Quod She

I've moved!

2011-08-05T18:53:00.002-04:00

And here's where I've moved to!

OK, I thought a post with that title might be more obvious on the blogrolls of those of you who use those updating blogrolls that show the most recent post.

That is all.

Time for a change!

2011-07-10T18:26:00.004-04:00

You know what this blog needs to get re-started? A NEW LOCATION! Yup, I've just moved into my new digs at a fancy Wordpress blog. You can now find me here -- just replace the blogspot in this old URL with wordpress to get you there (and to update your blogrolls and RSS readers).

I thought now was a good time to move since I'm entering a new phase of my career, the amorphous "mid-career" stage. I'm not only post-tenure, but post-sabbatical (I'm not hopeful that we'll have them any more in another seven years), so it seemed like a good time to upgrade the blog a bit.

I've got a introductory post up at the new place now, and I've also moved all the archives over from here. And shortly, I really will re-commence substantive blogging. I've got a post brewing about an infuriating e-text issue and tons of pictures to show you and stuff to tell you about my research trip to London (where I was too crazily busy to find time to blog). So go check out the new place and give me some feedback there.

I've been doing all sorts of house-cleaning and moving in the electronic realm, actually. I've moved the blog from Blogger to Wordpress, started up a Google+ profile (which I really hope will ultimately take the place of Facebook), and switched up the way I do e-mail. Basically, I'm trying to move Dr. Virago's world away from Google products (although I still have a Gmail account under that name) so that I won't find myself accidentally commenting under my real name on blogs or sending an e-mail to a friend as Dr. Virago. Plus things are just prettier and sleeker over at the Wordpress blog -- go see!

Sabbatical makes for boring blogging

2011-04-30T10:22:00.002-04:00

Sorry for the radio silence lately, but there just hasn't been much to talk about, really. *However*, I'm leaving today for six weeks in England, so maybe I'll have more to tell you about from there. The flat I'm renting is in a celebrity-rich part of Belsize Park, so I'll be sure to tell you if I have any star sightings. :)

Who the heck is the audience for a "companion to" piece??

2011-02-11T18:24:00.002-05:00

I have been tasked with writing a chapter for one of those "companion to" books, one with a *huge* charge: all of medieval British literature. So I'm writing a single chapter on a single very large genre (rather than, say, writing a more focused chapter for a guide to said genre). And worse, its word limit is 7500 words. (OK, that's 30 double-spaced typescript pages, but still, it's a big topic!) I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by the task before me.

But what most has me puzzled is just who I'm writing *for*. The style guide gives me some help, as it clearly privileges a synthesis of scholarly debates over an encyclopedia-like summary of the primary texts. But then it hilariously says it should be aimed at "undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars." Um, OK, then who the heck *isn't* it aimed at? (Well, a "general audience," I suppose -- but I kind of assumed that already.) And though it emphasizes scholarly debates over the primary texts, it also says I shouldn't assume too much detailed prior knowledge.

*headdesk*

Can my wise and witty readers help me out here? I've got some ideas, but I thought maybe I could spark some discussion about what is and isn't helpful in these guides and companions. In the case of my subject, I see non-specialists in it get all sorts of things wrong because they rely on out of date scholarship (i.e., what they learned in grad school or college years ago), and imho, no subfield of medieval literary studies has changed its mind so much about the basic facts as this particular subfield has. So beginning researchers are entering a minefield of bad sources. I think I should perhaps keep that in mind in my writing, perhaps even make that one of the shaping ideas of it. That would be helpful to anyone turning to it for a crash course in the subject. But I don't want it to sound like my "how to do research" class for first-year grad students; I don't want to talk down to people.

And on the other hand, one of the problems I have with many of these "companion to" essays is that they don't start at the beginning, that they do, in fact, assume too much knowledge, especially for undergrads and beginning grad students, so that reading one is no different than diving into any random point in the scholarship. And I don't want my chapter to be one of those, either.

Oy, what to do? Any thoughts? And if there are models of what you think makes the perfect "companion to" essay, lead me to it. Of course, different series do it differently, but even without those series, there's a lot of variety, so any model is useful. And if you were trying to bone up on a field, what would you find most helpful?

(Yeah, I'm being vague, I know. But hey, now this post applies to ALL the fields of literary studies!)

My super-awesome, brand-new early medieval lit course for the fall; or, something to be excited about!

2011-02-01T19:21:00.005-05:00

OK, I should be doing research work now—I still haven't been as productive as I'd like to have been this sabbatical—but I'm excited about one of my fall classes and I wanted to tell you all about it, both in terms of its content (which the medievalists should be interested in and can give me feedback on) and in terms of its methods, objectives, and assessments, which just about anyone in literature or the humanities more generally might have something to say about. And can I just say that I'm glad I'm finally looking forward to teaching again? Some of you may remember a post from last semester in which I admitted I was burnt out as burnt out can be. It's amazing what time away plus a revamped course can do to get you excited again!

First of all, let me give you some background on the revamping. Here in the RBU English department, we have one undergraduate course on the books for the broad medieval period (which, btw, is "slashed," or combined with the lower-level MA course). We also have a Chaucer course. I can come up with other courses and offer them as special topics, but our students seem to be allergic to special topics, thinking they won't count for anything, even when they will—even when we say so in the course description. (Problem number one is that they don't always read the course description—the one written for that semester's particular version of the course—and if they read anything, they read the brief, vague catalog description.) Anyway, in previous years I treated the everything-but-Chaucer course as a kind of smorgasbord introduction to the entire medieval period, from the Anglo-Saxon period through the 15th century and even a little into the 16th (if we count the performance history of medieval drama). I used to put up a timeline on the first day to show them that we'd be speeding through more centuries of literature than all of their other English literature courses combined! It was enough to make my head spin, and I'm used to thinking across large swaths of time. In the very beginning, I tried to get some Irish and Welsh literature in there as well as Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin literature, but the one time I did that, the class was an amorphous mess of "If it's Tuesday, this must be The Táin " kind of sampling. Bleh. So after awhile I started whittling down to the texts I most loved to teach or knew best. And for awhile that worked, but I knew that my students and I were both missing out on so much other good stuff, and I was starting to feel my brain atrophy. So, two years ago, with the encouragement of the undergraduate studies chair and the vote of the faculty, I changed the course description in the catalog to say that subsequent semesters would alternate between the earlier and later parts of the 8+ centuries of the medieval period, with some semesters offering thematically arranged topics across the whole period; it also directs students to consult the course description on the department website to find out the current topic. We also made it possible for students to repeat the course for credit if the specific topics are different (this is especially important for any MA students who are interested in the Middle Ages, but may also be true of some undergraduates).

So. Here we are approaching book-ordering and course description-writing time for next fall and I have to make good on my promise! This fall I'll be devoting the class to Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic (ASNaC) literatures, roughly those written or thought to have their origins before the full conquest of the Normans (for the Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and Welsh literatures) or from roughly the same period for the Old Norse literature—basically up to the 11th century for the Anglo-Saxon literature and up to the 12th and 13th centuries for the rest. There will, of course, be a little fudging, but the next time, I'll start with the Norman invasion in England and stick to the British Isles. And then after that, having taught a bigger range of texts, I'll know better what works for the students and what works together, and I'll come up with a thematically arranged class.

Of course, my more historically arranged courses aren't going to be without their themes, and one of the driving themes of this ASNaC course is the interlocking contact of these cultures. The Irish sent monks to England; the Vikings invaded England and Ireland; Wayland the smithy shows up in the both Old English and Old Norse contexts; shape-shifters appear in Norse and Celtic texts; the warrior-poet (or at least the articulate warrior) is a recurring figure across the cultures, and text after text brings the poet and/or the scribe into the narrative; the surviving texts are all written or written down by Christians but often draw on the pagan past even for explicitly Christian subjects; and so on. I know that it's really difficult to show or prove direct influence between the vernacular literatures in these cultures, but I want to create a general impression of a multi-cultural, multi-lingual, vibrant—even violent—state of flux for the insular and peninsular cultures of the North Sea in and around the British Isles. And so my syllabus isn't going to be arranged in any neat geographic or chronological way (which would be really hard to do, anyway, given how many questions there are about dates and places of origin for so many of these texts). I don't have it all sorted out yet, but on the first day I'll show images of three material objects—The Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the Franks Casket (especially the Wayland/Magi side)—to stage the shared cultures and influences, and also to begin pointing out the blend or juxtaposition of pagan and Christian narratives and themes (well, in the Franks Casket, anyway). The next day I'm thinking of either doing "Widsith," "Deor," and the Eddic "Lay of Volund" (to continue the "Wayland is everywhere!" theme, and also to set up the poet-as-hero idea with the first two), or else jumping into The Táin (after all, the Celts were in Britain first!), and doing "Widsith," "Deor," and "The Lay of Volund" after Beowulf, which I'd do after The Táin (to contrast "epic" heroic tales from two cultures). At any rate, I'm definitely going to intersperse appropriately analogous Eddic poems throughout the reading of Old English and Old Norse texts, and I may assign Hrolf Kraki's Saga right after the Beowulf -"Widsith" sequence, to get all those references to Hrothgar together. Usually I teach Judith after Beowulf, since they are manuscript neighbors, after all, and because I like to teach Judith as a response to Beowulf—especially as a rather critical response to the heroic drinking culture—which complicates the whole "yeah, we're Christians, but we admire our pagan ancestors" idea. But Judith could be fruitfully put off until after Hrolf Kraki. And skipping to the end of my syllabus, I'm going to put the Welsh last just to honor the fact that they were the last to fall to the Normans among the Anglo-Saxons and Celts. Well, they'll be sort of last, because on the very last day of reading, I'm going to assign "Pangur Ban," which is an Irish poem (and one of the oldest poetic texts on the syllabus), but which uses a Welsh word ("pangur") in the name of the poem's eponymous cat. And I'll be assigning it in Seamus Heaney's translation in order to reinforce the continued and very present-day vibrancy of this very old body of literature. (I also think it's a great poem to end with right before final exams since it depicts the scholar at work.) But The Mabinogi and Taliesin will get pride of place just before "Pangur Ban," even though the Book of Taliesin and "The Tale of Taliesin" are later in their manuscript forms than the dates I've imposed above. Like I said, there will be fudging.

So that's roughly the content of the course. I've got the list of texts I want to do and some rough idea where they'll go in the syllabus, but I haven't worked out the finer details yet, and in order to do that, first I have to, ahem, *read* some of these texts. I've never read most of the Old Norse material (or only in excerpt or summary form), but thanks to my friends on Facebook, I got a lot of good suggestions for stuff to assign and I'm going to sort through it this summer as I prep the class. And I'm excited to read it, too, because, hey, new stuff! (Well, new to me.) But I'm just as excited about the shape of the rest of the class—its assignments and their conception—as I am about the content. So lemme tell you about that, too, K?

For the undergraduates, there are going to be five graded components: participation, which counts a variety of ways of "participating" (10%); 8 one-page response papers (40% - 5% each); 10 submitted discussion questions (10% - 1% each); a 6-8 page essay in which they analyze at least three different translations of a text (20%); and a final essay-exam (20%). In the past I've taken exams out of my course assignments and replaced them with more writing assignments, but I've decided to put an exam back into the equation in this class for a few reasons. First of all, since one of the overarching themes of the class is the connections between the bodies of literature we're reading (even if those connections are nothing more than thematic), I want assessment that emphasizes seeing and articulating those connections, analogies, and parallels. A final, cumulative exam does that better than discrete papers on individual texts. I'm also going to emphasize making connections in the ongoing short assignments—the response papers and the discussion questions—both of which will also serve to keep students engaged in the material. Between the response papers and the discussion questions, they'll have to have thought deeply about at least 18 different texts assigned in the course (because they won't be able to do a response paper and a discussion question on the same text), which will set them up well for the exam. Still, concentrated focus and sustained analysis of a text is important, too, and that's what the translation analysis paper is about. And the response papers are about close reading, so those assignments are related in their skills, as well. But the other reason why I decided on a final exam rather than a final paper is something Tenured Radical said (though I can't find the exact post now) about giving students different ways to succeed in a class. Some students get neurotic about papers; some get neurotic about exams. I'm hoping that the short and largely informal nature of the response papers will keep the paper-writing neuroses down to a minimum, plus students can write them quickly (like an exam) or fuss over them, if that's their wont. And then the exam will be there for those who do well under pressure.

Meanwhile, the way I've set up preparation for the exam—especially since there's only one and it's cumulative—should help the students feel really invested in it and in the content of the course, as well as prepared for it. I'm really excited about this bit, because it's the first time I've planned something like this. Instead of assigning any new texts to read in the last week, the students and I are going to use that time to collectively write the exam. Like the discussion questions (and to some extent, the response papers), this is planned to help students realize that in many way they make the course what it is and determine what they get out of it; what's more, in both cases, I hope they'll learn by doing, rather than by merely responding. But again, it's also about the content of the course, about making connections. So, on the penultimate day of class, students will be charged with coming to class having reviewed the semester's work (oh, and yes, I'm going to emphasize note-taking in this class) and being prepared to talk about the themes of the course and its texts. (I am partly inspired on this point by Jeffrey Cohen's "Myths of Britain" class and their final review session, which he blogged about here.) And here's where I go crazy: after that class, they'll be charged with coming back on the final day with three potential final exam questions they've written themselves, based on the list of themes we've generated together. And we'll use that last day of class to select and hone at least ten questions. They'll know that the three final exam questions will come from that list of ten which they have helped to write, but I get to choose the final three. Now, I'm going to let them know this—and everything above—from the very beginning of the semester. In many of my classes, I give out the complete packet of assignments on the first day of class, and I intend to do that here, too (and schedule time to talk about each one on subsequent days). And so they'll know from the beginning that they're going to be responsible for helping to create the exam, but also that I reserve the right to do it myself if I think they're slacking or trying to get away with something. And the discussion question assignment will help them learn what really generates essay-length discussion and what doesn't. The pedagogical goal here is to get them actively making connections, cataloging, and sorting ideas as we go and in summary at the end of the semester. That's what a final exam is traditionally supposed to get students to do, but I find my students often regard a final exam itself as an opaque and mysterious thing and don't know how to go about making the broader-stroke connections it asks. If they have a hand in making it themselves, perhaps it will become more transparent to them—and that's a lesson they can take to other classes, too.

That's the undergraduate side of things. The graduate student side is a little different. First of all, I don't expect many graduate students to take the course, but for those who do, they'll have to do the response papers and discussion questions, too, as well as participate, of course. But instead of the short translation analysis and final exam, they'll have a graduate-level research paper in three stages: preliminary abstract/research question; polished abstract and annotated bibliography; and final paper. And I intend to make them meet with me for one group session about how best to go about the research and for individual sessions as they tighten up their research plan. But in keeping with the meta-theme of making connections—as well as accounting for the fact that it's rare that I have graduate students who want to be medievalists (the last two years bringing a plethora of exceptions, but still being the exception)—I'm going to allow them to write on issues of reception and revival if they wish. So if they want to write on Taliesin in The Idylls of the King, or Heaney's "Irishing" of Beowulf, or neo-Norse paganism and American pop culture, or whatever, they can. It might be harder for me to help them do it, but I'll enjoy learning something from their work.

So there you have it: a fall class almost ready to go on February 1st! Can you tell I was procrastinating? So, what do you think?

Goggies! (That's "doggies" in LOLDog)

2011-01-29T13:17:00.014-05:00

I've been transporting more dogs on their way to foster and forever homes since I first posted about doing this. And today was a treat because I got to meet my first German Shorthaired Pointers (GSPs) in person. Someone on the NBRAN volunteer list forwarded a call for drivers for a "GSP Express" run for National GSP Rescue carrying two 2-year-old GSP females; since it was coming right through our area, I volunteered. And I fell in *love*. If it weren't for the fact that Bullock *really* doesn't want a second dog and we're not sure Pippi would be happy to have a dog friend, I'd be signing up to adopt a GSP right now. And Bullock was pretty charmed, too -- I took him along because these were young and rambunctious dogs, and I knew I wouldn't be able to drive and manage them at the same time.

Anyway, let me give you a sense of how lovable they were. Meet Blue (the black and white dog on the left) and Cora (the liver and white dog on the right), two of the sweetest love-bugs I've ever met:

They look a little scared here (and wouldn't you be in their situation?), and Cora kept a kind of curious and serious demeanor most of the time, but they were also eager to be petted and to give kisses in return, and they settled into the car almost immediately. Blue even rolled over for a belly rub as soon as she got in the car, and Cora rested her head on the back of my seat, next to my head, for most of the ride as she watched where we were going. Blue, meanwhile, rested her head on the console in between the seats -- all the better to get ear-scritches from Bullock. And they were hilariously bi-polar: in the car they were mellow and calm (Blue even slept soundly for half the ride), but out of the car during the exchanges from one driver to another, they were insane balls of excitement and energy. Blue tried to crawl over my back to get out of the car as I untethered their leashes from the seatbelts because getting out of the car was SO EXCITING she just couldn't wait! But both in and out they were full of kisses and doggy affection. Adorable! And just look at Cora's eyes and reddish-brown fur. Wouldn't she look great with Pippi? And apparently Blue's coloring is rare -- it's likely she comes from a true *German* GSP pedigree since black and white isn't yet recognized by the AKC as part of the breed standard. Or maybe she's part English Pointer (which does come in black and white). Eh, who cares -- she was a doll. It was hard to hand either of them over, and now they're already half way through the next state in their journey. Sigh.

Btw, GSPs also come in a roan variation, like Pippi, and a roan GSP is the star of that Toyota "squeaky toy" ad you may have seen. ("Roan" in this context means the colors are blended together -- so liver and white are blended on GSPs and the orange and white is blended on Pippi. An American Brittany can also be liver and white, whether roan or not.) This also give you an idea of the crazy energy of a GSP. If you have a dog, you might want to play this video when the dog isn't around. Or, play it and watch your dog possibly go nuts looking for the toy:

Anyway, before Cora and Blue, I did two more Brittany runs. I promise not to post about *every* run I do -- I'll generally stick to notable dogs. But since I could never get Toby, on that first run, to face the camera, I thought I'd give you the opposite now. Meet Silas, who wanted to know, "What's that thing you're pointing at me? Can I eat it?"

Silas was a sweet, older gentleman, and a good copilot, as you can see here:

And before Silas, there was sweet, adorable Julio, a 10-month-old who wanted nothing more than to cuddle in my lap and get belly rubs. Luckily once he was getting said belly rubs, he was pretty calm -- a bit like the effect of a snake charmer's music on a cobra -- and so I was able to drive one-handed and rub Julio's belly with another. And oh, he was so, so soft. I often say that petting Pippi, who is also very soft, is like petting a bunny, but Julio was even softer. So I guess petting him was like petting a *baby* bunny. Heavenly! Unfortunately, what I wasn't able to get from Julio was a picture, because I was driving him after dark. But here are the small photos from the adoption site:

But don't fall in love with him -- turns out his foster already has and is adopting him. Hooray for Julio!

And what would a dog post be without a bonus picture of Pippi for all of her internet fans? Here's one of Bullock's 1,000+ photos of her (no, I'm not exaggerating!), this one from last summer:

Advice for a budding medievalist (in literary studies)

2011-01-27T19:44:00.010-05:00

Yes, I'm still here. Holiday travels and events, plus getting back into the swing of organizing my unstructured time, took a toll on my blogging. Also, I was trying to decide what to write about next and dithering over it until I got an e-mail today asking me to give advice to a first year undergraduate student at another institution who's interested in medieval literature and in possibly pursuing graduate studies down the line. And I thought, "Wow, that would make a great blog post, especially since it's medieval in content and I haven't written a medieval-related post in awhile (which means that Jonathan Jarrett has probably taken me off of his blog roll or is about to!)."

So let me share a draft of what I might write to him when he writes to me (it was his professor who first contacted me on his behalf and the student hasn't gotten in touch with me) and see what you think. Please feel free to add to or argue with what I say. And since it's advice for a student at a very small college, where departments consist of 3-5 people and no classical languages are taught, perhaps in the comments we can also make suggestions for those students at bigger colleges and universities. (And note that in the letter I *gently* address the "whether you should go to graduate school at all" issue. He *is* only a freshling.) Also, if my tone is too condescending, please tell me! I'm not used to talking to first years about graduate school!

Edited to add: with some minor revisions, you could easily adapt this advice to apply to any English major. Do a few more revisions, and it could apply to any humanities major or any other liberal arts major. Feel free to use, adapt, and link!

So, here's what I might write:

Dear Stu,

I'm so glad your professor put you in touch with me. I'm happy to answer your questions and give you some general advice about what to do to pursue your interests in medieval literature now and in the future. You're already *way* ahead of the game by thinking about graduate school already as a first year student. I didn't realize that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. until I was already out of college, and I felt like I spent the first couple of years in graduate school catching up with what I didn't know. So, in a way, the advice I'm giving you now is what I wish I had done myself as an undergraduate.

OK, first of all, you have three and a half years to explore: to find out what you love, what you're good at, and who you want to be. Don't be so focused on the goal of getting into graduate school to study medieval literature that you miss your chance to learn new things -- things you might not even yet know you'll love. You can get more advice like this about college in general and how to get most out of it from the book The Thinking Student's Guide to College: 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education by Andrew Roberts (University Chicago Press). Not all of his advice will apply to you, since the author works at a big research university (Northwestern) and bases a lot of advice on what resources students at such big places have. For example, he says not to take too many courses with any single professor, but there are only 5 professors in your English department, so that can't be helped. Also, he has an annoying habit of saying that most professors are more interested in their research than teaching. That's definitely not true at your college, which is committed to undergraduate teaching, and it's not even true of everyone at a research university like his. But most of his advice is excellent and equally applicable to you as it is to a Northwestern student.

But now, on to the more specific advice about your plans to pursue medieval literature. First of all, as an undergraduate, you shouldn't narrow yourself too much beyond the major, and your major is English literature, not only medieval literature. Make your goal being the best *English* major you can be and you'll actually be helping your chances of getting into a good graduate program. Admissions committees in Ph.D. programs don't want to see someone so focused so early that they seem unwilling to learn or incapable of making connections across a wider literary history. As professors we often have to teach outside of our specialties in surveys and introductory classes, so the better educated you are in English studies more broadly (including English literature, American literature, comparative and world literature, and rhetoric and composition), the more flexible a scholar and teacher you'll be. If your department offers a literary theory course, be sure to take that, as you'll need it in graduate school, and it will give you the tools to think with as you study and write about literature now. Start thinking of yourself now as one who studies and thinks about literature and how it works, and not just someone who reads lots of literature. And to do that really well, it helps to think about how language works, so if take a history of the English language course if it's offered. It also helps to have experience thinking about as many different genres and cultural and historical contexts as possible, so try to take a range of courses that teach you about as many periods and types of literature as possible, even ones you think you might not like. Even if you still want to be a medievalist, those other courses will help you think about how literature works, and therefore how medieval literature works, perhaps in contrast to how a novel or short story or modern play or contemporary poem works. Take the maximum credits you're allowed in your major department, but don't skimp on related fields: history, philosophy, art history, literature from other cultures and languages (more on languages in a minute), and theater (especially theater history). As you're doing all this, get to know your professors, not just in class, but out of class in their office hours and any department events. The more they know you, your work, and your goals, the better their letters of recommendation will be for you. At a small college like yours, it's really easy to know your professors and for them to know you -- take advantage of that opportunity.

And as you get further in your major, start doing research and reading criticism about the works you're writing about. Write research papers for as many classes as you can -- ones that don't just summarize what other critics have said, but that enter into conversations with them, argue with them, and get ideas from them (with all due credit, of course!). Ask your professors for advice on what to read, on how to do research (if there isn't a course on research methods), and on how to write in conversation with the criticism you find as you progress in the major. (I recommend the book They Say / I Say as a good guide to writing research papers, and librarians are *great* human resources for helping you learn to do the research.) If your college or the English department offers you the chance to write an honors thesis, take it. Graduate school and a large part of being a professor is about doing research and writing original scholarship about literature -- again, in conversation with other scholars -- so the earlier you learn to think that way and to read what others have written, the better jump you'll have on graduate school and being a scholar yourself. After all, one of the best ways to learn to do something is to imitate someone else doing it, and in reading and thinking about literary criticism, you can start using that criticism as models for your own writing.

While on your college's web site, I saw that your department offers a summer study-abroad trip to England with the professor who teaches medieval and early modern literature in English. If you can afford it, go on this trip. You get course credit and a great experience all in one, and there's nothing like being in the places you've only read about. Even if you've been to England before, being a student there is different from being a tourist, and includes opportunities you'll only really get as a student.

Now, there isn't time in four years to take every course ever offered, and you have other requirements and educational goals to meet, too (and you should aim to get that broad liberal arts education in the best sense -- don't skimp on the science and social science courses). So you should be choosy in some ways. Since you want to be a medievalist, choose courses in related fields most closely related to your interests. You'll still get the benefit of breadth, since you'll be learning how different disciplines have different goals and objects of study. If there aren't enough specifically medieval offerings in history, art history, philosophy, etc., take courses on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds (especially Roman) and on the European Renaissance. Or find out what was going on in Asia and North America while Europe was in the Middle Ages.

And take as much of a foreign language or two as you can. Be serious about learning the language beyond the required two years. Unfortunately, your college doesn't seem to offer Latin, so take French or German, or both. If you passed out of the language requirement, take another one anyway, or get better in the one you know. Most Ph.D. programs require proficiency in at least one foreign language, and sometimes two. For medievalists studying English literature, Latin, French, and German are the most useful, commonly-taught languages to know. There are intensive summer programs in Latin, if that's an option for you now (Google the phrase "intensive Latin summer courses"); you could also leave that for later, once you're in a graduate program.

And finally, start looking into graduate programs in your junior year. Most applications are due in December and January of the year before you plan to start. Of course, there's nothing wrong with taking time off from school -- I took three years -- but if you want to go straight from college, you'll really need to start getting applications ready over the summer and early fall of your senior year. While you're doing all this, talk to your professors, especially the more recent graduates of Ph.D. programs -- the ones with the title "Assistant Professor" -- and ask them about what graduate school is like, where they went, what being a professor is like (especially beyond the classroom), and how they got their jobs. I'll be honest: I don't recommend graduate school for everyone. But you're off to such an early start thinking about it, that if you start preparing now, even if you choose to go another route, you'll still have given yourself a great and enjoyable education. If by this time two years from now, in your junior year, you're still thinking about graduate school and no one has given you the "bad news" talk, get back in touch with me. And in the meantime, use the resources of your career center and learn about other career paths you might take. There are a lot of interesting careers out there you've never even heard of, as well as a lot of smart people in the world who love literature but who aren't professors and have fulfilling lives. It's good to have options.

And any time you want to ask me more advice -- especially about graduate programs for budding medievalists -- drop me a line. Best of luck and keep in touch!

RBOC - Gray winter day edition

2010-12-19T13:46:00.009-05:00

Blogging bullets:

You may have noticed that I have no blog roll. That's because it was a Blogrolling blog roll, and Blogrolling has ceased to exist. That's a shame, because it was a handy system (though the ads on it in the last year or so of its existence were annoying). But I cut and pasted the blogroll before that happened, and when I get the energy for it, I'll repost an updated version of it.
I'm thinking of changing to WordPress. Those of you who've made the move, how hard is it to move the archive of the blog? What do you like/dislike about each platform?
I'm also thinking of claiming my blog as service/outreach when I do my 5 year post-tenure review or when I go up for full professor. Any opinions about that?
My partner has been known as Bullock on this blog because I named him in our Deadwood-watching phase, during which time he grew a Seth Bullock-style mustache and goatee. But Deadwood is long gone and my man is clean-shaven. Plus, even though "bullock" meant "young bull" in Middle English and that's one of its meanings today, it also can mean a castrated bull, which is not the association I wish to project for my Bullock. (Though it is kind of a funny pairing with Virago.) But it would be confusing to rename him. I'm thinking maybe of just putting a "cast of characters" in the sidebar and explaining the origins of the name. Any other ideas?
I have been remiss in telling Pastry Pirate fans that she has long been blogging elsewhere. First she was in New Zealand, working and exploring, and now she's working in Antarctica. No, really. I kind of think "Baking in Antarctica" should be the title of the blog, but since it started before her life on the Ice Planet Hoth (as I like to think of it), it's called Stories That Are True.
Hey, cool, I managed to blog more than in 2009. Not exactly an awesome accomplishment, since I was really lame in 2009, but still an improvement. What should I blog about next?

