I’m juggling all the things I do: for instance, during the week poetry is on the backburner. I’ve managed, for the most part, to write my intended Independence Day entries (and, after announcing a few independence days to my discovery class, to prompt one student to ask how I know that… I was surprised that the fact that I write a blog is actually considered cool. When did the bloggers become the cool kids?) Poems have been on hold. Reading large slabs of my “whatever I want” pile has been on hold… hopefully I’ll get some of that on the weekend. This isn’t necessarily a complaint: I’m adjusting.

When a class has seemed to be a little flatter than usual—not as responsive, not sure what the hell I was talking about—I have been really affected, mood-wise. I asked a friend—who’s done a lot more teaching than I have—if that’s “usual.” I don’t know about everyone else out there, but apparently it’s at least not unusual for the first-time teacher. It gets easier. At the same time, I don’t think I’ve had any disasters so far, and when I’ve described what I’m doing in the class each day to other friends who are also starting out their teaching, they sound interested.

I was a little concerned that the fact I’ve kept the syllabus a little loose would be a problem. I asked Maggie Debelius, who both runs the Writing Center at Georgetown and also teaches a section of the “011” first year writing course. She said that it’s not a problem—that students don’t get terribly traumatised by it, for instance. That it has advantages and drawbacks: the drawbacks? Spending more time each day thinking through what the class will be doing the next day. The advantages? Flexibility to spend time on what seems to interest the students more—or even, in my case, to include two articles from yesterday’s New York Times that I happened to come across, and the cover and editorial from the issue of Vanity Fair that arrived in the mail last night.

I was worried that the subject matter might seem a little too—diffuse. There’s a common thread there—representations of teenagers. But I guess it jumps all over the place—cultural studies, sociology, politics, cinema studies, literary studies. At the same time, again, this is seen as something on an advantage: not every kid coming into university is going to end up being an English major. (Like, oh my god, they’re not?) So, again, there’s no rights and wrongs—no one way to do it.

Last night I went out with friends for a drink and a late-night burger. (My first in well over a month… what kind of pop culture fiend can I be? I don’t have a television, and I never eat fast food.) Pretty much all grad students, and a lot of them doing their first teaching as well. Nicole, who’d just finished her course, reminded me of another major thing we discussed in “Approaches to Teaching Writing.” Again, thanks to Randy Bass…

When you teach a course, it’s important to have some core goals. What are the things you really want every student to walk away with? For me the core goals are two-fold: I want, first, my students to understand the conventions of writing for an academic context. (And yes, I mean conventions… the mechanics of it, but also that the same subject matter and argument can be presented in different ways for different audiences.) And secondly, I want my students to be able to go beyond the “character” stage of reading, and get to the “representation” stage.

So, yesterday’s class. Once again I broke the 90 minute class roughly in half. For the first half of the class, thinking about the notion of “making writing visible in the classroom” I brought in the introductory paragraphs from two of my own response papers, as well as some other writing. I had copies of these examples of writing for everyone, as well as putting some of it up on screen. I read each of my own paragraphs (making the point that in my other life, when I’m not way too into pop culture, I know an awful lot about Victorian literature…) and we discussed them. One didn’t provide a thesis, but asked the types of questions that went straight into representation: in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. (Anyone who’s interested, I am fascinated by the fact that Lizzie and Eugene pretty much disappear from the narrative, and definitely disappear as a couple, for a quarter of the text. They’re a cross-class-lines match—a radical possibility for Dickens. Is he shying away from what he’s set up?) and the students picked up straight away that there was no thesis. But they were interested in the types of questions I was asking. The second, also on Dickens (thanks to Leona Fisher) was about Bleak House, and it did state a thesis. The students criticised where they thought I had used to much context/overview. They discussed the way I framed my questions. They saw that I’m not a perfect writer, but that I’m writing to conventions. I showed how I picked up on the language of the text (weaving “bleak” through the paragraph, for instance) to make Dickens’s language work for my argument. They got it. Happy teacher.

Then I turned to non-academic writing. I used two examples of blog writing, that make an argument. The first was from Matthew Yglesias—who I’ve just discovered. He’s not always putting forward an argument (more comment with occasional analysis… there’s so much on his blog that it is often one of the “take a look at this” style… but he’s great.) I asked the students to read each paragraph—going around the class, everyone had a “turn.” We discussed his strategy—he in fact moved between casual language and what was highly academic terminology. We pulled up the OED online and looked up a word they hadn’t come across. (Not too many people come across eschatology on a regular basis… I know it care of Bernard Muir.) One of my students picked up on the fact that he called it a “philosophical rant” and moved between the more casual language associated with the rant, and enlisting Aristotle, Kant, etc, in supporting his argument. I was so happy!

Then I read a post by from Angryblackbitch: not at all framed as an academic paper, and not the type of writing they're used to encountering in the classroom, but pretty fantastic as a piece of persuasive blogging. I asked them to try to reframe her argument in terms of a more “conventional” thesis statement… and they did. Honestly, I’m so happy with these students.

And then we watched the episode of the West Wing that they’re responding to for today’s class. I wasn’t sure how this would come across: I was upfront about this, saying that I hadn’t taught it before (the My So-Called Life I used on Wednesday I’d already used with the Discovery class, as well as having the reassurance that Robyn had used it in a community college class to good effect). Today they’re sending me all their pieces of writing, and as there are five students, we’re going to workshop each response as a class. Wish me luck.