple (two texts which several students reported crying over, along with Kay Gibbons' Ellen Foster).  I'm really pleased with the arc that these two texts anchored, and I'm feeling a bit annoyed that I haven't found similar anchors for my fall literature class (which I've themed "The Many Souths," but keep having the problem that all of the texts I want to teach are set in Mississippi!).  Still, I'm really pleased (and a bit relieved!) that my first experience in the college literature classroom was such a positive one.  I hope that I can carry this positivity over to my fall class, and find ways to form a tight community in a class that's got more than twice the number I had this summer!

*Well, technically my second, counting last summer's Shakespeare course at Davidson for the Duke/TIP program, but that was three weeks of even more intensive coursework with gifted seventh and eighth graders, which was a unique experience. 

SAMLA Recap

Even if the conference had sucked, the fact that my flights to and from Atlanta for this conference left and arrived on time and without incident would have made it noteworthy, given how terrible my flying experiences in the past year have been.  I got there, my suitcase was one of the first out, and I loaded $5 onto my MARTA card and followed the directions from the Midtown MARTA station to my hotel.

That was Thursday--I had scheduled library day for my WGS classes, as they're working on their research papers and most of them are rather clueless about academic research and writing papers.  The librarian seems like she did a really thorough job--she sent me the five page handout she gave all of them!  That should be a good basis for a quiz on Tuesday, I'm thinking, along with some questions about the assigned reading.  We're reading Neil Gaiman's short story "Changes" for Tuesday; I hope it goes over well.  I think it's a really great story.

So I got to my fancy hotel room around 4:30 on Thursday (a tv in the bathroom!  separate shower and bathtub!  robes! your choice of two textures of toilet paper!) and was hungry--checking out the room service menu, silly me assumed it would be cheaper to go down to the restaurant and get food, and the cheeseburger with smoked gouda sounded perfect.   However, they weren't open when I tried them at five, so I tried again at six--only to realize once I was seated that they were much fancier than the room service menu.  No cheeseburgers here.  So, I went ahead and ordered a fancy dinner--spinach and arugula salad (with caramelized bacon dressing and really sharp bleu cheese) and a fried chicken dinner that came with mac and cheese that tasted like it had smoked gouda in it (so, I did get the smoked gouda).  I was so full that I didn't even get dessert.

I made it to the 8am panels in the morning (despite being in EST time and not being able to sleep that night, from anxiety and a lot of coffee)--the 8am one was about publishing, and there was a lot of good nuts and bolts advice.  I introduced myself to the associate editor of the Mississippi Quarterly, who seems like a nice person.  I then went to a panel on Susan Glaspell, about whom I know very little, and quite honestly, that was one of the panels that just seemed like words words words to me.  My session was the one after that, so I probably would have been like that regardless.  I did see a friend from Tennessee there, whom I was quite glad to see. 

My panel had two other panelists, a panel chair, and three audience members.  Friday, there were concurrent panel sessions all day, with no break scheduled for lunch.  So, despite being the Flannery O'Connor Society panel, I think being scheduled for 11:45-1:15 means that most people went to lunch.  Sigh.  I played my clip of "Jesus Built My Hotrod" and gave my paper, and afterward had some good questions that I was able to answer.  No one asked about The Violent Bear it Away or any of the other O'Connor texts which I haven't read that I was afraid they would ask about.  (Though this fear isn't unfounded--Eudora Welty Society and Edith Wharton Society people were all asking questions about this particular letter and stuff--my fears weren't completely unfounded.)  I was quite relieved to get through that--and am really glad that I've now had the experience of standing at the front of a conference room and turning my boom box up to 11 as industrial music plays.  I sure wish I could go back in time to 1991 and show myself this image.

I had a lovely lunch with my fellow panelist, saw UT and Ole Miss people I like, and met several people who went to LSU, several of whom had the same adviser as me.  Their success gives me hope.

It really was wonderful to get my presentation  over with and enjoy the conference.  After having lunch, I returned to panels until 8 Friday night; I made to the 8:00 panel on Saturday, too, and went until about 6, ate dinner, and then went to the music performance that ran from 9:30-midnight that night.  As the alarm clock went off (I even dug the alarm clock--it had a choice of alarm noises, and I'm now a fan of waking to cathedral bells) Saturday morning at 7, my urhg I don't want to wake up was quickly replaced by--ooh!  Edith Wharton panel at 8! which got me out of bed.  I realize how few people this would work for.  I am, indeed, a dork.

I came away with three distinct ideas for papers/articles.  One, I'd like to expand my conference paper, interview the musicians I referred to, really explore the connection between the "masculine technological sublime" of Wise Blood that so appeals to this particular group of Wax Trax musicians.  Perhaps expand to include Deliverance, as Al Jourgensen also samples that, and Corrosion of Conformity, prior to their song and album Wise Blood, had an album called Deliverance.

Two, I was inspired by the Appalachian lit panel (besides reveling in hearing people who sound like my relatives), in which someone defined Appalachian lit in terms of its connection to land--I think there's something to be considered in what Appalachian studies can contribute to southern studies and its confusion over place versus real estate versus can we ever escape the Agrarians?  Most of the Agrarians who wrote about place and the idealized farmer never worked a plow--however, I think a lot of Appalachian writers are in fact writing about what they know.  I think the southern rural/urban split is not as binary as it's been claimed--even rural people now make regular trips to Walmart.  And tend to love Cracker Barrel.

And three, I was thinking about what a good introduction the anecdote that Kaye Gibbons told about going to wire her daughter bail money from the Berry Southern Women Writers Conference and asking herself, "What would Eudora Welty do?"  Thinking about her orphaned character Ellen Foster, when compared with Welty's ophaned Laura McRaven in Delta Wedding, I'm curious as to what happens when you put them side by side.  Do they diverge?  Did Gibbons ask herself WWEWD? when she was writing Ellen Foster, and, if so, did she then do the same thing or something different?

I'm pleased with these ideas.  And then last night, Knoxville musician R.B. Morris played along with an amazing fiddle player from West Virginia--between that and the mountain accents, I was in heaven.  Two hours of fine mountain music.  I felt so, so homesick that I'm thinking of taking my mother up on her offer of a mandolin for Christmas.  There's definitely still a time for drumming in my life, but I'm thinking mandolin music might be medicinal, too.

Now, on to another big week.  Right now, I'm scheduled to be at school every day.  We'll see if that actually happens.