Work/Life bullets:

Our Christmas tree is up, all the Christmas shopping is done, and all but one present is wrapped (because it hasn't arrived yet)! Hooray!
On Thursday, I wired the deposit for the studio flat in Belsize Park. It's non-refundable, so this makes it official. I'm going to be living, however temporarily, in a flat in London! I've never lived in a flat in London before! Heck, I've never lived in a flat before (American apartments, yes). How cool is that?!
The one-week rent for the studio flat in Belsize Park (the amount of the deposit) is just over my one-month rent in my awesome two-bedroom Rust Belt Historical District apartment and only about $175 less than our monthly mortgage payment. I'll never be able to live full-time in a big, expensive city again -- I've been too spoiled by the low cost of living here in Rust Belt. But hey, now I can afford 6-week jaunts there! So, I may live in Rust Belt, but I can better afford life in the big city in small doses. This is what I keep telling myself, anyway.
OMG, my sabbatical is half over!!! Ack!!!
Something I realized at the various holiday parties this week: asking me "So, how's sabbatical going?" is as crazy-making for me now as "So, how's the dissertation coming?" was for me once upon a time. Also, faculty on sabbatical don't want to talk about work issues. Come on, people, surely we can talk about something else!
Bullock is grading finals. He just said to me, "It must be Christmas time, because a student just spelled Commerce Clause like Santa Claus."
Bullock and I are going to BullockLand for the holidays (with Pippi). I spent Turkey Week in Cowtown with my side of the family and starting this year we're alternating where we go for Christmas so that we don't have to do the crazy-making hurryhurryhurry to get to one place and then the next. That makes my going out to LA to visit Virgo Sis and go to the MLA much less stressful (so does going to MLA just to go). Of course, so does being on sabbatical, because otherwise I'd be doing MLA back-to-back with starting our Spring semester.
Speaking of holiday plans, in case I don't blog again before we leave:

Going to the dogs

2010-12-12T12:52:00.012-05:00

Yesterday I drove 285 miles for two dogs named Toby and Brittany.

You see, we got Pippi from a national breed-specific rescue agency called National Brittany Rescue and Adoption Network (NBRAN), an organization run almost entirely by volunteers, and funded by donations, the good will of the volunteers who rescue, foster, and transport the dogs, and the $350 adoption fee you pay when you adopt a dog from them (which, when you think about it, doesn't really cover the expenses of a dog who's been fostered for any length of time). Anyway, Bullock and I can't really foster a dog -- Pippi doesn't get along with all dogs, and she seems well-suited to be an only dog; plus walking one of her is challenge enough -- but I wanted to help out with more than donations. So I put my name on the list for the transport drivers.

When a dog is pulled from a shelter and transferred to a foster home, or adopted into a "forever home," the dog might need to travel some distance to that home. When we adopted Pippi, she came from a foster home in our state, so her foster mom drove her to our house herself. But sometimes a Wisconsin dog might need to go to NY or a Texas dog might need to get to Pennsylvania, and so on. NBRAN will transport dogs up to about 1300 miles, and it's done with a chain of drivers who drive legs of about 60 miles each. Yesterday, on my first ever run, I drove two of them (and of course there and back again, accounting for the almost 300 miles), picking up two dogs along the way. I left the house at 7:15 am to get to the first meeting place and got back around 1pm.

First, I picked up Toby, a very handsome, mellow, sweet 5-year-old boy eager to meet new humans and dogs, but a little untrained and, sadly, deaf. But he was going to his "forever home," so his story already has a happy ending. Anyway, he was an affectionate love bug who wagged his tail and greeted me with a kiss right away. That's kind of novelty for me, as Pippi is deciding *not* the kissing kind. And when he got into my car, he decided that my lap was a great place to sit and look out the window:

Eventually I convinced him that he couldn't stay in my lap or else I wouldn't be able to drive, and he pouted:

He hid his face from me like this every time I tried to get a picture, and I didn't figure out until I dropped him off at my last meeting point that he was terrified of the camera! Poor boy! I didn't realize I was torturing him! But who would think that a dog would be terrified of a little point-and-shoot digital camera? But maybe he didn't know what it was or would do. And since he's deaf, when his head was turned, I couldn't soothe him with calming sounds or tell him he was a good boy.

Eventually he decided to move to the back seat, and at our first stopping point, we were joined by Brittany, a 9-year-old Brittany/Beagle mix. Brittany came with a crate, and I was planning to put Toby back in the front seat and Brittany in her crate in the back to keep them apart, but they got along quite well from the start. This kind of amazed me, as Pippi is such an alpha that she would have already claimed the car as her territory by this time and not wanted to share it. But here's Brittany posing for her portrait and Toby turning away, as usual:

In hindsight, I should've noticed that Toby's tail was tucked, but sometimes it hard to see that on a Brittany with a stub tail. When he wasn't hiding his face from me, he "dug" a little "hole" for himself (he scratched back the blankets and kept scratching at the upholstery until he was satisfied) and curled up and slept until we got to the next stop, where he'd excitedly greet the new people -- and the new dog -- just like he greeted me. Brittany was equally a great little traveler, settling down right away, just as in the picture (which I snapped as soon as we got in the car). It's amazing how resilient these animals can be. Occasionally she'd whine a little, but who can blame her: she was being transferred from stranger to stranger after having spent the first 9 years of her life with her family, who had to give her up because of financial disaster. Poor thing. Poor family!

I think, by the way, that's why I spend some time and money on helping companion animals -- it's as much about the people as it is about the animals. (The fact that it's NBRAN is just because we have a personal connection to them and the Brittany breed.) Anyone who has to give up their beloved pet wants to know it will find a nice home, and someone who adopts a dog (or any animal) is obviously getting something in return: love, joy, companionship, affection, and all the other benefits of pet ownership. So I'll probably do it again and again. I just hope the next dogs are just as easy as Toby and Brittany. And maybe I'll get better pictures of them!

Moving on up...

2010-12-09T17:14:00.003-05:00

...to Bel-el-siiiize! [Come on, sing it with me, to this tune.] To a de-luxe apartment in Bel-siiize!

OK, OK, I'm not really *moving* to London, but I am going spend a 6-week research trip from May to June in Belsize Park, a very posh neighborhood that I wouldn't normally be able to afford. In fact, the apartment I arranged through SabbaticalHomes.com is pretty darn pricey, too, and when I first started looking, I put it pretty low on my list as too expensive. But then I got a little windfall of money I wasn't expecting, which made me decide that it would be really fun to pretend for six weeks that I'm the kind of person who really could afford a swank place in Belsize Park. And it's just as well, too, because all the cheaper places that I was interested in -- the ones that weren't way out in SE23 or thereabouts -- turned out not to be available for my dates. They were listed as available, but then the owners said they already had parties interested. People! Update your listings! Stop leading me on with your promises of elegant little Bloomsbury 1-bedroom apartments for relatively reasonable prices! Or they said, sorry, but they couldn't do 6 weeks, they could only do full months. Then say so in your listing! I went through 7 possibilities before the Belsize Park person said yes, it was available for my dates and he'd be happy to rent it at the advertised price with no hidden charges. Hooray!

Thank god I don't have to look for *permanent* housing in London (or any other insanely expensive city). I'm pretty sure I'd go mad in the process or I'd be more willing to commute from Zone 6 or something. The place I'm renting has a monthly rate that's roughly three times the cost of our monthly mortgage (although at least the bills are included in the rent) for a 600 square foot loft studio (vs. our nearly 2000 square foot, four bedroom house with a yard and a garage). I know that sounds like madness, too, but for my purposes in the short terms, it's pretty much within the range of the expected. Put in these terms: it's the same per night as the Holiday Inn Express in the area charges, but I'll get to live as if it's my own house (because it will be for 6 weeks), spread out in a bigger space, cook for myself (thus saving on dinner especially), do my laundry in my own space, and so on. And out of curiosity, I looked at a real estate website offering apartments in the area, and the comparable ones had much higher rent, so I think I'm doing well for the area. The only way I've done things cheaper is to rent a student room, once at Goodenough College and once at the University of London's College Hall. But this time I'm going to be there while it's still term time, so those options aren't open to me. (Well, Goodenough might have a room available, but you have to share showers. In the summer, when few people are around, it's one thing, but I really don't want to share a shower with a hall full of students, even if they're mostly postgraduates. And last time I lived there, I was three floors up from the kitchen -- *very* inconvenient.) If it were available to me, I'd think about College Hall again; its ensuite rooms are very nice and there's a pantry or two with a fridge and microwave on every floor (though for 6 weeks, microwaved food might get sickening).

Anywho, the place I'm going to rent is swuh-ank! It's sleek and modern and all recently renovated, top to bottom, with gorgeous, gleaming dark oak floors, huge French windows letting in all sorts of light, and an open-plan kitchen that's reasonably roomy for a studio apartment. Put it this way: the minute I showed Bullock the pictures, he said, "Oh, that's NICE!" and he has pretty demanding taste. When I will the lottery (heh), I'd love a pied-a-terre just like it. I'm not the only one, it seems: I contacted one of the previous renters and she said she wished she lived there all year round. She stayed there with her husband and child, so it should be roomy enough for just me.

I promise, though, that while I'm there I'll work very, very hard at the BL and not sit around my flat pretending to be posh or hanging out with the celebrities who live in the area. And come visit me -- I'll give you the king size bed and I'll sleep on the couch!

I think I may be a secret geography geek

2010-12-08T18:06:00.005-05:00

I think maybe I should chuck literature and the Middle Ages and get a degree in geography and planning and learn GIS. Oh, you think I'm kidding do you? I swear, I'm not.

Why? Because today I blew off half a day's work on things medieval because I got *obsessed* -- OBSESSED, I tell ya! -- with "Legible London," the new(ish) "pedestrian wayfinding" project by Transport for London in partnership with Applied Information Group (AIG, but not that other AIG) and Central London Partnership. (I think I'm getting the credits right -- or maybe CLP was the real impetus behind it. Or AIG.) I think a couple of hours went by as I read the research behind the project, browsed around on the project websites, and played around with Google street view maps.

(This all began as I was looking deeper into the neighborhood I might be renting in for my 6-week trip in May and June and ended up playing around on the Transport for London site, so I guess the spur to this geographic obsession was the fact that I'm going to London again for research in things medieval. So I'm not really giving up my day job. Yet. Btw, the neighborhood I might be staying in is Belsize Park. Well now, aren't I posh?)

Back to the subject of the post. If you've been to London since 2009 and have walked around the Bond Street, Southbank/Bankside or Bloomsbury/Covent Garden areas in central London (or Richmond and Twickenham areas in the outskirts), you've seen the pilot program of this project. Here's a gallery of what the maps look like -- it might ring some bells for those of you who've seen and used them.

What got me so jazzed and took up so much of my time today was reading the "Legible London wayfinding study report," done by AIG and CLP, which you can download in PDF from this page, where it is also summarized. The report is worth reading if you're interested in maps -- the visual, material objects and their design, as well as their abstractions as data, or the psychological processes of "mental mapping" -- because I swear you'll have a fun time reading it, too. You'll also be interested if you're interested in design, information technology, urban planning, initiatives to encourage walking (for health of the individual or the planet), or humans' relations to and cognitive negotiations of space. For starters, it's a beautifully presented piece of public communication. And hey, I'm not the only one who thought so -- AIG won the 2009 Design Week Award for Best Promotional Brochure for a version of it. And it's *fascinating,* especially if you've ever tried to find your own way on foot around London.

One of the recurring themes of the report is that London has no consistent wayfinding system of signage and maps for pedestrians, in contrast to the systems for drivers (not just in London, but across the UK) and public transport users. Instead, an eclectic, sometimes even contradictory, collection of different systems in different neighborhoods has built up over time, and many of them actually aren't helpful for the way most people navigate on foot. In other words, they don't give pedestrians confidence (a key term in the report), and so people give up and rely on public transport, even when it would be quicker to walk. And it's not just the tourists, but the locals, too. So, for example, someone needing to get from Charing Cross tube stop to Covent Garden might go to all the trouble of going down into the tube, taking the Northern Line one stop to Leceister Square, transferring to the Picadilly Line, and taking it one stop to Covent Garden (traveling time 8 minutes, not counting getting in and out, transferring, and waiting for the trains), when instead, they could take an 8 minute walk for free.

But the obstacles to making that walk are many, according to the report. For one thing, the destination isn't visible in real space, where it is on the iconic tube map (more on that in a minute). In fact, London has few vistas, and with the exception of a handful of tall, iconic buildings and structures, not a lot of landmarks visible from a long distance. It also doesn't have a lot of long-running avenues, but instead, a warren of streets whose names change seemingly every block, and whose street signs are often blocked, hard to find (especially for pedestrians, as they are often oriented for traffic), or missing. And so even the native Londoner might not feel confident taking the Strand northwest to a left on Bedford to Garrick to Rose to Long Acre to get there. Even if there are signs pointing toward Covent Garden, they're likely pointing to the market and you need to get near the tube stop. Or if they do point to the tube, there's only one on Bedford and you won't see it unless you're already there. Or it's one of those little narrow signs ("finger" posts) and you miss it. Or someone has intentionally or unintentionally turned it and you get turned around. Or it says "o.5 km" and you think that sounds like a long way (more on that in a minute, too). Charing Cross to Leceister Square to Covent Garden is easier and the trains do the work for you.

I can understand this lack of confidence even though I'm generally over-confident at pedestrian navigation. At the risk of sounding obnoxious here, I'm actually a pretty good navigator and reader of maps (though add mountains and up and down and I get a little thrown), and I have a pretty complex "mental mapping" system in which I try to combine information from large scale system maps with my experiential mapping of traveling in smaller segments of that space. (For example, I'm the kind of person who knows which direction a subway is going, which direction(s) the exit ramps and stairways go, and therefore, which way I'm facing when I exit a subway or tube stop.) I'm not always right, but I'm rarely "lost." If I get off track I get back on it pretty quickly and I usually know what I've done wrong.

But *man*, I once got pretty darn lost in the Covent Garden area and I blame those damn skinny little "finger" posts that the Legible London report picks on frequently. I stupidly relied on those instead of getting myself a good map and I ended up not only going in the wrong direction entirely, but also disorienting myself because of it. This must have been on my trip in 2007 before the pilot "Legible London" maps were put up! I ended up finally righting myself, but came thisclose to hopping on the tube, even though where I was going was only a 15 minute walk away (the maximum time length that the Legible London study says people consider "walking distance" and that is often faster than the tube). In other words, that incident would've made a great data point for the Legible London folks: I lacked confidence as a pedestrian and almost fell back on the tube because of pedestrian-unfriendly signage up top and the ease of use of the tube and its well-designed map.

But the tube and its iconic map are also really misleading. This I already knew, but I didn't quite realize the extent of its effect. The tube map is a fantastic work of classic design -- which the report acknowledges -- both in its aesthetic value and its use value, at least in so far as it's used to navigate the tube. But did you know vast quantities of Londoners use it as a map for above ground, too?! That's madness! In case you've forgotten what it looks like, go take a look (opens PDF). It's a gorgeous piece of mid-century modernism, isn't it? Makes you want to sit in an egg chair under an arc floor lamp, doesn't it? But it's an abstraction that's not made to scale -- there's no way of knowing how far one stop is from another and often places are suggestively represented as being closer or farther apart than they are, or in different cardinal directions from each other than they are in real space. And it does funky things to the Thames to fit the design. So, for example, it shows the Thames seemingly going East-West (as a border, not the flow of the water) from Temple to Westminster, and makes Victoria seem like it's pretty near the bank; thus, on this map, Waterloo is South of Westminster, and the Westminster Bridge thus seemingly runs North-South. Except that none of that is right. In reality, the Thames runs North-South in that stretch; Victoria is to the South-West of Westminster and not near the bank; Waterloo is to the North-East of Westminster; and the Westminster Bridge runs East-West across the Thames. So when people use this map to navigate anywhere but the tube system itself, they're going to get hopelessly confused -- as the report in fact shows. And yet, people rely on it because it's a really cool, well-designed, easy to use map -- it's just not meant for pedestrians. (And meanwhile, the A-Z guide is made with cars in mind. And it's complicated and busy and nothing like the simplicity of the tube map.) So what the Legible London project is trying to do is, they hope, create a way-finding system for pedestrians that's as intuitive and easy as the tube map.

But people have funny intuitions about things. It's not just the tube map's fault that people think the Thames runs East-West. The report points out that that's a common misconception. It doesn't say this (maybe because they didn't get language and literature people involved) but I bet it's partly because there's a neighborhood called "Southbank" and borough called "Southwark," and they are, indeed, South of the oldest parts of London, where the Thames does run roughly East-West. Language shapes us as much as iconic imagery does. And history has something to do with this, too, as "the" Southbank was once directly south of what was then the limit of the city. I've seen this effect of language, culture and history on oreintation elsewhere, too. When I lived in LaLa Land, a couple of friends wouldn't believe when I said Malibu was West of Westwood, not North of it. In their minds, they drove "up" the coast to Malibu, and "up" is north, right? And they lived on the "West Coast," so it must run north and south, right? Well, abstractly and and in big-picture sense, sort of, but really only if you're looking at it from outside of California. But actually, no, because at Pacific Palisades, it turns West and runs that way until about Point Mugu, and then it goes northwesterly until about Santa Barbara, when it starts going west again, and it pretty much alternates between northwest and west until you get to Humboldt County way up north, where it ironically straightens out. (Duuuude.)

But I digress. The point is, it's not the Tube's fault if bright people in car-dependent LA also don't know their West from their North. Let's get back to London, where people have just as many cockamamie ideas about where things are and how to get to them as SoCal people do. Lots of Londoners walk, but more would walk if way-finding signage were designed with their needs in mind. And the more people walk, according to the report, the fewer cockamamie ideas they have about where things are in relation to one another -- the better their mental map is. (OK, so that *does* explain SoCal, because as the song goes, "Nobody walks in L.A.") According the Legible London folks, one of things pedestrians need to be more confident and therefore to walk more and further is to have maps oriented "heads up" -- that is, in the same direction they are facing when they read it. Funny thing is, this actually once nearly threw me off when reading one of their signs in Southbank as I was making my way to Waterloo station. It was oriented to the South because it was facing that way, which was also the way I needed to go, but I very nearly went in the opposite direction until I noticed. But I'm used to the "north is up" convention and how to compensate for that, and most people are not, apparently. I can give that up, since there's nothing inherently right about "north is up" -- as we medievalist know, many medieval maps were oriented to the East -- and the most sensible orientation is the one most useful in context (and so north-pointing maps are useful when you're orienting by the North Star -- not so much on the street in London!).

To give you another cool example of how the new maps are designed around the needs of pedestrians: if you go back up to that "gallery" link and look at the first three pictures in it, you'll see some of those pedestrian-friendly elements. Though the maps are largely aerial, they give at least the outlines of all buildings and then 3D images of landmark buildings and popular destinations. They're also generally more detailed, because of course a walker can take in more detail than a driver. And, perhaps most important, they give distance in time measurement instead of space measurement and show maps with a 15-minute walk radius (and also a 5-minute radius) because people are more likely to walk 15 minutes away than 1.3 km (.8 miles). As their pilot programs and surveys have shown, it also makes people realize that a lot of things are closer together than they think. London is a very dense city, with a lot of sensory stimuli in a 15-minute walk, which can make it seem much bigger geographically than it is. I'm a runner (or well, I was), so I'm used to thinking in both time and distance, and I can read "1.3 miles" and know how long it will take me to get there and that that isn't a long distance. But to most people it sounds daunting, even to native Londoners. Creating a system of maps that helps people digest their city in manageable chunks--bringing it down to human scale--actually does important social and cultural service, connecting people and neighborhoods, and in a huge megalopolis like London, that's no small feat.

As new and forward-thinking and digital and innovative that AIG and this project are on many levels, I think one of the reasons I love it -- and one of the reasons I love maps of all kinds -- is that it melds the old and the new. It takes old forms of travel, forms that Chaucer's pilgrims would have known in their London and Southwark -- traveling by time (one day's ride to X town) and by itinerary (pass the old church and turn right at the next crossroads) -- and melds them with satellite images and GIS and the latest research on cognition and "mental mapping," along with forms of cartography somewhere in between (the map of a whole area, for example, instead of just the turn-by-turn itinerary that a GPS [or "SatNav" in the UK] system would give), and brings London's distant past, the near past, the present, and the future (a more walkable, 21st century London) together, much the way that the city itself is a palimpsest of time and history. I really hope this project successfully expands to the entire city and its outskirts.

Disconnecting from the social network / looking forward to social networking

2010-12-06T17:12:00.005-05:00

I deactivated my Facebook account today. Deactivation isn't permanent -- my profile and all its contents are still there, somewhere, but those of you who are my FB friends can't see it. In fact, a lot of you now probably seem to be talking to a ghost in many of your threads.

I plan to return to FB Jan. 1 or thereabouts. I just got a little freaked out about how little time was left in the first half of my sabbatical and how much time FB was taking, despite all my leechblocking. See, the thing is, I have an iPhone, and on that phone is a Facebook app, and there's no Leechblock for the iPhone, alas. And I have no self-control. I've been tossing around this idea for awhile now, but last night, as I was curled up on the couch with a book, a glass of wine, and Pippi, while Bullock was at a job candidate's dinner, I realized how nice it was to slooooow doooooown and read for a good long time. And since I was reading a book set in Los Angeles, with many scenes in a neighborhood I knew intimately, I realized that there were other ways of being connected to the world than through Mark Zuckerberg's way of doing it. Even though what I was reading wasn't high art (it was detective fiction -- though its author's work has been promoted from the "mystery" section to the "literature" section of bookstores near you!), it felt more like a Forster or Woolf way of being connected -- like the "only connect!" motif of Howards End or the thin thread of Mrs. Dalloway. Both are vulnerable, fragile, abstract connections, of course, but that's what makes nurturing them and recognizing them important. It's not that FB prevented me recognizing these threads or of slowing down, but the moment made me realize that I could leave FB for a little while and not feel outcast or at sea or unmoored from the world or from my past. (I haven't thought this all the way out--it's really just a feeling, a hunch now--so my writing about it is a little flabby and cliche-ridden. For a blogger, I'm strangely not very good at writing about our socially networked world!)

Of course, as some of you know, the irony of all this is that I took a photo of that moment with the dog and the wine and the book (and fuzzy slippers!) with my iPhone and posted it to Facebook! Of course, I think there's something fitting that that was my last post before my hiatus. And it is just a hiatus, I promise (especially to Sisyphus, who is looking forward to beating me in our currently suspended game of Scrabble). In the meantime, most of you know where to find me at my real life, university e-mail address, and if not, there's my Dr. Virago g-mail address (see sidebar).

Meanwhile, I'm planning to go to MLA to do some old skool social networking, the face to face kind. Virgo Sis lives on the east side of the Cahuenga Pass, so I'm going to stay with her (and arrive and leave a few days before and after the conference) and take the Red Line subway from Universal City into downtown. I'll be going to all the medieval panels and to any meet-ups y'all want to plan (just let me know!), and presumably to my grad school's party, if I can find out when and where it is (it's often a big secret). I haven't looked at the program yet, so there's probably other stuff (besides the book exhibit of course!) that I'll want to go to. And I promise I'll start up Facebook again before that for easy contact. :)

And one other thing: I'm kind of hoping that less Facebook will mean more blogging. We'll see if I'm right.

You may be a hoarder if...

2010-11-14T16:41:00.003-05:00

...like me, you purchased bulk staples, paper clips, and pencils the year you started graduate school (for me it was 1994) AND STILL HAVE UNUSED ONES. Good god.

Even worse, I forgot where some of these were (shoved into a box labeled "office supplies" in a linen closet in our hallway) and have been mooching off of Bullock since I moved in with him. And all this time I still had one full box of 5000 staples, five 100-count boxes of paper clips, and four 12-count boxes of unused pencils. Also in the mysterious box o' supplies: a life-time supply of unused "daily schedule" sheets for the 8"x10" Day Runner I no longer use; a bunch of 3" or 4" D-ring binders; some blank composition notebooks; unused letterhead from my graduate program department (WTF, why did that even move with me to RBU???); and, my favorite, 3.5" floppy disks with with system and program backups for a computer I no longer own.

Sigh.

Updated to add: Oh wait, there's more. One of the big D-ring binders has my undergraduate institution's name on it and inside are labeled dividers with labels such as "company info/lit" and "cover letters (copies)." In other words, this was the binder I used to organize my job applications in the Spring of freaking 1991! *headdesk*

A Ph.D. in the humanities? - A kinder, gentler xtranormal video

2010-11-13T14:56:00.005-05:00

This is response to the now-viral video I linked to in an earlier post. This one is kinder, gentler, and more idealistic -- except when it takes a few jabs at the earlier video. It's also a lot more like the actual conversations I have with actual students. And bonus: it makes a Dr. Who reference. It's also really inspiring and I think that every time I get in a funk about the future of the university and especially the humanities, I'm going to watch this to recharge myself.

You should watch it, too.

h/t Karl at In the Middle

I'm posting this not only because I like it, but also especially for Jeffrey, meg, Flavia, and Clarissa, all of whom I know didn't like the original, cynical version (or, in meg's case, didn't like the emerging genre of xtranormal videos in which experience berates naivete).

New desk chair!

2010-11-11T18:35:00.008-05:00

I bought my first new desk chair for the first time since circa 1999 and it was delivered yesterday. The old one was a $49 number from Ikea, which I bought when I also purchased my giant Ikea "Anton" computer desk plus rolling CPU/printer stand and file drawers. The desk and its accessories are still going strong. The chair...eh, not so much:

Crappy Old Desk Chair

No, you're not seeing things; the seat really is sloping to the left (or to my right as I sat in it - probably from years of leaning right to the file drawers, printer, etc.). Anyway, after spending about $500 on the perfect "dissertating" desk, that lame chair was about all I could afford.

This time, now that I'm a tenured professor on sabbatical, and therefore spending a *lot* of time in my desk chair at home, but also making a decent living, I put down serious money and got something like the comfortable, multi-adjustable chairs they gave us in the new building at RBU. (I wish I could have figured out how to get that *exact* one, because it is teh awesome! But it's made by a company that only does bulk office orders, alas.) At any rate, the one I got cost more than Anton and his pals combined, but if I use it at least as long as the cheap Ikea chair, I'll get my money's worth. And it was actually right in the middle of the price ranges at the local office supply store, so it's not exactly extravagant as far as office chairs go. And I got to pick out the fabric! And the arms! And they delivered!

Anyway, here it is, right next to Anton (ignore the wall color -- someday I intend to change it):

Awesome New Desk Chair!

You can't really see this unless you "embiggen" the photo, but the fabric has a kind of funky dot pattern that seemed a little mid-century modern to me -- or at least as mid-century as a high-tech, 21st century, ergonomic office chair can get. The other colors were definitely mid-century: avocado green, tealish blue, Wedgwood grey. I got black, though, because I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the rest of the colors in the office, so I figured I'd stay neutral and also match my black filing cabinets. This chair does *not* have a right-sloping seat, though I think the angle I took the picture from makes it seem so. D'oh! Also, I have the arms high and pivoted inward in this picture because I was reading in it before this, resting my elbows on the arms. (If you're looking *really* closely, I have no idea why I stuck those red felt hearts on the desk drawer. I guess I was having a fit of whimsy that day.)

I'm still learning how it all works, which is why, in the background of the picture above, you can see the directions for the chair hanging off a bulletin board on the wall. Check out all the levers for all the adjustable stuff! Look! --

Levers!

Besides the four you can see on this side, there's another on the left side and one underneath. The back is adjustable in height, of course, and the arms not only pivot, but can be made wider apart -- though I don't think I'll ever need that. And they have soft gel cushions (though I wish the cushions were wider, but these were the only ones that weren't hard plastic). If only the pivoting arms went totally parallel to the back -- then I could get closer to the desk. Bullock may help me raise the desk because right now the arms won't go under it unless I lower the chair so much that I feel like a kid at the grown-up table! (That does work for my keyboard drawer, at least -- just less so for the other half of the desk.)

Right now I'm still fussing with all the adjustments and trying to find the sweet spot for my various tasks. And all this forced sitting up straight is actually making my back ache, ironically enough. Bullock swears this is normal and that I'll get used to it and be better off in the long run. At the very least, my butt is more comfortable than on that sloping piece of 11-year-old junk I had before!

*******

Bonus Pippi picture! This is what Pippi was doing for most of the time I was writing this post:

It's her way of saying, "Feed me!"

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-31T11:36:00.000-04:00

Job dissatisfaction

2010-10-29T19:46:00.006-04:00

This might be blasphemous to say, but I need to say it: I'm not looking forward to going back to the teaching grind next year (and let's not even start on service obligations). It's not because I'm enjoying my research and unscheduled time so much (see this post about how I'm just figuring out how to handle that unscheduled time; note how many times I mention how boring some of my work is). Nope, it's because I really kind of dread the whole package of teaching -- not just the worst parts (grading! oy, the grading!) but also the frenetic, when-will-this-semester-be-over grind, and even, I hate to say it, being in the classroom. I can't even put my finger on why -- I have always liked our students (well, most of them) and they have told me many times over that they like me -- but the excitement is definitely gone.

Maybe it's because next year I'll be facing another year of Old and Middle English, which I have to say, I kind of hate teaching. Oh, there are moments where I love it, and there were two sets of classes some years back who geeked out with me and made it awesome, but - ugh! - how can I possibly look forward to talking about weak adjectives and strong verbs and Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening...OMG. Kill me now. Horace, who just wrote a joyful post about what's cool about being a humanities professor (and whose positive post title I'm riffing only negatively) gets to talk about "the nature of time and the past in literature, about how drama and performance help us understand our very identity, how the language of advertising leaves us without a language of our own to describe our experiences of the real world." I, on the other hand, get to talk about i-mutation. Zzzzzzzz...And what's even worse is that it didn't used to bore me. But the thought of doing this over and over for the next god knows how many years is making my head explode.

And not even the thought of teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare in the spring term, or a newly designed Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic syllabus in the fall cheers me up. Something is seriously wrong with me if the thought of "The Miller's Tale," Twelfth Night, and "The Cattle Raid of Cooley" can't raise my spirits or at least make up for strong verb paradigms and brace constructions.

I have a feeling that part of what's coloring my attitude is the woeful morale at our university and especially in our soon-to-be-dissolved-and-chopped-into-three-colleges college. But I keep telling myself that that shouldn't really have an effect on my day to day experience, especially not in the classroom. Perhaps also, because I'm on sabbatical and not as crazy-busy as usual, when I witness just how burnt out and dog-tired Bullock is because of his overload of advising and service responsibilities (a situation created in part by the shrinking of his department by retirement and death without any replacements), I feel it more strongly than I would if I were distracted by a frenetic pace of my own. Or maybe my mood is a response to the bigger war on the humanities and higher ed in general here in the US and elsewhere (especially in the UK). One my Facebook friends (and who still reads this blog, I think) asked for robust language to defend the humanities. Once upon a time I could give it; now I just want to give up.

Tell me that this is what sabbatical is for -- to rejuvenate, to re-energize -- and that by next year I'll feel ready to take it all on again. Tell me that I'm just burnt out and I'm expecting to rebound too quickly. But most of all, tell me it's OK sometimes not to like my job.

Speaking (again) of delivering bad news to students in the humanities...

2010-10-26T17:19:00.002-04:00

...I wonder if the author of this little movie read the post below? Of course, it could just be because it's that time of year.

SO YOU WANT TO GET A PhD IN THE HUMANITIES

And yes, I *do* question the meaning of my existence.

Hacking sabbatical

2010-10-24T12:37:00.006-04:00

I didn't really think of my sabbatical starting until the Fall term started up, in part because I'd had such a busy summer of professional activities that would have happened whether I was on sabbatical or not. So, for me, sabbatical started August 23. And it took me the last two months to finally figure out how to manage my time and to get into a groove. Thank dog, then, that I took the whole year, despite the reduction in salary.

My problems in getting started were threefold: 1) the major project I'm working on is in its very amorphous beginning stages and the immediate tasks at hand were and remain super dull and tedious; 2) I'd forgotten how to manage so much unscheduled time; and 3) ZOMG! The Intertubes! Let me explain point 1 and then I'll talk about how I harnessed technology (my university's admins love to throw around phrases like that) to deal with points 2 & 3 and at least ameliorate the issues in point 1, and also how I actually added to my goals for sabbatical to paradoxically make it more likely that I'll complete those goals.

Even before we get to the issues with my major project, there was another task I had to take care of by a September 15th deadline, and that was the editing of a handful of medieval texts for an inclusion in a student anthology, along with writing the introductions to them. I learn a lot from such projects, and they're one of the most important things we do as scholars, I think, even though at most places they don't count as much as original peer-reviewed research, and so I'm happy to do such projects in that sense. But, ZOMG!, it is tedious work. And I think that tedium got me off to a bad start and in bad habits. I'd edit a stanza of text and then check Facebook. Then I'd edit another stanza and play 5 games of Mah Jong. Then I'd edit another stanza and read blogs. And so on. I let it drag out until mere days before the deadline, so poof! there went a month of sabbatical.

The thing was, I was totally using that editing job as a way to procrastinate on my own research. I could have been doing both all that time, but I didn't. But finally I got that job out of the way and it was time to move on to my own research -- no more excuses. But the first problem with this project is that it's so early in its development, it's hard to know what it needs and where I should be going in terms of textual, historical, and theoretical research and reading. I'm not even sure what the size of the project is; though I proposed it as a book project in my sabbatical application, I'm starting to think it might be a Speculum-length article. Or maybe a couple of articles of shorter length. And the working thesis/argument I have now may totally change as I continue to do the primary text research. God knows that happened on my first book, which started as a project on class and economics and a specific body of literary texts and morphed into a project on gender and those texts. And before that, I just wanted to write on those texts because there hadn't been any book-length works on them in a long while and I thought I had interesting, newish ways of looking at them. That's also kind of how this project started: I kind of fell into finding my primary material, realized it was both understudied and yet potentially significant, and then started thinking about it more. But that makes it harder to know where to go with the stuff because you're not entering a widely populated critical conversation; instead, you've got to find ways to introduce it into the conversation by relating it to conversations already going on. But the question is, which ones? In practical terms, that means: which existing scholarship is going to help me figure out what's going on here? What should I be reading to help me think through this?

Meanwhile, the one task I know I need to do -- find and catalog for myself all the instances of the literary phenomenon I'm working on -- is a slow and tedious one. See, the stuff I'm working on is what I think of as an obscure subgenre of 15th and 16th century poetry, and so I have to find it by combing through reference works like the various editions of Index of Middle English Verse. I go through a reference work like that one entry after another, looking for texts that might be the kind I'm trying to study and define and then entering them into a Word file I made (so I can search it electronically). And then I've got to track down the available editions of these poems (which sometimes means getting my hands on articles in obscure 19th century German journals!); and after that, in the Spring, I'm going to look at the manuscripts of texts without editions or whose editions don't tell me enough about the manuscript contexts (and that part means another longish trip to England - so yeah!). But right now, I'm in the most boring stage. I'm only up to M in the New Index of Middle English.

As you can imagine, that work is about as interesting as reading a phone book, and so it's also a task prone to procrastination and distraction. In fact, I really should have done it a little bit at a time last year when I was teaching, because it's totally the kind of task you can work into a busy teaching year with just a few minutes a day. But I am teh lame and did not do that. And now I have to Get. It. Done so I can effectively use sabbatical time for that trip to the manuscript libraries in the UK and here in the US, too, especially since that's how I justified the necessity of my sabbatical in my application -- I said I needed to do "literary field work." But trying to do hours of that kind of work -- or heck, even one hour -- at a time is going to create diminishing returns on productivity, because the more mind-numbingly bored I become, the more mistakes I'll make and the more I'll procrastinate with those games and Facebook and so on. And furthermore, I can't spend my whole sabbatical doing work that dull. I'll go insane.

So. What to do? Well, here's how I "hacked" sabbatical to help me make better use of my time and be more productive, both in terms of what this longer-term project needs to get off the ground this year and also in terms of having something to show for my time next year. As I said above, I actually added some additional goals to my sabbatical besides this maybe-a-book project (which is the only thing I mentioned in my application for sabbatical). I had already planned to finally get to writing an article I've had brewing for a couple of years. It has its problems and roadblocks, too, but it's much further along than the nascent book project, so at least it has some shape. I also took on another editorial job, related to that one I mentioned above. I know, I know -- more tedious work. However, I think I've figured out how to deal with that, too, which I'll get to in minute. I also accepted an invitation to write a chapter in a forthcoming multi-volume guide/companion/introduction to British literature on the same genre of text as the texts I'm editing and have edited and that the article project is on, so those projects are all interrelated and will aid one another. Plus, along with editing texts for either scholarly or student editions, I think the scholarly guides to literature are another really important feature of what we do in the profession. (So next time some fool is dismissing scholarly research as something no one reads, mention a Norton Critical Edition or a Cambridge Companion to said fool and ask him where he thinks such works come from. But I digress.) Those are the projects that will go under my "professional activity" section of next year's annual merit report. But I'm also doing things for teaching, for pleasure, and for well being -- including, for instance: re-reading a bunch of the classical, medieval, and renaissance texts from my undergrad great books core curriculum; reading lots of detective fiction; trying to get back in shape; and reading introductions to English morphology, phonology, and syntax, to make me a better teacher of Old and Middle English -- and these are all part of my daily schedule.

Now, it might seem like I'm being over-ambitious, but here's why I think more tasks will help me. Remember how boring I said some of my work is? Well now, if I get bored with one task, instead of playing Mah Jong or reading Huffington Post, I just switch tasks. If I get stuck on a problem in my article project, instead of checking Facebook, I switch tasks. If I'm frustrated with all of my own projects, I can read The Illiad or about the Northern Cities Vowel shift and still feel professionally engaged in some way, but give my brain a rest. And if I'm sick of all the brain work, I get on the tread mill or on my bike, or I chase Pippi around the yard. (She doesn't play fetch; she plays keep away.)

And here's the hacking part. I've incorporated two apps to help me achieve these things. The first one is an iPhone app called Daily Deeds. I'm pretty sure I learned about this from ProfHacker, so I'll give them general credit. Anyway, it's a simple little program that lets you enter a list of tasks that you want to accomplish daily (or at least in a recurring way). And if you accomplish said task, you check it off. You can then e-mail yourself reports to show you how much you're doing something each month. In my own version, I've entered a whole bunch of tasks and sub-tasks related to all of the above (so, for instance, I have an entry that says "catalog stuff from the NIMEV," another that says "read some Classical/Med/Ren lit," another that says "read some criticism and take notes" (so it serves for *all* my projects), and one that says "run, ride bike, or walk Pippi" (to account for all physical activity in a low-pressure way, just to help myself make it a daily routine, no matter how hardcore or not). I can't tell you how satisfying it is to check something off! And it doesn't matter how short a time I spend on something -- if I do it, I get to check it off. This 'carrot,' combined with allowing myself to switch tasks the moment I get bored or frustrated, means I now -- finally -- spend at least 6 hours a day actually *working*.

And there's the other tech tool that has helped me do that. I don't have the best willpower when it comes to things like Facebook or blogs or other online distractions, but I need the web for some of the work I'm doing (using the MED and OED, for instance), so I can't use Freedom and turn off the internet entirely. So instead, I use the Leechblock extension for the Firefox browser, which allows me to select the sites to block and the times to block them. So now, from 9am to 5pm each weekday, I cannot access Facebook, HuffPo, the real estate sites around here, Blogger or Wordpress blogs, or all the other things I routinely tend to want to distract myself with..."just for minute," I'll say...and which end up sucking hours of my time each week. And often, I move downstairs with one of the books I'm reading by about 4pm, so I'm away from the computer when I'm allowed back on the sites.

So this is how I'm "hacking" sabbatical: counter-intuitively adding more tasks to make more progress on each of them; switching tasks often; rewarding myself for activity on tasks by chalking up check marks on Daily Deeds; blocking myself from my biggest online time-wasters; and now, telling you all about it so that I stick to it! Let's see if it continues to work.

Sleepy sabbatical

2010-10-23T09:48:00.002-04:00

One thing, at least, that I've finally figured about sabbatical is that I can sleep in. Of course Pippi sees to it that one of us is up by 7am at least (earlier in the summer when the sun is up earlier), but usually that's Bullock. I think she's figured out that he wakes easier than I do. I don't sleep much longer -- I'm usually up by 8, though today it was nearly 9 before I woke up -- but to me that seems almost decadent, since there are people on our campus with classes and meetings at 8am.

Now, you noticed that I said "finally figured" out. Yes, that's right. Given the ridiculous guilt-anxiety cycles that we academics make for ourselves, plus the conventions of the Monday-Friday work week in the white collar world in which I was raised, it took me quite some time to allow myself this sleep. (Yeah, I was forgetting that the word sabbatical is related to the word sabbath.) At first I had dreams of keeping some crazy schedule where I was up by 6 and exercising or walking Pippi by 7. Yeah, right. Now I realize my schedule can be what I want it to be (well, Pippi has to be walked *some* time by 9 or 10 am) as long as I'm still doing what I need to do.

There are other things I've finally figured out, but Pippi actually hasn't been walked yet and it's my day and she's letting me know that as I type (her chin is on my lap and she's looking up at me with her puppiest puppy-dog eyes). Time for walkies!

Speaking of delivering bad news to students...

2010-10-19T19:39:00.004-04:00

...here's the pre-law version.

Bullock is our college's pre-law adviser and I used to be a paralegal once upon a time, and we couldn't stop laughing (especially during the part about Constitutional law). But New Kid, you may want to advert your eyes.

H/T Lawyers, Guns, and Money

Help! Advice needed! (Delivering-bad-news-to-students division)

2010-10-16T11:03:00.009-04:00

Before I get to the advice request, on a somewhat related topic I just want to say that Greg Semenza, who is a very cool guy, sent me a signed copy of the second edition of A Guide to Graduate Study in the 21st Century. And he quoted and cited this blog in the introduction as well as thanking me in the acknowledgments. (He quoted this post, which I really should put on a "Best of Virago" list in the sidebar or something. He quoted a farming metaphor that apparently I made in that post, but which seemed so hilariously out of character for me, a city/suburban girl, that I had to go back and see if I actually wrote it or if one of the commenters did. It seems I did!) So you must now all buy his book for *your* graduate students, because he is clearly a genius with good taste. And also because I said so. :)

Anyway, the advice I need is related to talking to students about grad school. Greg's book is *awesome* for students already in or accepted to Ph.D. programs, or, slightly adapted, for students in MA programs (which is how I use it). But it doesn't deal with the whole process *before* -- the making yourself competitive for grad programs, choosing them, applying to the, etc. (Let's skip, for the moment, whether anyone should be applying to Ph.D. programs in the humanities at all. I know how to have that talk.)

But here's what I don't know how to do. I don't know how to tell a student "There's no way you're going to get into ______." Or "I really can't recommend you to ____ program." Or, worst of all, "I really can't recommend you for Ph.D. programs." Many of our students, the BAs and the MAs, are often really naive about the competition out there and about the selectiveness of even the state school Ph.D. programs. The best of them, who have all the same natural gifts as the students who will get into the most competitive programs, have never had to compete for admission to anything (we're an open admission school at the undergrad level, and though our MA program is slightly selective--we do turn down some people--it's not terribly difficult to get into). And they don't have a lot of friends (or any others) who are also applying to graduate programs, so they grossly underestimate the numbers of people doing so. They've been big fish in little ponds all their lives and haven't really been pushed, either by their professors or their cohort. (We try, but really, you need a critical mass of ambitious peers to really show you what you can accomplish. And once you're at the top of a group, it's hard to see that there are higher things to aim for.) But they can't possibly see this from their vantage point. And we can tell them, but they don't always get the message. (There are obviously exceptions. But if they were all like the exceptions, I wouldn't be writing this post.) We even have a few faculty members who share the naivety (for various different reasons), and they are often wowed by these students and encourage them to apply to schools they're never going to get into (and only those schools), so we have to work against bad advice they've been given.

For example, about a year or so ago, a former student, whose work in our MA program fell about in the average range for our students, wrote to me to tell me she was going to apply to a particular Ivy League school for the Ph.D. And just that school. But she was going to visit it first to make sure it was right for her. *Headdesk* So I wrote back and gave her the statistics for the previous year's admissions (because I happen to know people at said Ivy and they could give me the cold, hard facts). To my utter shock, this did not deter her! Her response was something along the lines of "Oh, I know it's competitive, but I think I've got what it takes!" *double headdesk* And others to whom I give the bad news talk think I'm just trying to keep them down, that I'm holding them back. (What would motivate me to do that is beyond me -- our students' success is our success.)

For many, I can say a nicer version of "Fine, don't believe me. Go ahead and try." And sometimes I get them to add less glorious programs to their list (or simply more programs), and they *do* get in and go on to good things. (I basically suggest they apply to one or two "dream" schools -- it's good to dream! -- but then to a range of other, more realistic schools. Then I have to help them figure out what those are, because they have no idea.) So sometimes I can work with them and get them to where they want to be, which is in a Ph.D. program on the way to being a college professor. Ooh, and one of the first RBU students I wrote a letter for is now a tenure-track assistant professor! Hooray! So I'm not saying our students should just give it up. I'm saying they need to be more realistic. I'm *pretty* good at getting them to that point (Ms. Ivy League being the weird exception).

But where it gets tricky (and this is really where I need the advice) is with the ones who want me to write letters of recommendation. I don't think students realize we have professional reputations, that we know people at these schools they're applying to, and that our word won't mean anything (for them or for other students) if we write glowing letters for students whose work just doesn't stack up. And writing a truthful, damning letter seems passive-aggressively cruel; I think it would also make me look like an asshole to the people reading it. So the only alternative is to say, "Sorry, I can't do that." But I am such a wuss when it comes to such confrontations, especially when I like the student personally and have been working with them for some time, which is often the case (and this is really where I need your help). I make the lamest excuses just to avoid saying, "I really can't recommend you." For example, once I told a student that since the paper she'd written for me in class was a critical history and not an original argument, my recommendation wouldn't be worth much (which may be true but wasn't the real reason I was turning her down). Help me "woman up" and deliver the bad news. How would you do it?

Let's put this into a few more specific (but totally fictional) situations. How would you deal with each of them? Updated to add: How would you deal specifically with being asked to write a letter of recommendation in each of these cases? That's the key issue for me. Assume that we've already had all the "should you go to graduate school?"/"what's graduate school like?"/"what's on the other side of the Ph.D.?" type talks.

1) An MA student has mostly A- and B+ grades in hir chosen area of specialization and doesn't realize those are damning grades for an MA student applying to Ph.D. programs, and wants you to write a letter of recommendation. You gave hir an A, but in a less relevant class where earning an A might have been easier (say, a methods class or an undergrad/grad survey). [Hm, in this case, I might just go ahead and write the letter, describing the level and expectations of the class as well as hir work in it. And now that I'm not Grad Director, I might not look stupidly naive myself for recommending hir. What do you think?]

2) A student (BA or MA) is applying exclusively either to unrealistically competitive schools or to schools that rejected hir in the first round the last time ze applied and won't add less selective schools to hir list or drop the ones that didn't accept hir the first time.

3) Your department has a 0.000 batting average with getting any of your students, BA or MA, into the nationally ranked flagship school program up the road, and you know everyone in the department in your field (and in a number of other fields), and the student asking you for the letter is not even close to best of the students they've turned down.

4) The student asking you for a letter has barely survived hir Honors thesis or MA experience, kicking, screaming, procrastinating, and delaying all the way, and hir work isn't that outstanding. You know a Ph.D. program isn't right for hir *personally* as well as professionally. How do you convince hir of that when ze's got the classic combination of unrealistic goals and terrible working habits?

Thoughts?

Random bullet points of "I'll get the hang of sabbatical yet"

2010-10-03T13:41:00.003-04:00

You'd think that because I'm on sabbatical, I'd be posting more. Well, clearly that's not the case. And it's bumming me out a little because after I kinda, sorta, not really came out at NCS, lots of people told me that they liked my blog and wished I'd post more and I promised I would. And I meant that. So what's up? Well, there are a couple of factors, too long for a bullet point, so maybe I'll write about them in a full post. And maybe *that* will get my blogging engine started again.
I feel like I'm frittering sabbatical away. That's a post in the making, too.
I really need to start exercising again. I'm trying to get back into it, and lord knows there's no time like a sabbatical year to do it, but I need to find a new thing or find a way to make running new again for me. After the Boston Marathon in 2007 I got really burnt out, plus I no longer had any more goals that really meant anything to me. That's a post brewing, too. But I'm riding my bike. Today I rode 12 1/2 miles and every time I have to go to campus, I ride it there, too. So that's something.
The frittering, not-blogging, and not-running are part of my time management anxiety. Sabbatical is slipping away!!! Only 10 1/2 months left!!! (See counter to right.) Oh noes! Yeah, ridiculous, isn't it? But that's how I feel. WTF? What's wrong with me?
On the positive side, I *have* been reading stuff for fun. Finally finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I liked a lot. As a fan of crime fiction, I especially enjoyed the mash-up of various sub-genres, and the way it kept switching things up. Also, I think I need to emulate Blomkvist's schedule in Hedeby for his research routine -- it would work for my rhythms. So see, the pleasure reading may have had a therapeutic effect on the sabbatical anxieties. Maybe.
I'm also re-reading The Iliad. At first it was because I thought I'd be teaching our European Lit to the Renaissance class next year for the first time, so I set myself a schedule to re-read all of my undergrad great books syllabus, but I may now be needed for Shakespeare. So now I'm just re-reading it for fun. Shut up! It is *too* fun! I may even continue with the plan since I might still teach that class in the future, and there's no time like sabbatical, right?
Also, I've advanced to the Budokan concert in Beatles Rock Band and have 5-starred every song up to that point on the bass. OK, so I have to keep it on the Easy level, but I'm still pleased with myself.
My research? Yeah, don't ask about that. The first rule of Dr. Virago's research is that you don't talk abut Dr. Virago's research.
Seriously, it's going. Sloooooooowly, that is. Here's some advice: don't apply for a sabbatical when you're at the beginning of something. Apply for it when you have something to write -- as Dr. Crazy smartly did. Her productivity is both inspiring and also, yes, anxiety-inducing.
If only my research were as exciting as Blomkvist's. Or that I were stranded in a small, northern Swedish town with nothing else to do. Huh, do you think Bullock would mind if I took off for Sweden for six months?
And now, for Eileen at In the Middle, a random picture of Pippi, "the super model of dogs," as I called her at NCS. (Yes, that's right, Pippi came up in the discussion at the blogging panel at NCS. She's famous!) Here she is, hittin' the road at the end of summer (photo by Bullock, dog wrangling by me):

On relics, medieval and modern, sacred and secular

2010-09-04T12:16:00.009-04:00

Sorry for the silence, especially given that I'd promised to get back to blogging more regularly. Blame "LeechBlock," a plug-in for Firefox. It lets you bar yourself from certain websites during times you set, and I set it to bar me from Blogger (among other things) from 9-5, M-F, to help me focus on my work. And I haven't been getting up early enough to start the day with a post, and by the end of the day I need to get away from the computer because my back is killing me. I need to be at the computer during the day because I'm working on a editing project that is due very, very soon, but unfortunately, I tweaked my back a couple of weeks ago, so that sitting has been uncomfortable -- so you can understand why I don't want to do it for long.

Anywho, that has nothing to do with the subject of this post, which is all about relics, because this summer I got to see -- and even hold (sort of) -- my very first relics (one of them right here in Rust Belt State, no less!). Perhaps you find that surprising, given that I'm a medievalist and grew up Catholic, but I think there are some reasons for the belatedness of my encounters with relics. (And also, as the post title suggests, one of these "relics" is neither Catholic nor medieval. But I'll get to that.) First of all, the Catholic subculture I grew up in -- midwestern, suburban, largely well-off -- was kind of trying to pass as WASP, I swear. I have another post in mind in which I might try to explain that more, but you'll have to take that as a given now. At any rate, I don't think I even *learned* about relics until I was studying medieval literature, or if I did, the Catholics who taught me scoffed at them. And though I've seen many, many reliquaries in museums, it's not often that the relic is still in it (or if it is, it's not visible). This especially true in the US and the UK, for obvious historical reasons.

I must have felt this lack on some unconscious level -- how can I call myself a real medievalist if I haven't seen a relic?! -- and managed to turn this summer's travels into "Dr. Virago and the Quest for Relics." OK, that's not *all* I was doing, but I did consciously seek out three encounters with relics, and then accidentally encountered another one in a museum closer to home. The last one, the one in the museum, was one of the few rare visible relics in a museum-owned reliquary; it's the least exciting one, especially since it was the last of the relics I saw this summer, but I thought it was kind of serendipitous and funny that all this time I could have seen a relic in my own backyard. The overseas ones were the ones I actually sought out.

The first one was the hand bone of St. Etheldreda in St. Etheldreda's church in Ely Place in London (just off of Holborn Circus and next to Charterhouse St). My quest to visit St. Etheldreda's started when I purchased a book called Secret London (or was it Hidden London?? I don't have it to hand now) on my first day in London this summer -- to kill time at Waterstone's on Malet St. while waiting for my room at College Hall to be available. Both St. Etheldreda's and its neighbor, Ye Old Mitre pub, were in the book, and since they weren't far from Malet St., I decided I wanted to pay a visit to each -- the pub because it looked adorable and the church because, OMG!, a relic you can see! of a pretty cool Anglo-Saxon saint whose Life by Aelfric I've used in Old English and so know something about.

I went to the pub first with my friend Mark on a pub crawl that also featured the Princess Louise, the Cittie of York, and Blackfriars, all of which I recommend. But I'll have to do a separate post on those, especially so I can post pictures of Blackfriars, which is an *extraordinary* Art Nouveau extravaganza, and of the Mitre, which really *was* freakin' adorable (although its history is tied up with Reformation and the Bishops of Ely in kind of a nasty way -- at least according to history of St. Etheldreda's on their web site). And so when I was looking for something to do with my friend C. and we decided on another pub crawl, I talked her into starting at the Mitre, but only after we paid a visit to St. Etheldreda's first.

St. Etheldreda's was cool and fascinating not just because of the relic. Since the late 19th century, it's been back in the hands of Catholic church, so there were stained glass windows and statues commemorating Catholic matyrs to the Reformation who were all associated with the church or its nearby neighborhood, including Carthusian monks from the monastery up the street on Charterhouse St. The Carthusians were commemorated in the stained glass window made in 1964, and scenes of their execution lined up with scenes of the Passion. Yeah, not subtle. But it's pretty extraordinary to see such religious propaganda in England on the *Catholic* side of things. And while it must not have riled people up in 1964 in England, imagine such a thing being installed in Northern Ireland at the same time (or a decade later!). It's weird to think about the history *and* the present of religious strife in England and its dominions and to look at that window in peace in a quiet church on a placid little street in London today. You can see the window itself, as well as the statues commemorating other martyrs, here.

But back to the relic. The guide book said it was kept in the sacristy and if we asked nicely, we'd be able to see it. So, we asked nicely. And the man (lay caretaker?? he wasn't a priest) who we asked cheerfully marched up to the altar and the sacristy, opened the decorated coffin the relic is kept in (which I actually didn't see from my vantage, but you can see it here), brought over the reliquary, and *handed* it to us! OMG! I'm *touching* a relic -- weird! (To this day I keep thinking I could have turned to C. and said, "Run!" and we could have disappeared forever with the relic of St. Etheldreda. Not that either of us would have *really* done that, but it amuses me to think it.) And actually, we weren't really touching the relic itself -- just the surprisingly heavy reliquary, which was hand-shaped and had a little window through which you could see the bone. The web site says it's an "incorrupt" part of her hand, but it looked like a bone to us. And it had a bright red spot painted on it -- anyone know what that's about?

So that was my first relic, and being the kind of person fascinated with the macabre, I was fascinated with it, even though, in retrospect, it wasn't all that exciting. No, there was a *much* more exciting set of relics awaiting me at the Basilica San Domenico in Siena, Italy: the finger and *head* of St. Catherine of Siena. I have C. to thank for this, too, because she saw them first and told me I had to see them because they totally topped St. Etheldreda. And boy, was she right!

You can't take pictures of St. Catherine's head, and my measly camera wouldn't have been able to handle it anyway, because you can't get very close -- the chapel is roped off. (You can get much closer to the finger -- at which I stared for a considerable time -- but again, no pictures.) But luckily, there are images out there on the web that I can borrow. OK, prepare yourself to be a little grossed out.

Are you ready? It's pretty grotesque, so I thought I'd warn you before you scroll down.
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Here it comes, St. Catherine's head:

Now *that's* an incorrupt relic! (OK, it's partially corrupted, but it qualifies for incorrupt status.) Weird, huh? I was kind of creeped out and utterly fascinated at the same time. It was like rubbernecking at an accident. Standing and contemplating all of this, I had one of these moments where I thought, alternately, "What kind of weird freak-show religion did I grow up in?????" and also "Wait, *am* I Catholic? This is totally weird and alienating to me." It was one thing to hold a reliquary with a bone in it and think, "Hm, interesting!" and another to look at this and be kind of dumbfounded, as I was.

But you know what? It's not just medieval Christians and modern Catholics who preserve and display the dead among the living...and that brings me to the modern, secular "relic" I also paid a little "pilgrimage" to, back in London, and this was also thanks to that quirky guide book and my residence in Bloomsbury in a UCL dorm this summer. Have you guessed yet what modern, secular relic I visited?

That's right, Jeremy Bentham! Here's good old JB, with his wax head, this time in pictures I took myself:

And lest you think Jeremy's presentation is much more decorous than Catherine's, let me remind you that underneath those clothes stuffed with straw is JB's skeleton. And those are his clothes and accouterments. And once upon a time, JB's preserved head was also on display -- between his feet! -- as you can see in this picture from the nearby display [WARNING! Another grotesque human head coming!]:

(Sorry about the blurriness -- because of the glass case, I couldn't use flash. But perhaps some of you are grateful you can't see that mummified head clearly!)

Bentham called this little display, which he arranged himself before his death in his will, his "auto-icon," so he had to be thinking of the religious valences of the word "icon." And sure, given that it's Bentham the Utilitarian we're talking about, he was probably *playing* with that notion and had no intention of being actually venerated. But still, the little display that University College London has erected around him -- not to mention the UCL Bentham Project as a whole -- isn't all that different in its curatorship and its tone of appreciation from the display of Catherine's head and the San Domenico web site. The Dominicans and UCL may be fans of, respectively, Catherine and Jeremy for different reasons, and Bentham's fans don't expect him to intercede in the spiritual realm for the them, but they're fans nevertheless.

The other thing that unites Catherine and Jeremy -- besides the division of their heads from their bodies! -- is that both heads have been the object of theft. Catherine's head was originally secretly brought to Siena from Rome, where the rest of her body lies, and it's now under such tight lock and key because of subsequent attempts to steal it. And JB's head is no longer on display because of an infamous theft of it by King's College London students in the 1970s. What is it about mummified heads that make people want to steal them?!?!

And I think underlying both the religious relics and the secular one are our complicated relations to death and (im)mortality. The two heads, especially, seem to want to keep the memory of and admiration for these two figure alive, to show the ways they conquered death, whether spiritually or intellectually, but they also announce our universal mortality, and in that way serve also as memento mori. Catherine and Jeremy likely had very different attitudes towards the meaning of that mortality, but they couldn't escape it, and they each seemed consciously attentive towards that -- Catherine refusing to eat anything but the Eucharist at the end of her life and JB writing his will with instructions about his "auto-icon."

And it's probably my own obsessions with/fears of death that has me so simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by these relics.

In which "I" get thanked in a book acknowledgments

2010-08-19T12:27:00.007-04:00

Apparently, Gregory Colón Semenza thinks I had something to do with the success of Graduate Study for the 21st Century (I think I have mentioned it more than once on the blog). And by "I," I mean Dr. Virago. Go look at the Amazon page for the newly revised second edition and click on "Look Inside This Book." Then look at the acknowledgments to the second edition. Yup, there it is: Dr. Virago.

Too funny! Even funnier to me is the fact that my colleague Victoria will be taking over our 'intro to graduate studies' class this semester with my syllabus -- which includes Semenza's book -- and so the new crop of our MA students might read that acknowledgments section with no idea that "Dr. Virago" is me. Hilarious!

You know, it's things like this that sometimes make me want to 'claim' Dr. Virago here on the blog -- I'm already out elsewhere (including in print) -- but I still think I'd prefer for my own web identity and Dr. Virago's to be distinct.

Anyway, I still highly recommend Semenza's book for anyone in a humanities graduate program or thinking about applying to one, and I'm psyched there's an updated second edition. And most of my students have found it very, very helpful, and they're M.A. students, not the Ph.D. students it's really aimed at. (By which I mean to say, it's useful for M.A .students *as well as* Ph.D. students.)

And thanks for reading, Prof. Semenza!

Why you should go to Knaresborough and see the Chapel of Our Lady of the Crag

2010-08-12T17:57:00.017-04:00

While I was in England this summer, I took a weekend to see my good friend E. in the Leeds area. She asked me what I wanted to do and I said, "Let's go to that adorable town, Knaresborough, that I keep seeing from the train on the way to York." (Note: that's on the line to and from Ilkley, which is the line my friend is on, so I've ridden that route a couple of times before or after visiting her and also going to York for various reasons.) And she said she hadn't been there since she was a kid and would love to go back, so go we did. And it turned out to be the *perfect* place to have a picnic lunch and spend an intermittently sunny and pleasant English Sunday with a friend and her three-year-old little girl, as well as a place of interest to medievalists in the area temporarily or permanently (I'm looking at you, TO'D!), as well as anyone else who's looking to do something in Yorkshire and has visited all the usual suspects.

First of all, you might be wondering what it was I could see from the train that so delighted me. Well, first of all, let me give you a view of where the train passes through. The following picture is one I stitched together from three or four other photos and is taken from the edge of the castle and its gardens high on the cliff side (click to "embiggen," and it won't look so fuzzy, though you will still see where I stitched it together):
So, you're traveling through the rolling hills and flatter fields of West Yorkshire when all of sudden you're on this lovely 19th century bridge (which is better appreciated here than on the bridge, of course) with a town opening up not only in front of you, but above and below you, too. (Btw, in the big version, if you look closely on the horizon on the left, you'll see the house that I will someday make mine. If I win the lottery, that is.) Here are some more pictures of the part of the town on the terraced cliff side and below, including one when the sun was brighter, and one of "The Old Mill House" (now a private residence):

Now, the center of town and its high street is actually on the plain above the river. I should've taken more pictures, because it's pretty exceptionally cute, even by cute English town standards. But here's a picture of the statue honoring the Historical Town Character, Blind Jack, who was a surveyor, bridgebuilder, and roadmaker despite being blind -- hence his surveyor's wheel in the statue:

His *actual* surveyor's wheel is in the town museum, the Courthouse Museum (on the castle grounds), which is actually quite a good local history museum if you can ignore the god-awful misinformation about the Middle Ages in the kid's hands-on exhibit (though there are fun costumes to try on!). The stuff about the Middle Ages in the *actual* museum, where the old stuff is -- at least what I saw in the limited time before the three-year-old got impatient -- was quite good. I wonder if part of what made it interesting both to me and to the town that keeps it up was that this seemingly little, out of the way town often played a part in national history, especially in the Medieval and Early Modern periods. (Here's the Wikipedia overview, but you can read more about the castle and its history here at Knaresborough Online.)

I don't have a whole lot of pictures of the castle because there's not a lot of it left. It's been reduced to little more than Romantic-lite garden ornament, having been ordered destroyed by Parliament in 1646 (*shakes fist*)--though the tower was kept intact as a prison, and another part used as a courthouse (hence the Courthouse Museum). Here's what's left of the East gate:

And here's a bit of the castle proper:

There's enough left that you can climb up part of it (where I took the above picture) and climb down into the "dungeon" (uh, it's just the undercroft), but it's not so challenging that our three-year-old companion couldn't do it. There was some more silly signage in the castle, including one about what was obviously a medieval-era coffin (which looked like the one on this site) that said something like, "This could be a coffin -- it's shaped like a body -- but if it is, where has the body gone?!" Um, to the charnel house so they could reuse the stone? That's one possibility, anyway. But hey, the views are lovely, and the garden/park that the castle grounds have been turned into included a mini-golf/pitch-and-putt area, and who doesn't love mini-golf?! And when we were leaving at the end of the day, a brass band was giving a concert in front of the tower -- lovely!

But the highlight of *my* day, anyway, was the visit to the Chapel of Our Lady of the Crag, including the walk there. It's a *fantastic* surviving example of late medieval lay devotion and its survival, especially given it's a Marian shrine, is all the more surprising given the destruction of the Trinitarian Friars' abbey down the road during and subsequent to the dissolution.

The way to the chapel, along Abbey Road (no, not that one) is a lovely walk and there were plenty of other people making it -- mostly locals from Knaresborough and the next village over, out enjoying a beautiful summer Sunday -- but it gave me some serious real estate envy. It's clear Knareborough is pretty prosperous and that it takes a lot of money to live along the river. The first clue? The Porsche parked outside of this cottage:

I don't need the Porsche (not pictured) -- just let me have the cottage, please. Or, even though it's not really my style, I'll take this home with the river-front dock:

I didn't get a picture of the following, but a number of the houses with fronts facing the road and backing up to the river had planters out front that were clearly made from reclaimed stone from the abbey. Some might have been troughs of some sort, but judging from the carvings, I'm pretty sure these were more coffins! But if so, where had the bodies gone?! Te-hee!

There's also a posh-looking little gentleman's farm, with these adorable heritage hogs and a marvelous wood pile outside of its wattle and daub walls:

And this to-die-for antiques and book shop:

Or this inn along the river, perfect for the English version of Lorelai Gilmore:

And, of course, there's the Chapel of Our Lady of the Crag itself -- which, by the way, is still used as a shrine to the Virgin Mary (even *more* remarkable in modern England, I'd say). I could never get a picture of the outside of it without someone in it -- not to mention the ugly plastic chairs -- so this will have to do:

As the historical records indicate, it was built by John the Mason in 1408, and as you can see, he gave it elements of a proper, full-sized church, including a glass window in the style of a stained-glass one (though not actually stained). Yes, I'll get to that weird knight figure in a minute, but first here's a picture of more of John's details, including the "vaulted ceiling" complete with "roof bosses":

And there's this marvelous little face. What is it?

There's an altar, too, in this 10-foot-square space. The statue on top of it is a later addition, the original presumably destroyed by ~~the iconoclastic Parliamentarians~~ iconoclasts of some sort:

Now back to that knight outside. Here's a closer look:

The brochure I bought says that there's no record of it being carved at the time John the Mason got the permit to carve the chapel, but then says there's no reason not to believe it's as old as the chapel. Really? My friend thought the face looked too "modern." I think the mustache looks more 19th century that medieval, but dating by style is a tricky thing. More important, the carving doesn't look worn away enough to be as old as the rest. Look at that weird little face again that I showed you above and how worn *it* is. Would the knight be as worn or even *more* worn, considering it's outside? And why would John the Mason carve a knight? What do you think?

Anyway, I really recommend a trip to Knaresborough -- especially in fine weather -- if you have the time, opportunity, and inclination. My only regret is that we didn't have time for the Hermitage of Robert of Knaresborough -- the three-year-old could only take so much -- but then again, I think the Lady of the Crag is more interesting, given that it's surviving evidence of the intensity of lay devotion.

And let me leave you with one last picture just for the heck of it (it didn't really fit into the narrative). Be sure to click on the picture to read the name of these "holiday cabins" and then marvel at how *wrong* that sounds!

Guest Post: On the Medieval Academy's meeting in Tempe, Arizona

2010-08-08T17:33:00.002-04:00

Now that I'm back from my brief Midwestern vacation, it's time to get serious again. And for starters, I have a guest post from my friend The General on why she won't be going to the Medieval Academy of America's annual meeting in Tempe, Arizona, in April, and why she's not renewing her membership.

But first, let me give a little background for my non-medievalist/non-academic readers who might want or need it. In May, Jeffrey Cohen at In the Middle started the discussion of whether or not the MAA should move the meeting out of Arizona. That post garnered 74 comments and ultimately led to an open letter to the MAA urging them to cancel or move the meeting, signed by 170 people. That letter, plus discussions elsewhere, spurred the MAA to poll its members by e-mail and a web-based poll. On August 3, the MAA executive committee came to its final decision to keep the meeting in Tempe, and sent to the membership an e-mail letter announcing that decision. Karl Steel at In the Middle posted the letter here. And Inside Higher Ed followed up with a story.

That's the background. In response, The General wrote a letter to the Medieval Academy which she also posted as a note on Facebook and asked me to post here. It's still in the form of an address to the Medieval Academy, but it's been slightly edited since she sent it off to them. And although she's happy to have her name attached to it, I decided to keep in the spirit of this blog and use her pseudonym.

So, without further ado, below is what The General had to say to the Medieval Academy.

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Dear Medieval Academy,

I just read your recent announcement about your decision to proceed with the 2011 meeting in Arizona. I am deeply disappointed and rather stunned at your decision. As one of the few medievalists of color in the profession and on your membership roster, your decision means that anyone of color (or any shade other than white) will be under surveillance, put in the category of second-class citizen, and generally thought of as a person of suspicion if they even attend the Arizona meeting. As someone who has served for several years on a board of directors that managed a revenue stream of 70 million dollars, I understand the directive of fiduciary responsibility quite well. But I also would like to point out that your choice means that you have chosen monetary gain over human value for your organization. You have decided that diversity and encouraging students and faculty of color to go into Medieval Studies is not a core value of the Academy. Rather, the fiduciary bottom line of the endowment is more important.

Your letter states that you feel that you were not in a position to make a “collective political statement” for the entire group, but yet you have. Your decision means that a minority of your membership will be excluded, treated as alien others, and asked to constantly carry “papers” during their trip. You are asking me and every other member with a skin shade not deemed “American” or an accent not considered “standard” to accept this treatment and see it as just another political issue. When were basic civil rights a partisan political issue rather than an ethical and moral one? It would be one thing if you wanted not to hold a meeting in a state or location because it had voted Democrat or Republican; that would be a partisan “collective political statement." But you are asking me and any person of color to walk into a state and pretend that being a second-class citizen is fine. When did basic civil rights become a partisan political statement? I was under the impression that all the members of the Medieval Academy believed in civil rights. Or had I and other members been wrong? Is the Medieval Academy still an ivory tower institution that excludes, women, people of color, and the disabled? Is the Academy not interested in supporting their members and equity? For me, these were the issues at stake in your decision. And your answer to these questions were shattering.

Your decision and letter tells me that I should find it acceptable to come to a professional academic meeting and wear a figurative star on my lapel and have my papers potentially checked at every turn. What you are saying to me and every scholar (domestic and international) of color is that discrimination is fine, that equitable treatment in our field is not a priority or an inalienable right. This is the very opposite of community building. You say in your letter that it is about the work that people have done, yet the meeting’s presence in Arizona is going to overshadow the work. I would be queasy discussing Lateran IV’s restrictions and injunctions against Jews and Saracens in a state that is enacting their own version of these laws. The conference will not be an exercise in political free speech; rather it will condone the behaviors that put members of the academy under scrutiny.

Several blog comments discussing this decision have said it would be OK to have the meeting and just organize for political action. I completely disagree because this is not "just" a political issue; you are asking people to be comfortable with other members of the Academy being stopped, asked for papers, possibly arrested, and held for questioning. You are asking that our personal rights be assaulted, abused, and trampled on all to attend a professional meeting.

You are asking too much and therefore I plan to boycott the Medieval Academy and encourage anyone else to do likewise. I do not want to be part of an organization that feels it is acceptable for me to be discriminated against.

Sincerely,
The General

Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield and finds it not a burning wreck

2010-08-07T17:38:00.011-04:00

So in the last post I mentioned that I was returning to the place where I once spent "The Summer I Was a Governess." I have *many* stories to tell from that summer -- though my only friend from those days (how sad and melancholy -- *one* friend -- it's true!) thinks I should save them for a Nanny Diaries type novel. Suffice it to say for now that I was tricked into being a much-abused and exploited live-in babysitter, with responsibilities almost every day, all day, for a mere $15 a week, and that many of the other kids didn't seem interested in being friends with "the help." (Except for that one kind soul, who was the reason I returned to the place this week.)

*Anyway*, for the first time in 26 years, I went back to the sight of my indentured servitude, and I have to say that it was *great fun* being there as an adult with no children to look after! First of all, it's a *beautiful* place. It was originally a retreat for a particular denomination of Protestant ministers and their families -- not quite a Chautauqua, but related, I suppose -- founded in 1901. And like many other places inspired by American Romanticism and the urge to get back to nature, it's a bucolic and relaxing place, on a spit of land between one of the Great Lakes and a very large interior lake with the most crystalline water you've ever seen. Look! --

That water is up to the hem on my shorts (which are fairly short shorts), and I have long legs. And as you can see, it's a sand-bottom lake, too, so there's an actual sandy beach to lie on when you're not in the water. Here's a picture of part of the sandy beach with everyone's beach chairs and water toys just sitting around waiting for them to come back for them (because you can do that there and your stuff will actually be there waiting for you!):

People who live at this summer resort live in "cottages" of various styles. Some are very traditional, like this one --

-- and some are traditional ones expanded upon and made more awesome, like this one (*love* the tree through the roof line of the porch!):

And then there's the fancy excess-of-the-80s might-as-well-be-a-full-time-house I lived in with the family I worked for:

Yeah, I know, poor me. But I'm telling you, I really did get a raw deal. (Though I did like "laying out" -- as we used to say -- on the deck on the back when I was home alone with the infant.)

By the way, I wouldn't have been back at this place again if I weren't still friends with the one kid I really befriended up there 26 years ago. In the intervening years we kept in touch almost entirely by writing -- first hand-written letters, later e-mails, and now Facebook. We didn't see each other again until 2004, here in Rust Belt. And then Bullock and I went to a wedding in my friend's current vicinity and we saw him then. And then I saw him this week. Amazing, isn't it?

Anyway, this time around I made a quick, 24-hour visit (plus the 5 hours of driving on each end) and did some of my favorite things to do in a place like this (short of swimming, since I currently don't own a bathing suit that fits). Here's a quick photo essay of my visit.

I relaxed on the cottage deck with a regional and seasonal beer:

I walked along the shore of the Great Lake with my friend, looking for interesting rocks:

I took pictures of interesting rocks:

I enjoyed the sunset over the Great Lake:

I relaxed in front of a bonfire on the shore of the Great Lake:

And I marveled some more at the clarity and calmness of the non-Great lake:

Oh yeah, and I slept *great* in the quiet and pitch-black dark of the woods.

All it took was 24 hours of awesome laziness to wipe out the summer of '84. I'm now in love with the place and talking to Bullock about renting a place up there for two weeks next summer!

ETA: I should also add that all the people whom I met (or met again) who have been going to this summer spot since 1984 or before were *thrilled* to see me there again, and were warm and welcoming to me as an adult. I'm sure being 15 years old had something to do with my feeling like such an outsider back then.

Brief vacation

2010-07-31T07:32:00.003-04:00

I will write those promised posts (I promise again), but Bullock and I are leaving for four days to visit his mother for her 70th birthday. I'm looking forward to seeing her and wishing her happy birthday, but I'm not looking forward to the fact that it's supposed to be stormy weather on the drive there and possibly raining the four days we're there. Pippi is NOT going to enjoy the car right through a storm! (Yes, Pippi is going with us.) We'll see just how bad her storm madness gets in a moving vehicle.

Then after we get back, I'm taking another brief trip to the Land of the Summer When I Was a Governess. I can't recall if I've ever mentioned that traumatic summer of my life (I wasn't really a governess, but I *was* an exploited live-in babysitter), but I'm sure I'll have something to say about visiting that place as an adult 26 years later.

Anyway, back to blogging when I return from these adventures in the Midwest!

Don't know what to do with myself

2010-07-28T13:15:00.003-04:00

I decided to take this week off (despite having a massive primary text editing project looming over my head), and have realized, to my utter horror, that I'm not very good at relaxing around the house. Now, I'm great at relaxing and doing nothing if I'm somewhere scenic -- on a beach or a river bank, or at an outdoor cafe or bar in a city, for example -- but I feel a little at loose ends here at home in Rust Belt. And given the mugginess of the weather, I have a little cabin fever, too.

Sure, I have books to read, and I pick one up every now and then, but none of them are really holding my interest at the moment. I think I need to order some new books (suggestions welcome!), because I think I've overdosed on the pulp genre fiction that I often spend my summers on. (Btw, can my peeps of the internets tell me: is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo going to be all financial crimes all the time? I don't think I can take 600 pages of that, to be honest.) So I find myself reading, then playing a game on my iPhone, then checking FB, then flipping through a magazine, and then going back to the novel again.

I think maybe because I was going non-stop for the entire school year until the end of NCS, I just don't have any more energy left for steady concentration -- at least not at the moment.

Has anyone else experienced this? Or is it just me? Or is it true that the web is making me stupider? Ack!

PS -- Was my last post too much about Me Me Me to elicit comment? Does no one else identify with the ups and downs of professional confidence?

The evolution of a professional identity (or: why I had a better time at NCS Siena than Swansea)

2010-07-27T10:08:00.006-04:00

When I first saw my friend G. at NCS Siena, he said something like this: "Virago, I have to say, I'm a little surprised to see you here, because when I saw you at Swansea, you didn't seem to be having a very good time." And back in this post from two years ago, I hinted at why.

But NCS Siena was a completely different experience for me, and I don't think it was just because it was in Siena and not Swansea (although geography does play a part in this). It was different from the start, back when we were all submitting panels and abstracts. First of all, my friend H. approached me about putting a panel together, and that was the first step in what made me feel more involved, and less of an outsider, where this conference is concerned. (I should mention that part of my outsider status is that I don't work on Chaucer -- although my current work sometimes makes reference to him -- but NCS seems, in the last few iterations, to be more and more open to being about the "age of Chaucer," as its journal, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, suggests.) And then when the panels were all arranged and the CFP came out, I felt my current work fit one of the panel proposals much more than it had last time. What's more, I'd since met one of that panel's organizers, so I didn't feel as though I was sending a proposal out into the unknown quite as much. Two years ago, on the other hand, I was rejected from a panel, then told I was rejected from the conference as a whole, and then finally told a spot was found for my paper -- as I detailed here. And the panel on which I finally presented -- along with my friend G. -- was a truly miscellaneous panel in the last time slot of the conference, and it didn't really generate questions very useful to my project. This time around, though, I was accepted to the panel to which I applied, which was a good fit for my paper. More on how that all went -- very well, I think -- in a bit.

At any rate, before it even started, NCS Siena was already proving to be a better conference for me than NCS Swansea had been. And it continued to live up to its auspicious beginning. And yes, part of that was Siena -- but not just because Siena is a more historically rich place with more things to do. [Digression: in defense of Swansea, the weather was better there, the opportunity for good running was better (something that was once important to me), the bay was lovely (I'm a fan of water, of which Siena has none - not even a river, which struck me as odd), and I'm a weirdo who prefers the British climate and flora and fauna to Italian in the summer (though I did like the presence of cicadas, which reminded me of home - both Kansas where I grew up and the Great Lakes region I live in now). But that's the subject for another post.] The geography of Siena was better for my mood than Swansea's was -- and perhaps better for the mood of the conference as whole. At Swansea, there were a few people who stayed off campus, but most stayed in the dorms, which weren't terribly comfortable. But not only that, it meant that we were too much together, I think. So many meals were taken together in the dining hall that you were too often faced with the conference equivalent of the high school lunchroom hierarchy -- will I get to sit with the cool kids? And it was hard to escape the campus, situated as it was outside of the city. The edge of town was a long walk away, and the center of town was a cab or bus ride away. And so you were either trapped or, worse, stranded, if the people you knew had escaped and left you behind. But in Siena, we were in many different hotels, and the Arcobaleno, where I stayed, was lovely and comfortable -- best sleep I'd had in awhile! And I had a conference buddy this time -- my friend The General -- which eased any and all anxieties about finding company at meals or on excursions. And even at a hotel 2km outside of the city center as the Arcobaleno was, it wasn't hard to reach that center, and there was plenty to do there, of course. I actually regret not playing hooky a little more from the conference to be a tourist. I had the morning after the end of conference for that, but that left time only for a couple of things. Anyway, back to my main point here: I think less anxiety brews, and there's less posturing, when the conference itself isn't the only focus of your energies, and when you're not always forced together. And the Siena sun and heat, which could have made people cranky, seemed to mellow people out, to slow us down -- we were all in it together, we were all a little sweaty, we all dressed a litte more casually because of it (a strong effect on attitude, I think -- especially with all those previously unseen medievalist man legs in shorts!) and hey, we were in Siena!

But really, what made it a different conference for me was more about where I am in terms of my professional identity and in the number of people I know (and blogging has been no small part of that, though traditional networking has helped, too). As I said to G. when he made the comment above, "It's amazing what a difference two years and a good review in Speculum makes." Two years ago my book was out and I had tenure, so I should have felt confidence, but I was still uncertain about whether any of it mattered, whether I mattered. The feedback we get on our printed work -- the evidence of its impact -- is slow to surface. And when you have a job at a place like Rust Belt University, it's easy to think you're disappearing, that you and your work don't matter, that you peaked in graduate school, that after tenure you're *stuck* rather than *secure*. But in the last two years, four positive reviews of my book came out and I started to be cited in other people's books and articles, and my work started showing up on people's syllabuses. And people solicited me for conferences because they knew my work. Over time I became not Dr. Virago, random drudge at RBU, but Dr. Virago, who does good work that people know about.

And this conference reinforced that effect. Here, in bullet point format, are a few really cool moments that continued to boost my confidence throughout the conference:

On the very first day, in the first morning break, a Known Figure whom I know and admire, but to whom I'm not very professionally close in any way (despite being FB friends with him!), crossed the courtyard to say hi to me and said, "Virago, we were just talking about you last night!" An auspicious beginning to the conference!
A recent PhD had one of her professors introduce her to me at dinner in town one night, and said to me, "I just wanted to meet you and tell you I'm a huge fan of your work and I'm so excited to meet you!" Seriously. I have a fan! If said person happens upon this post, I want you to know you'll forever be my #1 Fan -- I *heart* you for that!
One of my friends told me she kept hearing me quoted in a number of papers. Really? I told her I hadn't heard that -- clearly we were going to different panels -- but she said that was a good sign: I was moving on with my work, and the work was speaking for itself.
The organizers of the panel I'd been accepted to told me that they had rejected papers, even after making three or four panels out of the best submissions they got. And while I feel bad for those who were rejected, it's still nice to know you made the cut.
My paper went really well. I started to feel a little guilty that I kept getting most of the questions in the Q&A, but for whatever reasons, people responded to what I had to say. And they liked it and had useful suggestions (or suggestions phrased as questions). They also liked the phrase I coined to name the phenomenon I was describing, which I wish I could share with you here, but even though I fully expect people to know or figure out my real life identity, I'd still rather not be Googlable.
Other than some technical difficulties, the panel I organized with H went really well, too, and people were still talking about it later that day. I've seen at least one of the papers on it mentioned as a highlight of the conference, too, out there in the blogosphere.
And finally, my paper was mentioned in the one of the final round-up presentations! Woot! I don't know if the person really *liked* my paper -- she was actually maybe a bit snarky about it -- but hey, all publicity is good publicity, eh? And it's always cool to be mentioned in a summary of the conference.

Oh, and I even had a good conference as "Dr. Virago," too. I kind of came out at this conference -- although I didn't actually name myself in the comment I made during the Q&A at the blogging session, I was happy to tell people who I was in the blogosphere. Actually, I came out in print first, in JJC's essay for the Chaucer blog book. And more than one person told me they were excited to know my real life identity or that they were fans of the blog. (Apparently, Dr. Virago has more fans than my real life identity. Heh.) One scholar who has always been supportive of my 'real life' scholarship said to me that finding out I was Dr. Virago was as exciting as finding out the Chaucer blogger's identity! Really?

The other thing that made this conference better for me than the one in 2008 is that I know more people, and the people I know I now know better than I did then. As I mentioned above, that's in no small part to blogging. I'm especially grateful to the In the Middle bunch for inviting me to lunch in the city the first day, when, because of the business meeting, we had more time to leave the conference site. What a lovely lunch that was! I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to join them on one of their late nights drinking prosecco in the Campo (one of the drawbacks of being in the further-out hotel). But all in all, I felt like this conference was full of fun and friends, and though I'm kind of a social butterfly and flit from group to group, I was happy in all the company I kept, however briefly.

Preview of stuff I hope to write about this week

2010-07-25T13:59:00.003-04:00

Here's what I hope to write about in the coming week, as I take breaks from writing letters of recommendation and working on the big, fat editing project that's due in a month:

NCS Siena and how and why it was a very different experience for me from NCS Swansea, and not just because of the gelato (a post that will be one of my usual meditations on 'professional identity,' among other things)
A more lucid extension on my babbling comment at the end of the NCS blogging panel, originally about what personal blogs like mine can do for the profession and the sub-field of medieval studies, but expanded/modified to talk about why I've had such a blogging lull the past two years and why I want and need to pick up the pace again
Meditations on visiting a part of Italy that wasn't Rome (for once), and how it made me think about the relation of the medieval to the modern, about historical and present space and geography, and about my relation to both medieval Christianity and my own Catholic upbringing in an assimilating, WASPy world
Relics, sacred and secular. Yes, that's right: secular relics. You'll see.
The nearly three weeks I spent in England before NCS Siena, including stuff about the London Rare Books School; tales of overcoming my fear of the London bus system (seriously); thoughts on my changing relationship to big cities; and pictures of the ridiculously cute Yorkshire town of Knaresborough

See, if write all this out here, its public presence will hold me to the plans for writing that I have. But today, I'm going to lie around reading Entertainment Weekly and pulp detective fiction -- something I haven't done in a long time.

Not dead yet...but not exactly in top form

2010-07-24T13:51:00.004-04:00

While I was in Siena, Italy, at the New Chaucer Society biennial congress, I caught an exotic conference cold that had been imported to Italy from Leeds by my hotel roommate, The General. Now that I'm back in Rust Belt, I'm still congested, although the cold is in its final stages, I think. Still, the 95F temperature here combined with the dense midwestern humidity is not helping with the feeling that my head is some sort of giant, stuffed, pinata-like thing really to burst. Somehow the cold was more bearable in Siena. Perhaps that was because it was dryer there (but also about 95F), or because the gelato made it all better, or maybe just because I was in freakin' *Siena,* for pete's sake! But at least here I have robust American air conditioning and Bullock's homemade ice cream to replace the gelato.

Anyway, why am I telling you this? Because I'd planned to write a long post today about NCS to re-inaugurate the blog. Now that more and more people know who I am in real life, they can actually *bug* me in person to get back to posting, and I promised a number people at NCS that I would get back to it as soon as I got home. And I will, I swear, but right now my head is too muddled.

You know you've been a bad blogger when...

2010-05-29T19:20:00.002-04:00

...Michael Bérubé wonders where you've gone and has to post Middle English poetry to get your attention.

Normal blogging will resume, I swear, as I am now fully and officially and totally ON SABBATICAL!! Hooray!! In the meantime, here's some Bérubé-inspired play-along fun: using "Sumer is icumen in" (see Bérubé's post) and Ezra Pound's parody as your inspiration, write a poem in the comments that begins "Sabbatical is icumen in."

Giving directions for writing assignments: I'm doing it wrong

2010-03-31T12:25:00.004-04:00

Over the years my handouts for writing assignments of all kinds -- short, long, research papers, close reading analysis, whatever -- have gotten longer and more detailed. These days they have a structure that looks something like this: general overview (including goals and point of assignment); format requirements (sometimes this comes later); details of process (what students will need to do *before* writing); summation/repetition of over-arching goal, often underlined or written in bold. So that last bit on a short assignment might say, "Write a short essay (about 4 pages) in which you address X and Y. Be sure to give concrete evidence to support your claims, state those claims with clarity, [etc. -- insert appropriate necessary move here]." And it will essentially repeat what the general overview said, but with more language about the "how" (the process detailed above it). The longer the assignment, the more complicated this summation might be, but it's never longer than a short paragraph.

So, in other words, I see my assignments as teaching student how to do what I want them to do, rather than just assuming they know what's expected in whatever the assignment is asking. And in the process section, I often point out that the order they *do* things is not necessarily the order they will *present* them in the finished product, or that they won't ultimately use everything they discover in the process of preparing.

Sounds good, right? Sounds like I'm setting them up for success, doesn't it? And in some ways I'm even writing my assignments like a well formed essay or narrative, with a beginning, and middle, and an end. And yet, somehow it doesn't work. More and more students seem to miss the point, the big picture, even when it's underlined and in bold and repeated at the beginning and end. And the students who miss this big picture include English majors, honors students, and even MA students. I had one assignment in my graduate methods class that was an utter failure -- not as single finished assignment addressed the big picture.

Instead, they get all hung up on the details. In that grad assignment, for example, they were seriously angsty over how to site the web page for a scholarly journal. Seriously. A whole bunch of them. I couldn't figure out why so many of them were spending so much time on those web sites. And no one asked me substantive questions about the larger point of the project, which was to report on journals in a given subfield and educate each other on what journals were out there, what their emphases were and what kinds of articles they published, how difficult it was to get published in them (in terms of time and percentage of accepted articles, etc.), whether they published scholarly articles only, or other kinds of writing (forums, reviews, etc.). It was clear in many of the assignments turned in that no one in some the groups (it was a group assignment) had even bothered to open an issue of the journal! I should have known that they were missing the point from the weird questions they were asking. In fact, I'm now thinking that instead of asking students if they have any questions about the assignment that I should say, "OK, who can summarize the point of this assignment for the class?" I think I might a) catch misunderstandings and b) open the eyes of a lot of other students.

And recently, in another class, a short assignment had final directions along the lines of "Once you've done all that, write an essay in which you draw from the evidence you've gathered and answer the following two questions: what does that tell you about X and how can we apply it to Y." More than half the class forgot to address the "apply it to Y" part and the ones who did threw it in as an afterthought. And the practice of "apply it to Y" has been part of every assignment this semester. As in the graduate journal assignment, I think theses students also got so hung up in gathering data that they forgot why they were doing it and what it was supposed to be used for.

So, clearly, something's wrong with the way *I'm* doing things, if all of these different groups of students are missing the point. I have to say that I long for the approach most of my undergraduate professors used. Twice a semester they'd say, "Go write a paper." Seriously, the syllabus (which was usually a single page, btw) would have two days marked "6-page Paper Due" (or something similarly laconic) -- one before the midterm and one after -- and that's it. And then there was a midterm and a final (no details about those, either). Of course, that would be going to the other extreme and there all sorts of reasons I can't do it that way with my students.

At any rate I'm starting to think I'm giving them too much guidance and they're getting lost in the details. And I'm also giving too many assignments. While that theoretically gives many more opportunities to learn, I'm not sure the students who need it the most take those opportunities. It definitely gives students more grades (each weighted very little), but then some of the flakier ones fail to do every one. And it burns me out on grading.

So what do you all think? Give fewer directions? Let them work out the how? Or maybe move the process-oriented guidelines to an appendix and limit the first page to big picture stuff (and move it all there)? A perverse part of me now thinks I should have a class day dedicated to how to read assignment instructions! But that would be a little insane. What do you think?

Practical paleography skillz FTW!

2010-03-27T09:35:00.005-04:00

So the grad committee started our meetings to admit next year's class of MA students and TAs, and one of our committee members was concerned that the handwriting on two letters of recommendation for one student, ostensibly by two different people, looked the same.

They were both written in unusually neat, unusually small, non-cursive writing ("printing" in the common usage -- but not machine printed, hand printed). This alone makes them remarkable in a world where we all swear that years of marking papers has turned our handwriting into an illegible scrawl. And since these two people were in the same department at the same institution, and one was male and one was female, I can see why someone who has never studied handwriting might be suspicious. (Although, if these were both architecture profs, there would be no need to be suspicious -- they're actively taught to write that neatly.)

But I took one look at them and immediately saw two different hands, and I'm not even really well-trained in paleography (that is, I was trained to be able to *read* different scripts, but not to date and identify scripts and hands). But for someone who's had even just a bit of paleography, and who's used to working with handwritten documents, this was a piece of cake -- it took only a glance. The early modernist needed no convincing, but the rest of the committee wanted to know how I knew, so I singled out a letter form that distinguished them -- the "miniscule" ("lower case" in print language*) d. In one hand it had an ordinary, perfectly straight and vertical "ascender" (for my non-paleographer readers, that's the part that sticks up). But in the other hand the ascender curved to the left in a hook-like fashion, almost like an Angl0-Saxon "eth" without the cross mark ("eth" looks like this: ð). Voila, two different "hands" or handwriting identified to the satisfaction of the committee.

Score one for the medievalist.

So when President Newfangledness decides arbitrarily that the university of the 21st century doesn't need medievalists, maybe I'll show him my mad handwriting analysis skillz and convince him otherwise. Or maybe I'll just go work for that Bones woman. She could use a medievalist on her team, I'm sure.

*Hey, how come we teach little kids to "print" in "upper case" and "lower case" when they're writing by hand? Gr, the tyranny of print! It has confused all of our non-specialist language about these things.

Not the same "Dr. V"

2010-03-24T15:23:00.003-04:00

Just in case you're wondering, I do not write the column "Doin' It With Dr. V" for TheFrisky.com.

Just wanted to make that clear.

I feel like I won the lottery or something

2010-03-06T13:51:00.004-05:00

So, a couple of posts ago -- in this post -- I talked about how much out of pocket expense my summer travels might cost me. And in that post I mentioned I might get the internal grants I applied for.

Well, hot damn, I did! The big award gives me a month's salary plus about $3500 in additional expenses. And another travel award gave me an additional $700. And since NCS is in the next fiscal year, I can apply for regular faculty development travel funds for that.

Woo hoo!

Now I'm definitely going to make a big donation towards the cost of taking our cast and crew to the performance in Toronto, especially since my own costs there are now pretty much covered from a variety of sources and opportunities. I feel like I should pay if forward, you know? Especially since I've been saving frantically for the combined costs of summer travel and reduced salary for a full year's sabbatical next academic year.

Speaking of the latter, the board of trustees hasn't officially signed off on it yet, but my sabbatical application was approved up through the president. I'm a little superstitious about celebrating things that aren't finalized, but fingers crossed, I won't be teaching after this semester until Fall 2011.

I feel like with all this awesomeness something really terrible is around the corner -- more terrible than the jury summons (ugh) I got this week. What, me paranoid?

UPDATE: OK, now that I've done all the math, in terms of the "expenses" part of my London trip, it's still going to cost me over $2000 out of pocket, even with that $4200 in travel and expense money. And I know not all of the Siena trip will be covered, either. Damn, this is going to be expensive! But at least there's that extra month of salary, so that will cover it.

The marriage of Research and Teaching

2010-02-19T10:29:00.013-05:00

Despite my title, I swear this is not an allegorical treatise or a long lost Passus of Piers Plowman, though I do think that someone with more talent than I should write such a thing just for the fun of it!

No, this is my long promised post on what value I think research brings to teaching (and vice versa). It's in response to a comment left by Anon here, and I'll turn to that comment in a moment. I've actually posted on research in the classroom before, largely on teaching undergraduates how to do research, how to think of themselves as part of the scholarly conversation. That's also something I emphasize all semester long in my graduate research methods class. Although that post isn't explicitly about the relationship between my own research and my teaching, it is informed by that relationship, and it's worth reading if you haven't read it before. There are a couple of other posts where I talked about that process, and I'll also be referring to this one later on.

Anyway, in the post to which Anonymous responded -- the one immediately preceding this post -- I was talking about the expenses of my upcoming plans for research and conference travel this summer. And Anon replied (in part):

While I appreciate the value of research, I do worry that the demand for research in universities is overshadowing the need for good teaching skills. ... I have to wonder if professors like you are becoming extinct, if the demand for research (which is quantifiable, hard evidence of success, unlike teaching) is having a negative impact on the universities.

Undergrad students (and even some grad students) care very little about their professors' publications-they care about what happens in the classroom. Perhaps the drop in the number of English majors is more than just the economy--perhaps it is also linked to the push to publish. Students might not be lucky enough to have a professor like Dr. V.--many have ones who are so consumed by the need to research and publish (whether of their own making or through pressure from their institutions) that they forget that they are teachers.

OK, first of all, let's get the business about "the drop in the number of English majors" out the way, because it's a somewhat faulty premise and really can't even be correlated to whether or not professors do research. If you look at this handy chart on "Bachelor's degrees conferred..." published by the National Center for Education Statistics (which I found via Michael Bérubé in this post), you'll see that while there was a drop in degrees granted in English in the '70s and '80s, there's generally been a rise in the '90s and the period 2000-2007. The numbers aren't quite up to that 1970-71 number, but that's because that year and the few years before it were an anomaly. Unfortunately, you can't see that on the chart, but as Bérubé has argued and shown elsewhere (in What's Liberal for the Liberal Arts, I think, and in talks he's given, including one at our university), the numbers of English majors is more or less steady over the post war decades *except* for that influx in the late '60s to 1970. Of course, I realize that there is a drop (of about 1%) even over the last two decades if you look at English as a percentage of all degrees, but there are increases in some related fields, including Communications, which is on this chart, and Creative Writing, which isn't on this chart, but which Bérubé talked about when he came to visit our campus. (And while most Creative Writing professors don't do "research," they most certainly have to produce their own creative work.) And there are increases in other majors where surely faculty at research-oriented universities are doing as much, if not more, research. And given the proliferation of majors and degrees over the same time, and the fact that the growth in college attendance is largely coming from first generation college students, that drop isn't surprising or cause for panic (though perhaps for serious thought about recruitment) and probably has very little to do with what professors do outside of the classroom (or inside, for that matter, since we're not getting the students there in the first place), and more to do with wider cultural trends.

So I strongly doubt that whether or not we produce research has a strong effect on the numbers of our majors. And at our university, where all of our assistant and associate professors, and most of our full professors, are very active in professional activities (research or creative work), our numbers are trending upward, in English literature, in general writing, in creative writing, and in linguistics.

That was all tangential, really, to Anon's comments and questions, but I thought it was important to address. And it's the only numbers I have to give. Alas, the rest of this post's arguments come mostly from experience and may seem anecdotal, but I do think I've got a wide sense of the field, not just from my own experiences in college, grad school, and my current position, but from my huge network of friends and colleagues who teach at a range of colleges and universities. And of course I invite all my readers to chime in.

First of all, I think few people go into a PhD program in a humanities field without the recognition that they're entering a teaching *and* research field. The possibilities of some organization, government agency, or corporation paying you (through funded research) to concentrate entirely or mostly on your research are few and far between for humanities folks. Even at the most prestigious research universities, the humanities professors have much more intense contact time with students -- through a combination of classroom teaching and advising theses and dissertations -- than in other arts and sciences fields. I've never heard of a humanities prof teaching only one class all year, for example, but I have heard of many science profs with such an arrangement. My point here is that people go into English and other humanities fields knowing that teaching will be an important part of their profession, and so that influences how we think of our professional selves; and I think that has become more true over the generations. And in English, largely through the expertise of composition specialists (whose research and teaching are inextricably intertwined, btw), we've been at the forefront of making sure that graduate students get pedagogical training prior to or coincident with their first teaching experiences, with continued advising, mentoring, and evaluation along the way to their degree. My own Ph.D. program -- a top ten program whose faculty and graduates number many heavy hitters in research -- required a pedagogical course before we taught for the first time, and another during our first quarter of teaching. We had a staff person and two senior TAs assigned to overseeing and mentoring TAs, and while I was there, they developed even more oversight, training, and mentoring. And in the MA program for which I am academic director and adviser, our first year students receive 40 hours of intensive training in a boot camp before the start of their first semester of teaching, and must also take a 3 credit hour seminar concurrent with that first semester -- all run by our composition faculty, who are specialist in both the research and the teaching of composition. That seminar is currently graded S/U, but the director of composition and I have been talking about making it a graded course, since students do a serious composition studies research project in it, related to student assessment. (Again, note the intertwining of research and teaching in composition studies.)

I point out all of that to say that even at the top Research 1 programs like my PhD program, teaching and the training of teachers is taken very seriously in English. I'd also add that the chair while I was a grad student was very fond of trumpeting the fact that the English department had won more outstanding teaching awards than any department on campus.

On a more individual level (whether the individual student or the individual faculty member), I have to say I think a professor's research expertise -- and I mean continuing research expertise, not just what you did as a graduate student -- is of indispensable value to students whether they know it or not. And I wouldn't be the teacher that I am without that research expertise. I also wouldn't have as much job satisfaction without my research (and job satisfaction is at least correlated to performance in all sorts of professions, but I would say that's especially important in any field where you have intense face to face interaction with constituents). But let me address each of those points -- the benefit to students; the benefit to the faculty member -- separately (though I think they're ultimately intimately related).

I'm going to reveal myself as a partisan here, but I think college students majoring in a subject -- whatever the subject -- should be taught by experts in that discipline and its subfields, especially in upper-division courses in the major. That doesn't mean that I think that the professional activity output of all faculty members at every kind of college should be the same. And it doesn't mean that I think that all sets of research expectations are sane and fair. Some are particularly insane; for instance, any English department that expects two books before tenure is clearly run by robots -- megalomaniac, workaholic robots with stay at home robot spouses. But in my ideal world, everyone would be doing some research -- even if it's only a slowly written article every few years, with conference presentations along the way -- related to the field(s) they teach. Otherwise, they're really not going to keep up with what's going on in the field on their own (the most diligent might; but many won't). Alas, at many small colleges this is the case, and that's unfortunate, in my opinion. They hire one person to cover everything before 1800 Brit Lit, for example. And in many of those places you've got a guy teaching medieval lit through the Romantics who wrote a dissertation on 18th century literature 20+ years ago (for example) and hasn't read any research on medieval lit since his first year in graduate school. Sure, in the beginning, he threw himself into getting enough up to speed to be ahead of the students, but over time he fell behind. And who can blame him really -- there's no reward for keeping up and the consequences are beyond his ken. But I can tell you he's going to be giving people some seriously out of date ideas about medieval literature. Now, if that guy is teaching the big survey and the students eventually have to take the upper-division class taught by the actual medievalist in the department, that's less of a big deal. (Side note: one of the profs in my grad program who taught the big survey use to say to the students over and over: "As your upper division professors will tell you, everything I'm saying is *a lie*." It was kind of hilarious.) But if this guy is the only pre-1800 Brit Lit person, he's also teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare and the medieval and renaissance lit courses, and so on. And maybe he has tremendous pedagogical skills, which are certainly important, but he's not an expert. And I think when you're majoring in something, your goal should be to learn how to become an expert (not necessarily to become an expert -- that takes longer -- but to see what the path to that expertise is). If you don't have experts guiding you, how can you learn that?

Such situations are particularly detrimental to those students who want to go on to graduate school in their major. That's one reason why our MA program exists, and one of the ways in which it's particularly good. We get a lot of students who couldn't get into Ph.D. programs straight out of college (they tried), but then who get into them after some more concentrated, research-oriented work in their chosen specialties in our program, with expert guidance. I've had to spend last two years unteaching a certain student, trying to get her to rid herself of all the out of date and misinformed ideas she has about the Middle Ages (she wants to be a medievalist) courtesy of undergraduate instructors who stopped paying attention to scholarship circa 1970. And really, that's a short answer to why research is necessary in my particular job -- I teach graduate students. I teach them in my specialty -- medieval literature -- and I teach them how to do research in the research methods class. After all, you shouldn't expect to be called a master of something unless you're learning about the current scholarly debates in the field and learning the methods and practices of how to contribute to the knowledge in that field.

But even if we were an undergraduate-only institution, and even if none of my students ever went on to graduate school, I think our students should be taught in their upper division major courses by experts in the field. And those experts should actively and explicitly bring that expertise into the classroom and demonstrate to the students why it matters -- to the students and to the world at large. Contrary to what Anon says, students do care about our research if you show how it has a direct impact on their classroom experience. It's actually fun -- for me and for the engaged students -- to see them realize that all those books and articles they're reading for their research papers in my classes were written by other people's professors. Sure, I could teach the undergraduate research paper, I suppose, without having published research myself, but where would my authority come from? And how could I talk authoritatively about the process, about learning to enter a bigger conversation, about writing for an actual audience? And wouldn't that then reduce the assignment to pure exercise? If I'm going to teach my students where new knowledge comes from in the humanities, and how we argue, present evidence, and write with an audience in mind (or with different audiences in mind for different projects), shouldn't I be talking from experience and expertise? And if I'm going to be teaching them to imagine their research writing as having an audience, shouldn't I know what it means to write rigorous research for an actual audience? And as I talk about in this post (also linked above), my students are fascinated with the process we go through, and the fact that we're reviewed and "graded" by both peer review and book reviews after the fact. I think it's important to talk about peer review, too, to show them how to weigh the value of information and arguments they get from various sources -- and that's a skill generalizable to all sorts of "real life" situations and issues.

And given our "information age," in which too many people give equal weight to all "opinions" (and think everything is mere opinion), I think it's very important indeed to teach students about expertise and also to model it for them -- not to bow down to it unthinkingly, but to appreciate where expertise derives from and who is (and isn't an expert). I also want my particular population of students to know that the experts are NOT only at the Ivies and the flagship research universities, but that they have experts teaching them right here in Rust Belt, and that they, too, could become experts if they so wanted. And in the short term, they can become an expert in something a little narrower, whether it's the history of interpretations of Grendel's Mother or of sexuality in Marie de France's Lais, or the applicability of deconstruction to understanding The Pardoner's unraveling in The Canterbury Tales, or whatever. I've had more than my share of students doing Honors Thesis projects with me on such topics, and yet none of them went on to graduate school in English. They pursued these topics because they were interested them and also, as they have expressed themselves, it gave them a sense of pride in knowing something deeply and intimately, of being an expert in some limited way. Given the collective low self-esteem that this town and university and its citizens and students have, that sense of pride is a huge deal.

Could I give them that opportunity without doing research myself? Yes, I suppose. After all, I remember writing research papers for English classes in high school and feeling like quite the expert. And my high school teachers weren't published experts on the authors and texts I was writing about, but they did a good job of teaching me how to come up with research questions, how to do research, and how to write a readable, well-argued paper. But then I went to college, where my professors were experts, and wrote more on those same works, and my professors challenged and pushed me in ways specific to the subject matter that my high school teachers didn't do. And so I understood both my subject matter and the process of doing research on a more sophisticated level. Isn't that what college should be, especially within a major? Shouldn't it be bringing a student to a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of a subject? I'm not sure that can be done with faculty who don't do some research in their field.

What's more, learning at the college level should be as much about process as content -- or more even. Passing on expert knowledge to a passive body of student who are merely supposed to accept it as such (whether it's your expert knowledge or someone else's) is a terrible model of education. (Paulo Friere called it the "banking concept," but you don't have to go to a Marxist/anti-colonialist thinker like Friere to find objectives to passive learning.) And I think you can best model how to do something if you're also a practitioner yourself. And in literary scholarship and criticism, those practitioners are all within the academy. We don't have clinical practices or clients outside of the academy. So, in effect, the fact that we do divide our time between research and teaching is a bit like the part-time law professor who teaches and practices law, or the teaching hospital doctor who is seeing patients, teaching med students, and also writing up unusual cases for presentation and publication. (And I have to say, since I brought up the medicine model, I do prefer the medical practitioners I see in my own life to be researchers as well as clinicians. But like I said above, I'm a partisan for research.)

I really shouldn't use the phrase "divide...time" to characterize the relationship between research and teaching. Oh sure, I try to set aside time for writing and reading, and I often put it first before teaching prep and grading if it occupies the same day, but that's because I know the teaching stuff has to get done and therefore will get done (and will expand to fill the time I give it), while the research can be put off (to my own detriment when it comes time for merit review). I'm not very good at this, though, and the truth is that I do most of my research in the interstices between teaching -- on Fridays, if at all, during the semester, and otherwise, mostly during breaks and summer. That's not to say that there aren't faculty members who do put their research time before their teaching time regularly, and perhaps could spend more time working on their teaching skills. I know they exist. (And what those professors lack in classroom skills, they're still resources of expertise that a student might approach -- say, as an outside reader on a thesis. I have to say, I always learned even from the most uninspiring teachers, and the most dazzling in the classroom didn't always push my thinking or knowledge enough.) But I have to say, I think the vast majority of my cohort in English across the institutional spectrum has a schedule and a rhythm that looks more like mine.

And more to the point, when we're doing our research, that doesn't mean we're not thinking about teaching. In English it's much easier to draw these things together than it might be in, say, theoretical physics. (Though I like to think that Brian Greene is a fantastic teacher, and not just because he kind of looks like David Duchovny from some angles. Wait, did I just say that out loud?) Even my current research, which I like to jokingly call "the bad poetry project" and which takes as its subject poetry that I'm not likely to teach per se in my courses, still informs both what and how I teach. Again, I can talk about the process of doing the research -- and here, I can tell students that sometimes the research requires slow, methodical, and boring sifting through references like the Index of Middle English Verse to find the stuff you need. But I also draw on it in a myriad of ways in teaching other literature in the period. Since my project involves owners and compilers and readers of manuscripts, I can talk about the audience for medieval literature (especially in the late Middle Ages), and that often gets me thinking about issues of readership and audience in the earlier periods as well, which I draw into my classes. Students often perk up when I bring up such subjects, because, after all, they have more in common with medieval readers than medieval writers. And sometimes the reading I'm doing for my research doesn't end up being that useful for my project, but shows up in my classes instead. As a result of having to teach myself much more about paleography and codicology to do what I'm doing with this new research project, I'm bringing much more of that into my classes and I'm planning developing a history of the book or manuscript study class for the English majors, to compliment a course on the printed book and the art of the letter press that one of my colleagues offers. Likewise, my teaching gives me eureka moments for my research, and I cycle texts in and out of my syllabus to keep that sort of thing happening.

And finally, I have to say, I really wouldn't like my job much if it were just about teaching. Plenty of people prefer teaching to research (and really, I think in my discipline they outnumber the ones who prefer research to teaching), and there are jobs that are all about the teaching, but I really need the balance to keep me going. My research and teaching are married and I don't intend to divorce them any time soon. I think I'd go mad if I didn't read any new scholarship in my field. That, too, gives me insight for my teaching, as a new interpretation can mean a new teaching approach to a text. Case in point: John Niles's Speculum article on the ending of "The Wife's Lament" completely informs how I teach that text in both my literature class and my Old English language class. If I didn't have to produce my own research, I'd still read the major journals, or at least skim the articles apropos to what I teach, but sooner or later I'd get the bug to enter into the conversation myself. And that's the same spark that I'm trying to give or convey to my students.

Dr. Virago: International Woman of Mystery and Credit Card Debt

2010-01-29T14:14:00.007-05:00

I'll be traveling to three foreign countries for professional activity in Summer 2010: Canada, the UK, and Italy. The first trip, at the end of May, is for the sake of medieval drama. The other two destinations will be part of the same month-long trip from the end of June to the end of July: first, to study the early modern book in England (in manuscript and print form) at the London Rare Books School; then, to do about a week and a half of research at the British Library; and then to go down to Siena, Italy, for the New Chaucer Society Congress.

I'm very excited about all of this. The Chester production and conference will feel like the capstone of many years of work on medieval drama, and I'm looking forward to spending a weekend watching theater groups from all around North America and the UK interpret and perform the cycle, as well as to hearing people present new research on the plays at the symposium. The European trip, meanwhile, is all about new avenues of my research into manuscript-oriented studies which, like the drama, cross the medieval-early modern divide. That research is still a little inchoate, in part because I'm largely teaching myself how to work in a set of new sub-fields, including manuscript and textual studies -- hence my attendance at the LRBS. It's also a move into new genres of literature (or rather, new genres for me to do work on) and for some reason I'm presenting on that work in progress at NCS, even though, as I said, the works is still rather inchoate. Ack! But still, I'm looking forward to NCS because, well, it's in Siena! I've never been to Siena or Tuscany, and besides the usual academic conference stuff, NCS - as usual - is offering excursions to villas and castles and working Benedictine monasteries! And a final dinner at a vineyard estate in the Tuscan countryside! How fabulous!

But of course, all of this is going to cost me a whole heckuva lotta money. Mucho dinero. Mega bucks. And all this right before I take a year's sabbatical (approval still pending) in which I'll be paid 2/3 of my usual salary. I'm squirreling away as much money as possible to pay for it all, especially for my sabbatical year. I'm saving, as usual, for ordinary summer living expenses (since we're paid only during the nine months of the academic year), but not just for summer 2010, but also for 2011. And then, in addition to that, I'll be putting into savings every stipend I've been awarded, every honorarium I've been given (for example, for being a peer-reviewer for a book manuscript), every monetary Christmas or birthday present I've gotten or will get, and all of my tax refunds. I've also agree to edit a number of texts for a forthcoming largish literary anthology, for which I'll be paid a flat sum, and that will be squirreled away, too.

I applied for travel funds to cover my costs for the Canadian trip, and I was allocated what I needed as long as I can travel in our production team's van and don't have personal transportation costs (although that may not work out), but I may be chipping in to cover some of the costs of taking our cast and crew there for our play in the production. We had originally signed up for a play with a small cast, but then found out we were also being assigned an episode from another play in the cycle -- for good scholarly reasons -- which more than doubled the cast members we need to take! Our theater department is still managing to cover most of it, although we may be the only group there that uses the technique of 'doubling' (one actor playing two parts) -- we'll see how well that works in open-air performances at multiple stations! But students might have to pay for food for themselves, and I'd like us all to go out and eat somewhere cool together at least one night there; I can't really expect poor students to pay for that themselves.

I've also applied for an internal summer fellowship that will cover the cost of the London trip and give me a month's additional salary. But that fellowship prioritizes junior faculty. Tenured faculty have gotten it in the past, and I think I wrote a good proposal that speaks well to people outside the humanities (I even called manuscript research our version of "field work"), but it's certainly not guaranteed. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

And since NCS is in the next fiscal year, I can apply for more regular travel funds for that, but whatever I get will be a drop in the bucket of the total cost, even if the London portion of the trip -- including the overseas flight -- is covered by the summer fellowship. So even if I get all the funds I'm applying for, I'll still have to carry some serious costs myself. And then next year, in 2011, I'm planning at least another month or so of research in UK libraries. Again, I'll apply for all available funds -- including some external ones this time, as I hope my project will be better defined by then -- but who knows if I'll get any.

Now, I'm not complaining here. Really, all I'm doing is a little financial planning in public. Because Bullock and I are DINKs (Dual Incomes, No Kids -- an acronym that never really took off, alas) in a city with a low cost of living, and because we don't live extravagantly (well, unless you count our taste in food and drink; or my penchant for the practical-but-cute, but also expensive, La Canadienne boots for winter; or the money we've spent on training, boarding, and grooming Pippi), I can afford to take a full sabbatical year and also make multiple trips out of the country. But I don't know what I'd do if we had kids or lived in an expensive area, or both, as many of my academic friends do.

And I guess I'm posting this as a kind of public record of what professorial life is like for the vast majority of us (or, well, in my field, anyway) -- those of us teaching at the less-than-elite colleges and universities. Many of my students are surprised to find out I'm not paid in the summer or that the research and conference trips I undertake aren't fully subsidized. I know most of my readers know these things, but my blog gets Google hits all the time (often misdirected ones....but still). So, if you're wondering, Do professors have their travel paid for? The answer is: usually only in part, and sometimes not at all. We get partial funding for one trip a year at my university. Do professors get paid in the summers? Usually, no, unless they've arranged the 9-month paychecks to be distributed over 12 months, or unless they're teaching summer school or they're a chair or a program director or other administrator. Do professors get paid while they're on sabbatical? Yes, but often not their full salary. At my university, it's 100% for a semester, 66% for a year. Your mileage may vary. And, in fact, I'm lucky that my university hasn't cut sabbaticals entirely -- as others in the state have done recently -- although they're being very stingy with them. Anyway, all of this means that we're often footing the bill for our own research expenses, especially in the humanities and social sciences, whether that means the time we need (summers and sabbaticals), or the travel we undertake for conferences and research. And don't forget, our job performance evaluations include research -- it's not just a hobby.

So, for the record, here's what I'm estimating the major expenses of these three trips will cost all together, at current exchange rates and fares, and using government standards for mileage costs and per diem (though I spend a lot less on food and incidentals that the per diems allow):

Travel to & from Toronto (if there's not room for me in the van or if scheduling doesn't work out): $300 (using IRS mileage rat)
Lodging in Toronto: $ 250 (if I stay in the dorms, which I probably will)
Toronto per diem: $555

Subtotal: $1105

LRBS Tuition: $886
Round trip flight to London: $1200
Lodging in London: $1500 (I've arranged a cheap university dorm room already)
London per diem: $3060

Subtotal: $6486

Round trip flight from London to Florence: $220
Lodging in Siena: $370 (if I share, which I'll likely do)
NCS registration, final dinner, and excursions: $435
Meals not provided: $300

Subtotal: $1325

Grand total: $8916

To put this in some perspective, that's more than 10% of my gross income when I'm not on a reduced salary. Of course, as I said, Toronto is covered, and I'll get something for Siena. If luck prevails, I'll get that summer fellowship, too, and if not, I've got money saved. And there are my credit cards (hence my post title). I actually haven't carried credit debt for more than few months at a time -- usually after trips like these -- since the third year of being a professor, when I finished paying off the $11,000 I still had from graduate school. (Though I still have about $28,000 student loan debt, much of which was taken out originally to pay off credit cards, swapping a higher variable interest for a very low, fixed one.) But I think after this summer it may take me awhile to recover.

Anyway, we're doing a better job of letting students know the costs of pursuing academic jobs -- the real costs and opportunity costs; the personal costs, as well -- but I thought I'd throw out some more data on the costs that continue to accrue, depending on your field and your area(s) of research, even if you do get the coveted tenure-track job. I often get the "must be nice" comments from non-academics and students when they ask what I'm doing with my summer, and it *is* nice, I'll agree, to spend a productive day in a manuscript library and then to walk "home" through Russell Square, or to spend five days in Tuscany with the world's experts in Chaucer and other late medieval English literature. But it's often partly or entirely at my own expense.

Team teaching is teh awesome!!1!!!

2010-01-20T09:08:00.004-05:00

So I'm team-teaching a small seminar. We spent all summer and a little bit of fall planning this class because when you have to run everything by your co-instructor, everything takes twice as long. No, even longer -- it has an exponential effect, since the co-instructor might have to read something first to decide whether it will work in the class, or even if it's a simple question, they have to get your e-mail and respond to it. None of this deciding on your late-paper policy as you put the syllabus together at 2am the night before the first class business! I even wrote up a sketch of a lesson plan ahead of time for every day I'll be teaching this semester so that my partner won't be going in blind. And in this case we come from two different disciplines -- theater and literature -- so we do things differently, in terms of both our approaches to drama and to classroom policies, assignments, etc. That's supposed to be the *point* of team-teaching -- bringing these approaches together -- but it still makes the logistics more complicated. (If it sounds a bit like I'm dominant in the class, I am. But that's because he's directing a production related to the class, for which I'm the dramaturg, and so that's where he's the boss. And also, I've taught a class on the topic multiple times and he hasn't.)

But since neither of us had done this before, we weren't exactly sure how it was all going to come together, and in the first week of classes there was still some fine-tuning, especially since on those days we were sharing the time. (Starting this week we alternate days. More on the awesomeness of that in a minute.)

On the first day of class one of the students asked what the benefit of team-teaching was. We gave him some canned answers about interdiscplinarity and multiple points of view and learning from each other, since, after all, we hadn't done this before. But now, even after only three classes together, I can already see the benefits and the canned answers don't sound like empty boilerplate eduspeak any more. We are already learning from each other, and presumably the students are learning more from both of us than they would from just one of us. He's got a much broader knowledge of theater history than I do; I'm a medieval-early modern gal, and know England much better than the continent. That said, I have a deeper knowledge of the language, literature, and socio-economic culture of the period of English drama that we're studying. He's also a director and dramaturg, so he brings practical production knowledge to the class. In fact, that's our organizing principal for the class -- we're studying these plays in their historical contexts (textual, literary, social/cultural, and performance contexts) *and* thinking about how to perform them now. Although this is an oversimplification, I'm "then" and he's "now."

And it works beautifully together. Case in point: yesterday, I was getting students to notice the symbolic significance of movement and space in the play we were reading. And then I got them to talk about how bodies and physicality matter thematically to the play. And then we talked about gender. After class, my co-instructor noticed a way to connect the gender issues to the movement issues in a way I hadn't and it sparked his ideas for what he's going to do in class on Thursday.

And the fact that I have one less class to prep for Thursdays for most of the rest of the semester (except during tech week of the production, when I'll take over for my swamped co-instructor on both days) is suh-weet! But lest there's some troll out there thinking, "Hey, my tax money is paying her salary and she's not working!" let me remind you that we spent all freakin' summer (when we *weren't* paid) putting this all together. So the time was simply displaced. (Plus, I have plenty of other paid work to fill it, including putting together a handbook for department graduate directors, since I'll be on sabbatical next year and have, up until now, kept everything in my head. Yeah, not good. But that's a subject for another post.) And I still have to do the reading he's assigned for his days, and I still come to class, which I am looking forward to with great enthusiasm, for -- hooray! -- I get to be a student once a week! How fun!

But one of the coolest little surprises of the semester so far is that we have great co-teacher timing. We don't jump into each others' presentations or discussion leading often, but when we do, it reinforces what the other is doing. And we seem to have great dorky comic chemistry, too. (Yes, the students are laughing, too. Well, most of the time.) For instance, yesterday, we were discussing a play with a rather strange anal fixation. All or most of that embodiment I was asking the students to pay attention to kept coming back to the ass (or arse, actually -- it's an English play, after all). So we got to talking about farts and fart jokes in the play and one of the students wondered if it told us something about audience, on the theory that physical humor and "toilet" humor appealed only to the less educated. I gave the student my skeptical look and my co-instructor and I had the following exchange, totally deadpan:

Me: I like fart jokes. Fart jokes are hilarious. (looking at co-instructor) What about you?
Co-instructor: Love them. Can't get enough of them.
Me: And I have a Ph.D. And you?
Co-instructor: Me, too. Ph.D.
Me: But seriously....

And then I started giving a potted history of the fart joke in English literature (no, really) and talking about how the idea of "low" humor is a culturally contingent thing and how "less educated" is a difficult or different thing to talk about for the Middle Ages, anyway. And my co-instructor talked about farts on the stage up through the 19th century (no, really), including a French performer who used to perform entire songs via fart for wealthy and cultured audiences (seriously, not making this up). And we hadn't planned *any* of that. And yet the whole performance went off as if it was a well-practiced routine. It was awesome.

And that's the other thing that this class is doing for me: it's bringing my teaching energy back. In my other classes, even though I'm changing the content and the methods, as well as the assignments, all the time, it's still my shtick I'm doing. And frankly, I'm sick of me -- or classroom persona me, anyway. I *really* need that sabbatical I've applied for. (This, btw, is the great benefit of sabbaticals to *students*. We need a real break from teaching to keep it fresh and effective. Summers help, but they're too short to really recoup and by the end of them -- or in the case of the team-taught course, all through them -- we're thinking about teaching again.) After last semester I thought this one was going to feel like a death march. But the team-taught course is re-energizing me, and as luck has it, my Middle English course comes later in the day, so I can go into that a little more hyped up and enthusiastic. (Oh, and also, I seemed to have no problem students so far, knock wood -- not even the one I thought would be a problem.)

So if you have the opportunity to team-teach something, and it's in load (in my case, happily, it is) or you can handle the overload, I highly recommend it. Well, at least for now, in the second week of classes! I'll keep you posted if the honeymoon phase wears off!

Edited to add this PS: Also, my co-instructor is bigger hard-ass on deadlines, plagiarism, etc. I always try to present myself as one, but then I usually show mercy. So I don't pursue plagiarism to the dean, but give an F on an assignment. And I'll take a late assignment under conditions not listed on the syllabus. But not co-instructor! So yay! *He* can be bad cop!

The best professional moments of 2009

2010-01-06T17:14:00.007-05:00

Since my last post had a little bit of the professorial gripe to it, and was also ridiculously long, I thought I'd counter that with a briefer post on what made me happy in my professional life in 2009. It's still the first week of 2010, so I'm still allowed to do a 2009 retrospective, right?

In our annual reviews, we have to categorize all the work we've done in the previous academic/fiscal year (July 1 to June 30) in the three usual categories of what professors do all day: teaching, research, and service. So I thought I'd give you my three most gratifying moments or element of 2009 in the same three categories.

Service is technically the smallest part of my workload (20%), and I definitely don't do as much as some people in the department. Most of my service work in 2009 was in three areas: serving on the committee that hired our most recent faculty member; serving on the department personnel committee; and being the director of graduate studies, which entails both service (administrative stuff) and teaching in the form of advising, and always poses problems for me when I'm trying to decide what part of my annual report to put its activities on. But this is my blog, so I'm counting my most gratifying moment as grad director in the service category. This year the associate chair proposed the idea to me of assigning one or two outstanding graduate student teachers to their own sophomore level literature course and we decided to do this through a competitive application process. So I was charged with drafting the application with the rest of the graduate committee. With their input, I put together an application that I think will not only give us a good way of assessing the proposed courses and the individual student's potential for success with it, but that will also teach all of the students something about course design, teaching portfolios, and job applications (that was the model) and give them materials to use if they apply for community college jobs after the MA. So I was pleased with the end product. And most gratifying of all, so was the rest of the faculty, including the composition faculty, who were worried that it would seem like we were "rewarding" students with a literature class over composition. In other words, I seem to have pleased everyone. Yay me!

My most gratifying "moment" in my research was actually, technically, a series of moments, but I'm still counting it as one: that is, the three very positive reviews that my book received in 2009. Even more gratifying was the fact that they were by scholars in three slightly different fields of late medieval literature: one works largely on gender and vernacular devotional literature (including the genre that's the subject of my book, but not exclusively); one works on literature and the social class that's part of the subject of my book; and the last one works specifically in the genre that was the subject of my study. Once again, I seemed to have pleased everyone -- or a range of someones, anyway.

I've actually saved the best for last, the most gratifying moment in my teaching. Oh sure, great reviews of one's book are *extremely* gratifying, but I'm pretty sure that over the course of my career I'll have more students than readers of my scholarship, so I'm going to rank teaching as the place where I could potentially have the most impact on the world, even though teaching and research are weighted the same in my workload - 40% each. The most gratifying moment in teaching was a small one, but it meant a great deal to me. Last spring I taught the "gateway" intro to literary study course for the major, which allows me to stretch myself and teach all sorts of cool texts beyond the medieval period, and I always make a point in such courses of including one or two relatively recent American works, or else my tendency might otherwise be to stick to British literature, medieval to Victorian. This year I ended the course with short stories, capped off with Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," as it originally appeared in The New Yorker. I'd never taught it or been taught it; I just decided to do it. We'd been talking a lot in class about the ways in which modern and post-modern fiction writers convey subjective points of view through narrative form, diction, imagery, and so forth, and that's largely what we did with this story. And I'd also been showing clips of movie adaptations of a lot of the texts I taught to talk about film as interpretation, and to show the formal changes necessary, as a way of drawing attention to the formal elements of writing. Anyway, I did this with "Brokeback," of course, showing the heartbreaking scene of Ennis visiting Jack's parents and finding his own shirt hidden inside Jack's in the closet. In doing so I think I indirectly steered us towards a discussion of the depiction of love rather than sex, of emotion rather than sexual desire. I didn't plan it very consciously this way, but I think that's what made the discussion so good. But it wasn't the discussion that day that was so gratifying -- though it was good and blissfully free of awkwardness. The moment came after class. One of my best students, who had taken a number of courses with me, came up to me and said that she didn't expect to like "Brokeback Mountain," and in fact, had expected to be offended by it because it conflicted with the way she was raised and with her religious beliefs. I was afraid that what was coming wasn't a "but" or "however," and braced myself, but I should have known better since this was a truly thoughtful and empathetic student. And indeed, she did say "but." She said that and more, that despite what she expected, she found herself deeply and powerfully moved by the story. It's really a compliment more to Annie Proulx than to me, but the student did thank me specifically for assigning the story and forcing her out of her comfort zone. I'm not really sure why this moment meant so much to me. Perhaps because it came from one of my "fans" who was simply telling me that she was still learning from me, even when it wasn't medieval literature. Or maybe because at its heart, I think that's what the value of a liberal arts college or university education in the traditional classroom is about: it's about the encounter with others.

So what were your most gratifying moments of 2009?

When good classes go bad

2010-01-03T14:08:00.009-05:00

OK, first of all...Damn, did I really write only 20 posts in 2009? Wow, that's really lame.

So let's start this last-day-before-I-must-start-work-in-earnest-again Sunday afternoon in a still new year (and new decade!) with a substantive post. And let's simultaneously make a resolution to write at least twice as many posts in 2010 as in 2009, which would still be many fewer than in each of the previous two years, but let's not get too crazy with the ambition.

And no, I don't know why I'm speaking in first person plural. I am not actually royal. There, now that I'm back in a singular state of mind, on with the actual post topic to which the title refers.

My Old English class sucked this year. It really bums me out, too, because it was so awesomely enrolled: 34 students! And Middle English is equally awesomely enrolled, and so I'm a little nervous about it because I think maybe that relatively large size was part of the problem. But also part of the problem was a critical mass of "difficult personalities" (probably my own included) which led to a sucking of the energy in the room and made the routine but necessary parts of the class seem duller than necessary. I want to break down what happened, perhaps go over what I might do differently next time, and also recount some of the successful emergency measures I took (perhaps too late), but first let me briefly recap the last three times I taught this course, which made the anxiety-dream-causing suckitude of this semester seem even worse by comparison.

Now, my first OE class didn't go particularly well, but I didn't actually have very high expectations because it was my very first semester as a tenure-track professor, the first time I'd taught any kind of language class (let alone one in my secondary field, in which I'd only ever had one graduate level course!), my first semester of teaching undergraduate/graduate courses, and my first semester in a new town at a new job. All that might have added up to a nightmare, but I was in kind of a "this is all hard" daze. Still, that class did have its difficulties and challenges. The two biggest problems were graduate students who really shouldn't have been admitted to the program. One ended failing all of her courses because she just wasn't prepared enough for graduate level work in English. (She was a non-traditional student who'd come from another, *entirely* unrelated field. We used to admit more of those, many of whom were pursuing the MA for pure pleasure -- and I don't knock that at all -- but too many of them floundered and so we're a little more skeptical of their applications these days. It's no joy to say "yes, come to our program" and then follow that with "sorry, you're failing our program," especially when we're taking their money, as they usually don't qualify for TAships.) The other seemingly did well enough in his other courses but he got an F from me for plagiarizing his final translation and annotated bibliography project. (Thanks to him I now give final exams in that class.) And like most plagiarizers, he did a smashingly stupid job of it, by plagiarizing the very text I'd partly modeled the assignment on, Corey Owen's hypertext edition of "The Seafarer." My student didn't know that I'd modeled my assignment on this work, but he should have known better than to steal directly from Owen's summaries of articles written in German, since my student didn't read German and yet there they were in the annotated bibliography with their German titles! D'oh! And what's more, I'd already pulled him into my office for plagiarizing someone's translation once before! So he knew I was on the lookout.

But what made the semester so torturous wasn't that these two students were struggling students or even than the one panicked and resorted to dishonesty; rather, it was their attitudes throughout, which culminated in both of their failures, and I imagine had a causal relationship to them. Student 1, the non-traditional student, performed poorly on everything, but in the beginning of the semester, she tried to seek help. I say tried because she initially came to me asking for tutor. When I explained that knowledge of Old English was pretty specialized and there really wasn't anyone around except me, and offered to set up an extra weekly meeting with her, she reluctantly accepted, but stopped coming after the second meeting. And she subsequently grew surlier and more disruptive in her behavior in class. Then one day she melted down. We were going around the room, going over the translation homework, and the guy before her had just given a particularly sound translation, and since he was someone struggling in the class, I gave him extra praise. And then she took her turn and read something truly unintelligible. "I'm sorry," I said gently, "that's not quite right..." But before I could get to the explanation, she burst out, enraged, "Why does HE get a 'YES' and I get a 'NO'?" It was really unnerving, especially since it was my first ever experience of such disruptive behavior in the classroom. I thought I handled it OK, saying very gently that it wasn't personal, but that her answer was empirically wrong -- for one thing, she made a very clear subject an object and vice versa -- and his was right, but that tomorrow it could be the opposite. Well, it seems she thought my frequent but gentle corrections of her were personal, because the next day I got a three-page, hand-written screed from her (slid under my office door) decrying how inhumanely I was treating her. (It turns out she wrote similar to letters to all of her other professors, whose classes she was also failing.)

Meanwhile, student 2 usually complained about something every day in class. He was also struggling, but concerned only with the effect of his struggle on his GPA. He, too, tried to come to office hours, but gave up. In his case it was less out of a paranoid sense that I was out to get him -- as in student 1's case -- and more out of a deep-seated lack of interest in the necessary intellectual work. He actually said to me in one office meeting, "Why do we need to learn this stuff, anyway? Hasn't it all been translated already?" *headdesk* He was the kind of guy who, even as an MA student, would ask "Is this going to be on the test?" Oy.

By now in this post you might think that *that* was my worst OE class ever. But it wasn't. It's definitely in second place, but it didn't bother me as much as the most recent class. As I said, I expected things to be hard, anyway. But also, every other student in the class was a joy to teach, and there was a cohort of smart, funny, geeky students who loved when I got excited about geeky linguistic stuff. And the class was small and intimate, and so the other dozen students easily communicated through body language and expressions that they sympathized with me and were equally frustrated with the two problem students. In the beginning they reached out to them and tried to help them, but they got no further than I did. A number of the engaged students later joined me for a Beowulf reading group the next semester, so it was also clear they were learning and interested. One of those students later went on to do an MA in Medieval Studies at York (after taking every class I ever offered while she was an undergraduate!), and she was the energetic center of the enthusiastic majority in that class.

The next two times I taught OE, the classes were composed mostly of students like the enthusiastic ones in the first class, and blissfully free of problem personalities. Like the first class, those classes enrolled about 15-18 students, and since many of them took both OE and ME, there was a high energy going into ME (that was also true of that first year of ME, since the two problem students failed OE). The second time I taught OE and ME, I taught them in the same semester, in the same room, back-to-back (because I'd been on leave the previous semester and certain students needed both classes, usually offered only every two years) and I took to showing goofy language-related YouTube clips or SchoolHouse Rock videos in between classes for edifying entertainment, a habit I carried into the courses two years later (though to do so I had to arrive to class early -- didn't want to use actual class time). OK, so some of the videos weren't exactly edifying, but one silly one -- the now somewhat infamous "Pork song" -- was at least inspired by a class conversation about "r-colored vowels." Just about every student from those last two classes is now a Facebook friend of mine, so if you're my Facebook friend and you've seen my status updates about the grueling OE class this semester, you've likely seen their comments bolstering my spirits. (And since a couple of them know about this blog and might be reading: thank you! That meant a lot.)

So what went wrong in this year's iteration? Well, for one, that huge enrollment turned out to be a problem. This is something that I learned (and that I did to myself) that needs to be repeated over and over to anyone who wants to raise course caps and replace small classes with large ones (whether with or without discussion sections): the same content taught by the same teacher will paradoxically not be the same course if the enrollment is doubled. It might not be a worse class, but it won't be the same. And in my OE class's case, it was definitely worse. Alright, so there are other variables involved, I know, but I can tell you that it was much harder for me to reach and engage and keep track of the performance of 34 students than it was to do the same for 15-18 students. There were more students who were struggling and there were more students who'd stumbled into a class that was over their heads. I tried to head this off at the pass by e-mailing the syllabus weeks before the term started, but our students don't drop classes. (Or perhaps they didn't read the syllabus carefully.) This time, one of the struggling students at least did actively seek out extra help, and this time, having had three cohorts of OE students, many of whom are still in the area and seeking work, I was able to rustle up a tutor for said student.

But even with a tutor working with that student on the side, my student still came to my office hours every week. On the one hand, I'm glad she didn't give up like the two the first year, but on the other hand, she sapped a lot of my energy, and I needed that energy to deal with the rest of the class. Meanwhile, there were three undergraduate students with strange, disruptive behavior. One missed about half of the semester, either by missing a whole class or else by coming in extremely late, sometimes 45 minutes late! I could see this and it was clear the students in the back of the room, nearest the door, were distracted by it, as they took to keeping track of when she arrived. And when she was in small groups she wouldn't speak to the other students. At all. Strangely, though, she would sometimes speak up in whole class discussion, so I don't think it was real shyness. And on more than one occasion, when it came around to her to translate a line from the homework, she wouldn't have it prepared, in which case she'd just stare at me silently. And yet she'd come up to me after class -- after not having been there half the week -- and argue for fractions of points on graded assignments.

Then there were two other students who had the opposite problem: they didn't know when to stop talking. They both had a version of what I've heard parents of small children call "interruptitis." One of them would most often interrupt me; the other would interrupt me or other students. The first would argue with me when I was trying to explain why her translation wouldn't quite work tonally or stylistically or logically. Often she wouldn't let me explain what wasn't quite working with her translation; she'd interrupt and argue. These were often issues less concretely wrong or right than the situation that inspired the outburst from student 1 in the first year, but in each case, there was still something wrong and I knew that from my knowledge and the authority of many other scholars and translators, which she either didn't realize I had or didn't seem to accept. It wasn't always transparently clear why what she did was wrong, but she didn't wait for my explanation. She seemed only to want me to say "yes, your version is acceptable," rather than to learn why it wouldn't quite work. And in arguing at all, she delayed class for no good reason, because in each case there was nothing at stake or it was something peculiar to her translation and not common to the class. What I've learned from this is that I need to learn to say more quickly, "That might take me too long to explain and we need to move on, but I'd be happy to discuss it in office hours" or "Did anyone else come up with the same result? If so, let me explain to you all why that's most likely not going to work." Or just to say, "Give me a minute to think of a way to explain that to you," because honestly, sometimes it was something I knew but hadn't articulated yet to myself. On top of that, she'd also sometimes correct me spontaneously, interrupting me in mid-sentence as she did so. She did occasionally catch a slip of my tongue -- the class was so wearying that I sometimes had bouts of mild aphasia, where I'd flip terms (strong for weak, for example) -- but usually I'd catch myself a split second later, so I didn't really need her. Honestly, I'm usually appreciative of a correction, but not unnecessary ones. If that had been the only problem in the class, it might not have rubbed me the wrong way, but combined with everything else, it was a major irritant. And she also had a seemingly condescending tone every time she did this, although later I decided that she was actually pretty uniformly affect-less, even when she was talking about something she was supposedly enthusiastic about, so about two thirds of the way through the class I started getting irritated a little less. I also managed her and the rest of the class better. More on that a little later. Apparently she also did the same thing -- the seemingly condescending, spontaneous correction -- when other students were talking, but only the students around her heard that, because she kept it sotto voce. But that was irritating them so much that they started dreading class and it affected the atmosphere.

That was on one side of the class room. Meanwhile, on the other side, something similar was going on. Another student there had a similar kind of academic Tourette's, interrupting me and blurting things out at inappropriate moments. But hers bothered me less at first because it didn't seem laced with bad attitude; rather, she seemed to me to be bubbling over with enthusiasm. But then she, too, started correcting other students. Or sighing or snorting. And by the end of the semester, when we got to the literature and the discussion, she'd respond to my questions by starting with such locutions as "Well, you have to understand..." And then she'd say something totally wrong, or at least ill informed. (Often it was out of date blanket stereotypes of the Middle Ages, or a confusion of the content of the literature with the life of the day. I think she might have been home schooled or at least an autodidact in my field. She was a big Tolkien fan and might have just decided to start reading what he'd read. She'd clearly read a lot, but had no real guide to what she'd been reading.) Of course, I'd correct her, gently, which sometimes got snickers from her classmates who were less patient with her outbursts, and she'd look crestfallen (clearly not realizing she did the same to them). She also had a tendency to call herself, out loud, "stupid! stupid! stupid!" when she missed so much as a point on a quiz, which was hard to take in its own way.

And then, on top of all of this, there was one of my best grad students, who has an unfortunate habit of sighing audibly when he's frustrated. And he, like me, was frequently frustrated in this class, as were many of the other students. Furthermore, as in many of the former iterations of the class, there were a lot of high-performing but neurotic students, who radiated a lot of nervous energy even under the best circumstances. But add that to the powder keg of the difficult personalities, and you've got a lot of extra strain and stress.

The combination of all of this sucked the energy out of the room. I and many of my best students dreaded coming to class. Showing students paradigms of verbs and such isn't the most exciting thing in the world in the first place, but in most iterations of this class I at least brought energy and dorky enthusiasm to it. Even without the difficult personalities, I think the bigger class size brought the energy level down. When students are five rows away, you're lecturing, not showing or discussing or explaining. I think this semester, in Middle English, I'll make myself move around more to combat that. In Old English, I did a lot more small group work than I might have otherwise done to get one on one with students, but in much of the semester, too many of the struggling students or the ones with clashing personalities were grouped together simply by virtue of the geography of the room. So finally, about half way through the semester, I spent a few hours making a group assignment chart, being sure to keep apart students I knew didn't get along, and making people move across the room to meet people they hadn't met before. I put one of each of my smartest, best performing, and also most confident students with each one of the two interrupters, so that they'd see that they weren't the only ones quick on the uptake. (Indeed, the median and average grades in the class were consistently As. I had a lot of high-performing students and then a significant drop off to the struggling students -- another problem of the class, I think.) I stopped using my old method of going around the class and having each students translate a line or two -- which works fine in a small class -- and had students in small groups compare their translations to mine, note meaningful differences, and try to teach each other where they went wrong. In other words, I took myself in person out of the equation for a little while (though obviously my authority was still there in the translation). Of course, I'd go around to each group and I'd answer questions as they came up. And since I'd carefully designed the groups, I made sure to put students who I knew could teach each other well in each group. Having done this, the last third of the semester was much more pleasant than the first two thirds. Plus, by that point, we were done with the crash course in the grammar and syntax and on to the literature, which also made things more fun.

Looking back, I think I learned from that class something about how to manage people. It took me awhile, but the assigned groups did eventually solve some of the major problems. And they worked happily together, so I seem to know something about what personalities will mesh and which won't. But I wished I'd learned it faster. And I wished I'd learned faster all of the things I've suggested above that were going wrong and were in my control. But I do think a lot of it was just the bad luck of bad chemistry. We'll see how much of this shows up in my evaluations (or, how many perceptive students will realize that it was less about the class content and me and more about the chemistry).

But one thing I'm thinking about changing is the way I assess the students. For three iterations now I've been using quizzes, following by translation assignments, followed by a final exam. I'm thinking of swapping the quizzes for homework, which means I'd have to change the final exam, too (or maybe just get rid of any big capstone project entirely -- just add more short translation work or other short assignments). Whether I use Jambeck and Hasenfratz's book or Baker's book, both now have fill-in-the-blank or sentence translation assignments (the former in their book, the latter on his website) and I could use those for both graded and ungraded homework. I could also use Michael Drout's website King Alfred's Grammar, although I'd probably do so in conjunction with Baker. The idea behind the paradigm quizzes was that students needed to have the basic structure of the language at their fingertips, and would then only need to refer to the grammar paradigms later when necessary to check their work or when memory failed. In other words, it was about approaching some basic fluency. Admittedly, it was an old-fashioned approach, the way I'd been taught both Latin and Old English. But I don't think that really worked in such a short class or with a larger group. (With the smaller, more self-selecting groups, it worked fine.) I think perhaps it might be better to concentrate on how the structure works in action, in sentences and short passages. I tried that the first time I taught the course, and it didn't really work -- and it was those students who suggested that I institute quizzes -- but I think it was more in the details of how I did it than in the larger concept. I also think that the move from quizzes to translation in this most recent class actually inspired some of the more annoying personality issues, because we'd moved from assignments that were black and white (you either knew the dative singular for a strong masculine noun or you didn't) to the more nuanced practice of translation, which starts with grammar and can have elements that are wrong or right, but also has more interpretative elements, some of which are more arguable than others. I taught a lot of that debate -- especially some of the more famous critical cruxes in the poetry -- but many issues were less up for debate and more a matter of students' inexperience, and that unnerved a lot of the students. In other words, I think I accidentally did a bait and switch on them, and I'm sure that contributed to the weirdness of the course's chemistry. Middle English is a very different course, and I use writing and translation assignments in that class -- no tests -- so I expect some of these structural problems to disappear. Also, some of the most difficult personalities won't be in it. But I'm still stealing myself for the large class and what new weirdness it brings with it.

OK, I have babbled on for long enough. Anyone who has any suggestions for how to manage a class of difficult personalities, or how to effectively teach Old English or another 'dead' language (i.e., where conversational fluency is not the goal), have at it in the comments. I'll probably need your advice for Middle English.

I may not be writing frequently here, but...

2009-11-11T23:36:00.002-05:00

...I wrote something over here. It's not exactly new content, but it's something.

What counts?

2009-09-20T12:47:00.004-04:00

I'm on my department's personnel committee (DPC), which is the committee responsible, among other things, for evaluating our colleagues' annual merit in the big three areas of professorial activity: teaching (which also includes advising, directing theses, and that sort of thing); professional activity (a huge category and a large part of the subject of this post); and service to the department, the college, the university, the profession, and, at our public university, the community (this is anything from doing things like serving on the DPC to being on faculty senate to organizing a professional conference to serving as a peer reviewer for a press or journal to judging a public speaking contest for the region).

If find that my students, even my graduate students whom I've beaten over the head with lessons in 'how the profession works' in my research methods class, are often surprised to learn that we're "graded." They shouldn't be, because of course all professionals have some sort of review practice, but I think the surprise comes in part from that myth of the professorial life, that we all get to do our own thing with little oversight. While it's true that on a day to day basis, we manage most of our own time (we generally don't pick the time slots and classrooms for our courses, though) and pursue the professional activity we want (ideally, but the limits on that are part of the topic of this post), and request (note: *request*) the courses we'd like to teach and pursue that teaching in the ways we see fit, at least once a year the chickens come home to roost and we have to show what we've been up to. And then we get graded for it. In my institution, we get graded on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the highest, in the three categories mentioned above, and then those scores are weighted by a set of percentages that we determined in consultation with the department chair a whole year before, and voila -- we get a final score that determines what tiny merit raise we'll get, *if* there is a merit raise in the current contract. (And in case you're wondering, my percentages are 40% teaching, 40% professional activity, and 20% service, so when someone tells me my "job" is to teach, I can accurately say, "No, that's only 40% of it," though in reality it takes more time.)

Anyway, having been on the DPC for the past two years, I find that the question of what counts for each of the big three categories is a contentious and vexed question. It matters only slightly in terms of the monetary rewards for it (though those tiny raises do have exponential value since they add to one's base pay for subsequent raises), but I think it matters a great deal in terms of how one defines a department, an institution, and a field or discipline. Our department, like those at a lot of smaller institutions, includes people in a variety of fields and disciplines. We have literary scholars of all kinds, creative writers, linguists (including applied linguists who work on issues of second language acquisition), and rhetoric and composition specialists. Even on this level the kinds of "professional activity" that counts has to differ. Poets don't necessarily do peer-reviewed scholarship (unless they are also literary scholars, which of course, can be the case), and some of the linguists and rhet-comp people are in fields where journal articles are the norm of scholarship, and rarely books. Meanwhile, the rhet-comp people and the applied linguists work in fields where their "professional activity" and their "teaching" and sometimes also their "service" overlap in substantial ways because often the subject of their expertise is the classroom and the way people learn to write or learn a language there. So when they give a talk to new faculty about pedagogy, is that teaching or service? If they get a grant for revising the composition curriculum, is that teaching or professional activity? For that matter, I have a hard time separating my graduate student advising from my graduate director administrative service -- what activities go under what categories?? To some extent, debate over these issues can be resolved by simply going with how the person in question listed the activity on their annual report, where we have to account for the last year's activity in those distinct categories. But then what happens when two different people list similar activity in different ways and it affects their scores significantly?

Oy. It's enough to make your head spin, and that's before you get to some of the thornier issues. There's long been debate in our department over what counts for professional activity and how much it counts, particularly when someone starts publishing in a new field, a field that was not part of the advertisement for the job they were hired for, or that was not part of their letter of offer (no matter how long ago that may have been). Say, for example, we hired a Romanticist 15 years ago and now that Romanticist has been publishing quality poetry in serious places, and that poetry was part of the reason why he was a Romanticist in the first place and informs his approach to Romantic poetry? Or say that he still teaches all the Romantic lit classes, but publishes poetry exclusively and has let scholarship in Romantic lit slide. Or say I decide I'm more interested in popular culture medievalism and start publishing on that. Or my interested in gender studies and masculinity leads me to write about post-medieval masculinity. Or heck, let's take a more likely example from my own work -- what if I start publishing on 16th century texts (traditionally that's the Renaissance/early modern period)? Now I know that some of the texts that I've already published on are technically or arguably or theoretically part of the early modern period as well as the medieval period, and so such a move would be a pretty logical outgrowth of my scholarship and expertise. But would my colleagues see it that way? Should any of these above hypothetical examples count for professional activity?

Some of my colleagues would adamantly say no. In fact, they find such professional turns deeply vexing and troubling. I don't agree and see such objections as being serious breaches of academic freedom. Now, on some practical level I can see why this would be a problem in a Ph.D. granting department, where you need experts in a given field to teach and advise the students admitted in that field on the assumption that yes, you do have a specialist in that field. But if said specialist starts devoting all her research time to another field, she's not really keeping up with the first field and so really isn't the best adviser for students who are themselves supposed to be becoming experts in that field. But we're not a Ph.D. granting department; we're an M.A. granting department, and our M.A.s don't come here to work with a given person, and they usually have a wider range of academic interests. Breadth suits their needs and their level better. And it's not a problem of a field-switch leaving us with a gap. We have some serious gaps in our faculty even without someone moving from one field to another; really, someone doing that is just shifting the gap, not creating one. Someone who seriously shifts fields has a wider range of teaching possibilities, and that's a good thing for us. And if they're doing serious work in their new field, then that's a measure of their expertise in it. Some of our colleagues keep going on about whether or not someone has "training" in something, but if you're "training" in your original field was 30 years ago, that training doesn't matter. It's all about being current in a field, and if you can get peer-reviewed publications in the top journals and presses your new field, or if serious creative writing outlets are publishing your poetry or fiction, then I say that's a measure of your "training." I have a bigger problem with faculty who think they can teach, especially at the senior or MA level, in any damn field they want. I think any of us can do the intro-level courses, but I think our students benefit from expertise in upper-level classes, and that's especially true for those students who we want to "Master" the field. I also think we endanger our chances of being able to hire someone in a field if we let someone not in it teach its courses. But then, as I've suggested, publications in that field are, for me, a sign of that expertise. Finally, we're not a high visibility institution, and in my view, anyone producing quality professional work (whether scholarly or creative) in quality outlets of professional standard in that sub-field, is bringing our department and university visibility, and so it's all good.

Frankly, I just can't see the big deal about this field switching in our context. And I also think it demarcates arbitrary divisions in the discipline that could potentially be harmful. I think as a larger discipline of modern language and literature we've too forcibly and artificially divorced the serious study of literature from creative writing, the study of language from literature, and the study of rhetoric and writing from traditionally defined "literature." I see the effects on our students when they can't tell me what's odd about the opening sentence of Jane Eyre, an otherwise first-person narrative that was originally published as an "autobiography" "edited" by Currer Bell: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day." I see it when I do the whole "what is literature? what is literary study?" song and dance in my grad research class, and despite all my moves to the contrary, they conclude by insisting that they can say this is literature and that is not and that it's an objective quality held in the thing itself. Or heck, such a stark claim for what is literature and what is not threatened to derail a whole day's discussion in an NEH Institute I attended, as at least one of my occasional readers will no doubt remember, so it's not limited to first year graduate students anxious to define what they "have" to know.

I also think that such bounded thinking in evaluating professional work -- this counts for your professional activity; that does not -- replicates a behavior that drives me nuts across the profession: it's all about acting just like the elite R1s do. If they do it, it must be good, so we should act that way, too. Arrrgggghhh. I hate that. We have different missions, different student bodies, different constitutive faculty, even, so why should we be doing things exactly the same when it comes to evaluating our faculty members? And along with that comes mission creep, expectations creep and so on and so on.

And in talking about this with Bullock, he brought up the problems of interdisciplinary work, or of fields that have disappeared or have so changed how they work that it might seem that someone has shifted fields when it's really the field that shifted around them. Take, for instance the field of the history of the book. In some places that subject is taught and faculty are housed in the history department. But there are certainly English faculty who work in that area, and they might reasonably publish and present in a variety of disciplinary outlets, as would the historians. (In a recent forum on this topic in PMLA, one of the articles recounted a scholar getting his Ph.D. in English who was almost denied because his dissertation on manuscripts and book history wasn't properly a subject of literary studies.) And drama and theater studies cross back and forth between literature scholars and scholars and professionals working in theater departments. If a literary drama scholar were to direct a production, would that count for her professional activity the way it would for someone hired to teach directing and production classes? What then? How do you determine what "counts" in their professional activity? Why shouldn't we be more flexible in determining that?

But, having rather forcefully stated where I stand, I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. What do you think? What counts?

Making myself write

2009-09-02T13:50:00.003-04:00

I'm trying to research and write an article. No big news there, since that's part of what I'm paid to do, and which I should be doing pretty much continuously. And, of course, I've done it before. But for some reason this one has me really stuck.

Part of the problem is that I keep veering off in all sorts of directions. Let's say the article is about, I dunno, an allegorical debate poem (it's not -- let's just pretend) with a 16th century manuscript date (again, I'm fudging the truth throughout this description) but assumed late medieval origins largely based on genre, content, and a few philological bits that people have been cribbing from its first editor way back when. And so everyone talks about it as a medieval text. But then it's in a early modern manuscript and there are all sorts of weird things about that manuscript. First of all, the other texts it has been bound with are pretty much ideologically antithetical to what everyone assumes is the orientation of this text. So let's say it seems, on the surface, to have orthodox religious politics for the late Middle Ages, but it's in a manuscript full of non-conformist Protestant tracts. OK, that's weird. And then there's a recent article that points out all sorts of codicological and paleographical evidence that the scribe was imitating print books in making this manuscript. Also weird. And so all of that makes me want to talk about my ideas about this text in terms of reception and reader response and appropriation and 16th century medievalism and the impossibility of a "right" reading and so forth. And if I do so, I really need to do more research on the related 16th century contexts -- book culture and anti-Catholicism as it affected book culture and 16th century medievalism and so on and so forth.

But wait, there's more. Even if we go along with the assumption that this text had origins in the Middle Ages and therefore think of it as a medieval text (although I'm not sure we should go along with them...but at any rate...), it's a weird text by itself. It's not like any other text in its genre; in fact, it's a unique sub-genre. And it's aesthetically bizarre, even in context of all that's already bizarre about late medieval aesthetics. And it's offensive to present day sensibilities (or at least, it should be), and the aspects that make it so offensive are the most written about aspects of the text. And so all of this makes me think I need to take this part of the ongoing scholarly conversation into account, even while doing what I said I want to do in the above paragraph.

And there's more, but I'm running out of ways to talk about it in made-up terms. But you get the idea. Every idea I think I have leads to a dozen more directions of research and thought. This article is like a Hydra on steroids -- cut off one head of ideas and a bajillion more pop up in its place. Argh. I've been toying around with this thing since the year 2-thousand-and-frakin'-3. And I've presented it at conferences in a few variations and gotten good responses to them all. Clearly, I need to stop the "I just need to read one more book" nonsense and start writing something. But I keep unhelpfully convincing myself that I'm not there yet, not ready to write.

So here's my solution: I'm going to pretend that this is a seminar paper and it's due on December 17, just like my students papers are. After all, I turned out decent drafts towards things in ten-week quarters when I was a graduate student, and here I've got a head start and 14 weeks. I think I might even give myself earlier deadlines for an abstract, preliminary bibliography, and annotated bibliography, just like I do with my students.

What do you think?

********

PS -- I started this blog 4 years ago yesterday. Happy blogiversary to me!

A blog of interest

2009-08-09T23:14:00.003-04:00

Ah summer. A time when I just don't have that much of interest to blog. Sigh.

In the meantime, some of you may remember a certain piratically-inclined dessert and bread making friend of mine who blogged her Cookin' School adventures. Well, she's back to blogging at a blog called Stories That Are True. Only this time she's in New Zealand. It's a long story; I'll let her tell it.

Where does my research go from here?

2009-07-14T10:52:00.004-04:00

As many of you know (because I've been cooing about it on Facebook), my book, published two years ago, now has been reviewed three times and the reviews are all positive. The most recent one, even though it was at times the most critical, was also simultaneously the most enthusiastic. It even made me blush a little bit. It also made me feel pressure to make good on the promise the reviewer seems to think it shows for additional scholarship. As I've been joking, I'm now resting on my laurels, but they're feeling a little prickly.

Like Dr. Crazy, I'm feeling a little like I'm done jumping through hoops, that I don't have to write a second book. Like her, I didn't actually have to write a first book for tenure at my institution, but I did feel I needed to write one to be someone in the field, to feel like I was on par with my peers at fancier universities. But now, also like Dr. Crazy, I'm a little more relaxed about my status and professional identity. (Tenure, promotion, a juicy raise, and good reviews will do that for you.) And unlike what seems to be the case at Dr. Crazy's somewhat similar university, I don't absolutely have to write another book to make full professor; although most of the literature people in the department have done so, a woman in linguistics went up last year with a series of substantial articles (more the norm in her subfield), which helpfully sets a precedent for the department in general. And at our university, the process for full talks about your contribution to and status in your field, and so I'd use reviews and citations of my older work, as well as new work to help establish that (although my previously achieved laurels alone wouldn't do it, of course). That said, our administration seems to want to ramp up research expectations (at the same time that they want to increase teaching load, either by classes or enrollment, of course!), so I need to keep an eye on that and not simply assume that all will continue as it has done. Not to mention the fact that the discipline in general keeps expecting more from each generation. (Why do we do that??)

But the thing is, I'm not sure I have it in me. I have ideas, but I'm just not sure they're book-length ideas. There are two things that I'm spinning my wheels on now. One is on the same genre (in the broadest sense) as the subject of my book, but a different sub-genre from a different part of late medieval/early modern England. That project is definitely only article-length. The other project is related to my previous work only in so far as the socio-economic strata that produced and consumed the texts in question is related to the topic of my first book. It's in a completely different genre, however, and requires of me new skills and knowledge, so it's both daunting and exciting, because it will keep me from getting bored and my work from seeming stale, I hope. It also, at first, seemed like a complex and wide-ranging topic and I thought it would become my next book, but now I'm not so sure. It involves a long list of texts, but the texts themselves are not all that complicated, and I'm starting to think that while it will take a lot of time, effort, and research to show their textual and cultural interrelations and significance, it won't take a lot of pages of writing to do so. I could be wrong -- in the process I might find I have a book after all -- but it looks now like I have another substantial article, perhaps a Speculum-length article, but not a book.

And after that I got nothing. Or at best, I have some very sketchy little obsessions about things I've taught. But see, none of the projects above or the sketchy ideas are really closely related to each other, and so I couldn't put them together to make a book. So what if the second project above really isn't a book-length one? It's possible that I could produce what's 'in the queue' now as articles and maybe a book might germinate out of that. That is, one of those projects might lead to something else that really is a book-length project. Right now, I think that's my plan: keep working on the ideas I've got, following leads and pursuing questions, and keep my eyes open for the bigger picture, if there is one. How I ended up with project number two in the last paragraph, after all, was pretty serendipitous. If not, a series of 4-6 really substantial, well-placed articles would probably get me to full professor, and I've had one come out and one submitted since tenure, so I'm already 1/2 or 1/3 of the way there. I think for my sabbatical application I might still pitch that second project as a potential book, especially since I'll be applying for a whole year, but certainly the manuscript research I need to do will take a year of planning and travelling, anyway, so that will help. But if in the long run it's better as a longish article, that's fine with me.

Of course, if my projects don't turn into books, that means that I take myself out of the running for any moves to more prestigious jobs, but I'm OK with that. First of all, I can't work at the faster or more demanding pace that such a job would require. Take this morning as an example: all I've done is read a chapter of a scholarly work and write this blog post. I'm a slow reader, thinker, and writer. And that's all I manage when I'm not teaching; I manage less when I am. I already have a 2/2 load here (normally 2/3, but I'm grad director, remember) and so a more prestiguous job wouldn't mean any teaching reduction. And these days the grass is no longer looking especially greener at either the public or private R1s or SLACs. Add the greater expecations and pressure to that, and they're really not. And then there's the two-body problem, which Bullock and I conveniently avoided having by meeting here at Rust Belt -- why mess with a good thing?

But staying here at Rust Belt and continuing to publish substantial articles, and doing so in visible places, I think I'd still be contributing to the field, and I'd certainly be contributing to the education of students. I'd still have expertise in the field to share with my students, undergraduate and MA level, and enough visibility and standing that my letters of recommendation for students applying to graduate programs would have substance and weight. And so this is my plan now: keep following the leads and see where they take me, whether that's to articles or a book or a combination of both.

When Chaucer is an intro-level class and other problems with "recommended" prerequisites

2009-07-07T17:20:00.004-04:00

From the nine comments on my last post -- not a very good sample, I realize -- it seems that most of you want me to write about teaching issues, particularly the inter-related problems of multiple audiences and students putting off "recommended" pre-requisites. And so that's what I'll do, mostly through the lens of my Chaucer class from Spring. I don't really have any answers here, but maybe we can at least start a conversation and share some ideas.

First, though, some background. Our English major consists entirely of 3000 and 4000 level classes. The 1000 level is reserved for composition and the 2000 level consists of general education courses that don't satisfy the major. To me this seems like an obvious system where each level corresponds roughly to a year in college -- 1000 for first-year stuff, 2000 for more advanced general education courses you should be finishing up in the sophomore year, and 3000 and 4000 level courses for the major, which you're largely doing in your junior and senior years, and where 4000 level courses are more advanced than 3000 level ones. This is partly reinforced in our major requirements where the 3000 level courses have names with "introduction" and "principles" and words like that in them, or where they're called "X 1" and the 4000 version is called "X 2." And a bunch of these courses with the seemingly obvious names are specifically required. So it should seem to the casual observer that one is supposed to take those 3000 level "introduction" courses first. Obviously. Or, at least it's obvious to me, and it was so when I was an undergrad at an institution with the same kind of system. (Where it *didn't* seem intuitive at all to me was in the major at my grad institution, which had 1-digit, 2-digit, and 3-digit courses, and once you got to the 3-digit level, there was some kind of distinction, but it wasn't quite clear what that was.)

But apparently it's not obvious to our students. For one thing, I'm starting to realize that they don't look at the major as a whole -- or few do, anyway. They don't make a long term plan or think in sequences. That's not how our students pick their courses. Rather, they do so one semester or, at best, one year at a time. And from what I've heard from the advisers in various areas -- not just our majors -- a lot of them don't come in for advising from someone with a longer view until their senior year or just before it. And left on their own, they make choices that seem strange to me. I know a lot of them search by day and time, and they use the electronic system that gives them only the course name and brief, general catalog description, instead of consulting the detailed descriptions we write for them in a document that is both mailed to them and available on the department website. Our undergraduate adviser is working on that by developing a booklet that every student will get when they declare the major, which lays out for them the logic and order of the classes and the underlying curricular purposes of the requirements. But I bet that doesn't stop a lot of students from the short-term thinking or from simply picking what fits their schedule or what's taught by someone they heard is a good teacher.

So why aren't there computer-enforced pre-requisites? Honestly, I don't know. I think this state of affairs is combination of various causes, some of them buried deep in the past. Looking at my Chaucer class, it has three "recommended" prereequisites, one of which is the course I think should be a computer-enforced prereq, and two of which are 2000 level general education classes, which these days we teach not as "gateway" courses to majors but as "appreciation" classes (for lack of a better word) to more general audiences. (Although, honestly, were I teaching them, they'd only be slightly different from the true gateway-to-the-major course. But that's another topic.) My guess is that once upon a time the faculty wanted to encourage "converts" (those other majors who realized their true love was English after all when they took a particularly good English gen ed course) and wanted them to be able to move into the upper level courses more quickly. Also, if these three courses were originally more alike in conception and the way they were taught, you'd want any one to be a pre-req. Certainly a computer registration system could be programmed to accept an "X or Y" type choice, but that may have gotten all fouled up in a relatively recent switch to a new system. Or maybe it was beyond the old system. I really don't know for sure, but I do know that our catalog of courses looks in many ways like the accumulation of piecemeal changes, and so the pre-req system (or lack of one) may be the result of that, too.

The other problem might be that the three concentrations within the English major didn't used to have the same core required courses, and so a student in, say, the creative writing concentration wouldn't have necessarily taken the same 3000 course that the English lit concentrators all have to take, but might want to take some of the same 4000 level courses, and so a computer-enforced prereq would require an override in such cases every time. (Or maybe such a pre-req wasn't possible since the computer saw them all as English majors, regardless of concentraion.) But just recently this has changed, and *all* English majors have the same core requirements.

That change is due to our undergraduate advisor, who is also the head of the undergrad curriculum committee, who has been doing a bang-up job reorganizing the major and making it make better sense -- that is, looking less like a bunch of accumulated, piecemeal changes. But he's much more interested in the curricular and pedagogical logic of things than the nuts and bolts, and probably hasn't thought of things like computer-enforced prereqs (or out of date recommended ones). [Note to self: bring this up with him!]

Then there's the additional problem of the English-Ed majors. If they were still all English *and* Education *double* majors, it wouldn't be a problem, but the school of Ed recently devised a single degree option and, frankly, gutted the actual subject content in favor of the pedagogical and curricular courses over in Ed. (The ambitious students still do both degrees, thank heavens.) Those pedagogical courses *are* important, I do realize, but right now the English-Ed single degree requires *no* 4000 level courses. and most of the content is from 2000-level general ed classes. And whoever designed what it does include -- without consulting us -- put in bizarre courses from the catalog that we don't actually teach all that often. *headdesk* But more germane to today's point is this: what those single degree English-Ed students have to take isn't the same as what our English majors have to take, and that screws up the pre-req system as well.

OK, end of boring background. Now, what does this mean for the classroom?

It means that in Spring's Chaucer class, as I only learned well into the semester -- and in one case, at the end of the semester -- I had students who were starting the major and simultaneously taking the intro-level class and mine; English-Ed students who were taking elective English content courses, and had had some English lit courses, but not the core intro class that most of us think of as the foundation of everything after; English majors who knew the ropes already; clueless students only just beginning the English major and taking Chaucer first before anything else; and, on top of all that, MA students of various backgrounds, abilities, and preparation. (Oh, and as a corollary situation, I had two students in my section of the intro level class who had taken all or most of my upper level classes already. They were both smart students who'd managed to find their way through those other courses, but they had a *lot* of eureka moments in the intro class that might have helped had they had that class *before* the others!)

Oy. How do you teach to that mix? In the past I've tried various strategies. In the two most recent go-arounds of Chaucer, I've redesigned the writing assignments to be a series of short papers that build skills every English major should have and that help students cope with the special challenges of Chaucer. I modelled it on the assignment sequence that Jeffrey Cohen once posted about over at In the Middle. They start with simple translation assignments with reflective essays about what gets lost in translation. Then they move to more complex interpretative assignments -- close readings of passages, longer essays. They also review a secondary article (which I pick out, though there's a choice) along the way, to help build to their final paper, where they mount their own argument in conversation with two articles they find themselves. So, it seems, that I've arranged a nice scaffolded sequence of assignments that build skills in relation to the subject at hand -- Chaucer -- and the discipline as a whole.

But as basic as those first assignments seem -- and there were a number of low-stakes close-readings for them to learn from -- a lot of them didn't know what to do even after a *lot* of commenting on my part and dealing with individual sets of knowledge gaps student by student. The kinds of things they didn't know how to do included a lot of the stuff I drill in the intro class, including: the difference between summary and analysis; the necessity of remembering that characters are not real people, that they're illusions created by language, that they can't make choices; the need to turn to the text frequently for evidence, and how to do that both in terms of the mechanics and the logic and argument; the need to *make* an argument; and the most difficult but necessary move from describing what a text does, however prettily, to thinking about what and how it means. Ideally, the upper division classes would be where we talk about that last point the most, and add the various methods and materials and knowledge for talking about that (theories, contexts, genres, etc.). But with many of my students -- including, btw, an occassional MA level student -- I didn't get to that last point because they're just getting the hang of the other issues. There was one student this semester whom I could never get to move past his personal reaction to characters. He wrote weird, angry essays about all the women who were sexually or emotionally unfaithful and claimed -- when he had a thesis at all -- that his disgust with them was Chaucer's disgust. I really should have required that guy to come talk to me (I did urge him, but didn't require him), not to berate him for his misogyny (although that *was* disturbing) but just to teach him that characters aren't real and that his sitting in judgement over them said more about him than about Chaucer. (Although, in retrospect, I guess it taught me that Chaucer's women push the buttons of certain kinds of men. OK, duly noted.) It saddened me that he could never imaginatively move out of his own point of view enough to see that maybe Chaucer was saying something very different and that maybe he might learn something from that (such as, for example, that women have sexual desires, which, judging from his screeds, he desperately needed to learn). Had he been in my intro class, he would have had many assignments and activities that precisely talked about how our immediate reactions to texts can sometimes be with the grain of the text or sometimes against the grain, and that one of the first things we need to do to be more analytical is make those kinds of distinctions and figure out what we think the text wants from us (or if that's radically unclear, so be it).

I don't mind having to reinforce lessons learned in the intro classes, or needing to teach the quirks of reading older literature (for example, that it rarely, if ever, is naturalistic or a depiction of everyday lives the way that, say, the social novel is). But it's damned difficult to teach simultaneously to MA-level students with aspirations for the Ph.D. and student who are, for all intents and purposes, coming straight from their high school level lit classes where, appropriate to that level, they do tend to talk about how a text made them feel or if they liked a character or not. It's hard enough to pitch any upper level course to a broad array of English majors who'll go on to various careers and lives. And it's a bit more hard to teach to that body *plus* the MA students. But then it gets a whole exponential level harder to add the underprepared students who are going through the major haphazardly. This has probably always been the case since I've been at Rust Belt, but it seemed a particularly intense problem this past semester. There were some "light bulb" moments and I have no doubt that a lot of the students learned a whole lot about thinking analytically about how literature works. If they realize that it wasn't just about my course, and if they carry that knowledge to other courses, they'll benefit in the long run. But some grades took some serious hits (and I'm sure my evals did as a result). And it was a harder struggle than usual -- it was a Chaucer course lacking some of the joy that it usually has. I think that was partly because so many of the students were dealing with the anxiety that is Chaucer alone -- it's hard! it's weird! it's not a novel! -- plus the anxiety that my assignments and comments and grades provoked.

And this isn't limited to my Chaucer course. I had a lot of the same problems in the broader medieval lit course the previous semester, but that semester's class was weird and wacky in so many other ways because of the personality clashes and dramas going on in it that the usual pedagogical issues were overshadowed by the rest of the nuttiness. And so I'm sure this radical mix of levels and preparation will happen in future courses.

So, what now? We could, maybe, enforce the intro-level class pre-req. We do offer the class every semester and in the summer, too. But what if we can't? How do I (re) adapt what I'm doing to the various audiences and levels and needs of my students? Do you have any ideas, because I'm kind of fresh out.

I got bupkis

2009-07-04T17:58:00.002-04:00

I haven't been blogging because, well, I'm boring. I got nothing. Help me out here and give me a topic. What do you want to know about?

Or how about I give you some choices.

Would you like me to write about the experience of collaborating on a class design, which is one of the things I'm doing this summer (though the class won't be taught until Spring 2010)?
Or how about the agony of coming up with new research projects now that the book is done?
Or should I write a confessional entry about my frustrations with teaching last semester (note: *not* with my student, but with *my* teaching) and the difficulty of speaking to multiple audiences/levels (English-Ed students, English majors interested in grad school, MA students, etc.).
Or maybe I should write about my frustrations with our prereq-light system that means students who haven't taken the Intro to Lit Studies class take classes like my senior level Chaucer class before they've even learned how to think about literary texts at the college level (which I suppose is related to point three, above).
Or, on a cheerier note, I could write about how Bullock and I have spent last summer and this one rewatching all of Buffy and Angel (half way through the latter) -- though I'm not sure I've entirely processed my thoughts on that yet.
Or, I could write about how I'm not only planning a class for Spring, but have done my syllabuses for the Fall and am trying to plan ahead not to have a maddening year this coming year in terms of prep and grading.

Or, again, you can suggest a topic, though I retain the right to demure if it's too personal or revealing or I don't have much to say on the topic.

Is that supposed to be an insult?

2009-06-09T15:56:00.006-04:00

You know, when I read medieval misogynist aphorisms like this one --

A wyld beest a man may tame
A womanes tunge will never be lame

-- my first response is "Hell yeah! Right on!"

Just saying.

Back from the UK with visions of food dancing my head

2009-06-09T10:29:00.012-04:00

In past summers I've spent a lot of time in the UK, but this year I went there only for a week -- totally personal, too, not professional -- and I'm actually looking forward to a summer of reading, thinking, and writing in my own home. And in the next post, I'll have a research-related query for you all. But first, an update.

Bullock and I are just now back from our trip to the north of England where, as many of my Facebook friends already know, I attended a good friend's wedding in a borrowed dress and shoes (and no makeup, and unwashed hair!) because my luggage didn't get there in time. The fact that there was an attendee who lived locally and who had an extra dress in roughly my size was nothing short of miraculous. Otherwise, I might have gone to the wedding in the t-shirt and chinos I'd been wearing for about 36 hours straight. And not just any chinos, but coffee-stained chinos, the result of the flight attendant having spilled coffee all over me on the flight there. But it all worked out, and I actually liked the borrowed dress better than my own. England has many more cute dress options that the States, even in the English cities that are more or less the equivalent of Rust Belt City.

Speaking of which, I don't know why it took me so long to realize this, but much of the north of England -- especially Lancashire and Yorkshire -- have a lot in common with the upper Midwest. It's full of former industrial cities that hit hard times in the last few decades but are experiencing some renaissance now in the creative and cultural classes (think Chicago or Cleveland or even Pittsburg; and then Manchester and Leeds); the people are friendly, unsnobby, and hospitable; there are large Muslim populations in Dearborn, MI, and Bradford and Leeds; there's great Middle Eastern and Pakistani food to be had; and there is much beer drunk and much cheese eaten. No wonder I feel so much more at home in the north than in the south of England. Of course there are less savory similarities, too -- Yorkshire just elected a member of the British Nationalist Party to the European Parliament and Michigan is also frequently known as Militia-gan.

But one thing every city (and sometimes the towns and villages) in the north of England has that is missing in Rust Belt City is a slew of restaurants doing interesting and inventive things or just doing traditional dishes exceptionally well. The fact that the UK is having a cuisine renaissance is now practically common knowledge, and I've been noticing it and commenting on it for at least the last 10 years. In the north, especially, I've had amazingly good traditional, local food, often at small hotel restaurants and local pubs off the beaten tourist path. This trip I had tender, slips-off-the-bone-with-a-fork lamb at The Peasehill House Hotel Restaurant in Rawdon (a suburban village near the Leeds/Bradford airport); rich, tender duck confit salad at The Malt in Burley-in-Wharfedale (at the wedding reception); sweet and creamy mussels at Delrio's in York; mouth wateringly rich pork belly at the Hotel du Vin Bistro in York; and a lovely steak with a crunchy duck egg on top (the egg had been dropped into the fryer so that the whites fried up in the shape of wings, but the white stayed runny inside -- you wouldn't believe how good runny egg on steak is!) and a "trifle" of asparagus (a foam with crunchy peas in it) at J. Baker's Bistro Moderne in York.

But the best of all dinners was one I booked us for our last night. We were staying at the Crowne Plaza Manchester Airport (NOT recommended -- boo!) for our morning flight, so I did a bit of hunting on the internet to find an interesting and fine restaurant in the general vicinity. I finally decided on The Alderley at the the Alderley Edge Hotel in Cheshire, about 7 miles southeast of the airport, whose online menu suggested that they did interesting interpretations of traditional dishes, using mostly locally sourced ingredients. (If you're ever inclined to do the same -- though hopefully from one of the other airport hotels, NOT the icky Crowne Plaza -- I recommend taking the train from the Manchester Airport to Alderley Edge and walking through the posh and charming village to the restaurant, then taking a taxi back, since the trains stop running back to the airport at about 10 -- the taxi is about 15GBP and the restaurant will call it for you. We chickened out and taxied both ways, because we weren't sure what the walk from the station looked like, which really was a waste of money.)

Anyway, we were not disappointed. First of all, it was simply a lovely dining *experience*, the kind we can't get at all around here. Our coats were taken and we were first seated in the bar, where drink orders were taken and we were given a complimentary plate of amuse-bouche to go with the drinks. Then we were brought the menus, and the head waiter/maitre-d' (it was a small wait staff of three who shared tasks, but it clear who the top guy was) let us take our time as we hemmed and hawed over whether to go with the three course prix fixe menu, or a la carte, or go for the 6 course tasting menu. (There was little overlap between the three and it all looked SO good.) In the end we went a la carte because those were the dishes that excited us the most. (And here, I should say, if you go there and order what we did -- cocktails, inexpensive house bottle of wine, bottle of water, three courses each, plus coffee and petit fours -- it will cost you about 150GBP. It will cost more if you go off the house wine list (which is still quite nice, btw) -- that's where we cut a little cost because we not as much oenophiles as we are foodies. We knew we were splurging, but given the level of service and the wonderful food -- and given how much we like food -- it was worth it for us.)

And then once we'd ordered and we seated at our table, we had a leisurely dinner, perfectly paced by the attentive but unobstrusive staff, who had the rhythms of their restaurant down perfectly. And the food! Oh. My. God. The food! I really should've taken pictures, because it was all so beautiful on the plate, and just as rapture-inducing in the mouth. (You can see what I mean if you go to the website; you can also see the whole current menu there.) Just to give you an idea, for our entrees, I had the "Saddle of Roe Deer, Venison Hash, Poached Cherries, Pickled Sloe Gin" and Bullock had "Cheshire Spring Lamb, Three Ways with 'Shepherd's Pie,' Pickled Beetroot and Leeks." The "Shepherd's Pie" is in quotation marks for a reason -- not because of random quotation mark abuse -- because it was a miniature, almost bit-sized "pie" with a tiny little tart shell, a bite sized piece of lamb, and a dollop of mashed potato on top. (And then there were the other ways his lamb was prepared -- a lovely variety of miniature traditional lamb dishes.) And the pickled stuff was in the form of artfully sliced jellies that added color as well as taste to the plate. My plate, with its accompanying spring carrots and green onions looked liked modernist art, like a Mondrian done in triangles instead of squares and rectangles, but topped by the perfectly bite-sized array of oval slices of roe deer and the little ovals of the venison hash. And oh, was it good. The flavors seem kind of busy in my description -- so many things on a plate -- but it was all laid out so you could have a bit of saddle of deer with a cherry, or the hash with a bite of the sloe gin and a carrot.

I know for some people this might seem all too fussy, but I really appreciated the care, the craft, the art, and the thought in it all. I like the way it appeals to the eye as well as the nose and the tongue. I like the fact that it reminds me of other arts while I'm enjoying it. In fact, I think that's what characterizes this kind of cuisine -- it's food for thinking about as well as tasting. Or thinking about *while* tasting. And given the leisurely pace of the experience you have time to do that, to savor, to think, to discuss, to ruminate (well, hopefully not literally!). And I also like that with three courses, plus amuse-bouche and petit fours, I didn't feel horribly stuffed. I like the fact that I get to try all sorts of different flavors (and the appetizers and desserts were equally abundant in tastes) without over-eating. And alas, I still haven't found anything quite like this in and around Rust Belt City. There's an award-winning regional restaurant in the city 2 hours away from here that we like very much, but it requires an overnight stay, since a 4 hour round-trip drive is too much for one night. But this academic year Bullock and I have been quite spoiled with our trip to Paris and our trip to England, and now I fear we'll feel the lack of such restaurants even more. Sigh.

We also did all the touristy things one does in York and Leeds -- the Minster, the Yorkshire Museum, the Jorvik Viking Center, the Royal Armouries, etc., etc. -- and had a fun time at my friend E's easy-going, relaxed wedding and reception (once the dress issue was sorted out, anyway!). I also recommend the Hotel du Vin in York, if you can get a good discout rate. It was by far the most comfortable and modern hotel we stayed in (fantastic hurricane shower head! wonderful bed! and everything smells so good!), and it's only a 10 minute walk from the train station, as well as from Mickelgate Bar and the medieval part of the city.

Oh, and also, having learned about Eric Bloodaxe in all the York Viking-related museums, Bullock now wants to be known as Bloodaxe on the blog. But I thought that might be confusing for readers who pop in now and then. I suppose I could just attach the Viking nickname to the Western pseudonyn, like so: Bullock-Bloodaxe (with or without the hyphen). What do you think?

And yes, I will have some pictures, once I upload them from my memory card, and once Bullock gives me copies of his much better ones. I have a post brewing about one in particular. More later.

Slow and steady: my new motto for teaching

2009-05-16T13:34:00.005-04:00

I crammed too much into my Chaucer class this semester. I expected students to do close-reading assignments without modeling enough of that in class. Oh sure, I'd pick out passages to look at closely and then we'd build out to the tale or prologue or the book of Troilus as a whole, but then most of class was spent thinking in big, conceptual modes. Those modes have their place, too, but if, three quarters of the way through the semester you realize from multiple students' papers that they're misunderstanding the very basics of given text, then you've got a problem.

Case in point: one bright and enthusiastically engaged student this semester wrote that the mourning women at the beginning of the Knight's Tale were selfish and whiny. I suppose, on some level, all mourning is inherently selfish, but he wasn't thinking on that level. Instead, he took at face value Theseus's charge that they must be jealous of his triumph, rather than understanding that that was Theseus's own selfish misreading of the situation, or seeing that Theseus's changed understanding after they had pleaded their case exhibits how he learns to be a more appropriately compassionate ruler through showing sympathy for the pain and suffering of his subjects. In class I took all of the above as a given and started a discussion about the troubling nature of that lesson, and the ways in which even Theseus's compassion remains selfish, how he turns it into an opportunity for his own glory and heroism, how it's all predicated on war and the suffering of others (and whether or not the text was aware of that or if we were reading against the grain). But my student had missed the basics; he'd misinterpreted the tone of the women begging and crying for compassion, because, of course, it's presented in formalized, poetic language, and would seem off-puttingly melodramatic in a narrative today. We don't tend to have positive associations with the act of begging or with the idea of "pity," and so medieval texts presenting such scenes are ripe for such misreadings. (Likewise, the entire class found Troilus off-putting; but in that case, I spent some time explaining the rhetorical of the medieval lover, and explaining that he's *supposed* to put himself in his beloved's power and beg for her pity. But maybe it didn't stick or this student couldn't then translate that similar language to the situation of the mourning women.) He also, apparently, missed that they were mourning and begging for the sake of their husbands' honor, not their own, and he didn't realize how very different the relationship between kings and subjects is (especially in its medieval idealized forms) from the relationship between citizens and elected governments. (There were bits of American individualist rhetoric in his paper.) And heck, in a world where Glenn Beck hates 9/11 victims' families and the poor stranded in New Orleans after Katrina, it's no wonder my student couldn't muster up compassion for a group of unnamed, fictional, historical distant women who were, after all, mere words on a page.

But I'm not blaming my student for that failure. I'm blaming me. There were lots of misreadings like this during the semester, from various students, including misreadings of the critical texts they read for various assignments. If the benefits of reading difficult literature from the past include learning how to read and interpret difficult texts, as well as learning that the assumptions of some texts may not align with our own assumptions (whether it's the meaning of a word like "pity," or what makes a satisfying read, or bigger cultural and political assumptions), and through those lessons learn simply to recognize difference (and perhaps even become more sympathetic to it), then I failed to teach those lessons, to give my students those benefits.

And so, in the future, not only am I going to alternate Troilus and Criseyde (plus dream visions and/or bits of The Legend of Good Women) with The Canterbury Tales, and teach them in separate classes, but I'm going to sloooooooow the pace down. We're going to do some serious close reading together, and we're going to start with issues of diction, tone, and style before we proceed to anything else. I do this in my lower division intro to literary study (although not slowly enough), but it needs to be reinforced in the upper level classes, especially with texts as difficult as Chaucer, and with poetic texts in general. And as a participation element of my class, I'm going to require students to come to each class with a passage that they think needs to be looked at closely, along with written notes concerning their own interpretation of the passage. I'll model this for them in the beginning, and then I'll call on students -- different ones each time -- to share their passages. I might structure classes so that the first day on a given text or part of a text (say, Book III of Troilus and Criseyde), we do nothing but that, drawing on our knowledge of the rest to provide context for understanding. And then on the second day we'll broaden the discussion, and show how we move from close reading to "far" reading. And yes, we'll spend two days on every text or part of a text, unless it's something very short (for example, "Adam Scriveyn").

And we'll do this with at least one secondary text, too. I found this semester that students claimed that perfectly well-written articles that I had them review on their own were "unclear" or "disorganized" because the students didn't know how to follow a complex, multi-part argument and see its organization. They weren't marking up their texts and noting the underlying structure, or they were getting lost in the details and forgetting where they'd been. So, I'll assign an article that we'll all read *and* discuss together. I'll ask them to outline it, to find both the global organization (including the thesis) and the topic sentence or idea of every paragraph. I think I might use Mary Carruther's "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions" for two reasons: 1) It's a classic text that changed the way we read the Wife's Prologue and Tale, and that will also allow a broader discussion of critical history and reception; 2) it's a model of organization and argument, good for teaching students what a well-wrought argument looks like, without being too intimidating. If anybody has any other suggestions -- perhaps an article that *doesn't* rely on historical evidence so heavily, to provide a different kind of model -- I'd welcome them.

In a 2008 whitepaper (link opens PDF file), the MLA recommended that the curriculum of the English or foreign language major should offer courses of the following types, and I think in my proposed re-design of my Chaucer course(s), I'm meeting, in part, the bolded suggestions:
• courses that develop literacies in reading and writing
• at least one course devoted to slow reading and in-depth study of an artistically great work or works
• at least one small seminar to develop individuals’ capacities to their fullest
• at least one team-taught or interdisciplinary class
• a course on disciplinary issues and scholarly debates
• the opportunity to study abroad

I think my redesign would also do a better job of teaching Chaucer! What do you think?

In which I am teh lame

2009-05-11T12:36:00.002-04:00

I'm back from Kzoo and I had a really lovely time. But I also completely crashed by the end of it and couldn't bring myself to make it to the dance. My headache was just too raging and my energy way too low. So I played Trivial Pursuit on my phone with The General in our hotel room.

That's reason #1 why I am teh lame.

Reason #2: I completely forgot about the party for Bonnie Wheeler. Forgot to RSVP. Forgot to go. Forgot it even existed, until I read about it on blogs today. The invitation is still sitting on my desk here in Rust Belt, under a pile of other stuff I've neglected this semester. D'oh!

My excuse for my lameness is in the post two below this one. It's hard to be on top of social things when you're barely on top of all the rest.

But I have to say, I'm in a much better mood post-Kzoo than I was pre-Kzoo, thanks to all of you whose company I shared this weekend, however briefly!

Thank you!

2009-04-28T08:19:00.002-04:00

I wanted to thank everyone who commented on the last post, and since I'm a little late in commenting myself (sigh), I thought it was best to elevate it to a post. So, thank you! Yes, it does help to know that what I'm experiencing is common or even "normal." And it's even better to know that with a bit of effort I'll get past this stage.

This is just one of the many ways that blogs are a big help to the academic community. I think there's perhaps one person in my department who I *might* have been able to talk to about this, and I'm not sure she would have offered any positive advice. In fact, she might have made me feel even more doomed. And I vaguely recall an Inside Higher Ed piece on the same topic getting a lot of those IHE trolls who said, more or less, 'boo hoo, so get a different job.'

And can I just say that I'm touched that I got 15 comments right away, despite my spotty blogging this semester? (Yay for RSS readers, I assume!)

So thanks, everyone.

Post-tenure blues. Ennui. Depression. Melancholy. Or something like that

2009-04-25T16:26:00.003-04:00

This is what it's like after tenure for some of us.

And these are the reasons (or collectively, the single reason) I haven't been blogging this semester. See, it's like this: I have no enthusiasm for anything I do right now, whether research, teaching, service, or blogging. I keep putting things off and then feeling them hang over my head. And what do I do instead? I Facebook. Why? Some might say it's for the instant gratification, and they're probably right. But it's also for the sheer mindless, time-wasting, numbness-inducing state it puts me in. Time slips away effortlessly when I piddle around on FB (or, my second favorite online place to be, the realtor in Neighboring State that lists all the 10+ acre estates and is searchable by county). And then, after the time has slipped away, I berate myself and work at a frantic pace to get a half-assed job done of my grading or reading or whatever. Or I work all weekend to punish myself, which is particularly stupid, because if I had a better handle on my time, I'd have weekends off for the first time in forever this semester, and I'd be able to enjoy my life and the unexpectedly large raise that came with tenure because of a newly negotiated contract that raised the tenure bumps. And have I mentioned that I haven't run since November? And that I've gained 20 pounds as a result?

I've rarely been in a state this bad for this long. It has pretty much lasted the entire semester (perhaps minus the first month and a half, when I had the euphoria of wining and dining job candidates to sustain me). I occassionaly experience brief bouts of this kind of inertia in my dissertating years, but not since having become a professor. I'm sure it doesn't help that our university is an annoyingly wacko place these days, but really, I think I'd be going through this just about anywhere.

You see, we push and push and push to reach certain goals, tenure being just about the biggest of them, but after tenure, the goals are less clear. There's a sense of deflation. All of a sudden you realize your job has some of the qualities of routine that any other job has. And it's -- gasp! -- a job. This is especially true if, like me, you teach a certain range of courses over and over and over. By now you've got them down, a little too down, and they start to feel stale.

Some smart people arrange for sabbatical for the year after they're tenured, and if I were on sabbatical I might find some rejuvenation. I'd actually like to work on my research, but I've been so poorly managing my time, that of course it's the thing that has really fallen by the wayside. But I went up for tenure a year early, and I'm also putting off sabbatical for yet another year because of a wonderful teaching opportunity that I'm seizing with a colleague in theater. And maybe doing that ununusual team-taught course will energize both my teaching and my research, since seeing someone else do it half the time will give me ideas and a fresh insight into the subject matter, which also happens to be an area part of my research interests are in.

None of this is to say that the life of a professor is hard. But there's a burden that's unique and peculiar to it and that can lead to the kind of inertia I'm talking about. Right now it's going to take every atom of will power in my body to make it through the semester (and to write my Kzoo paper -- ack!), and then it will take additional will to start my work up again in the summer (thank god there's a 10 day vacation -- not research! -- trip to the UK in a little over a month). I'll get there. Writing this helped.

In the meantime, if you've ever been in such a funk, especially as a faculty member, what got you out of it? How did you rejuvenate interest in your research and teaching?

Facebook killed the blogosphere star

2009-03-27T10:41:00.005-04:00

No, not really.

Remember, correlation is not causation. Just because I'm on Facebook pretty regularly does not mean that's the reason why I have not been blogging as much lately. In fact, the reasons why I'm not blogging as much are the reasons why I'm on Facebook -- it fills the electronic conversational gap that my inability to keep up with blogging right now has left.

As for why I haven't been blogging, that has more to do with my ridiculously poor time management skills this semester. And the reasons for those are something I do want to blog about soon...if only I can find the time! (Oh, the irony.)

But now I have to get ready to go have lunch with a certain very dangerous blogger. And then later I'll be attending his big talk, followed by dinner.

And tomorrow Bullock and I are off to visit a town with a rockin' museum to eat some pig's ear, take in the view from our lakefront hotel, and belatedly celebrate my 40th birthday.

Best overheard conversation in light of current trends in higher ed

2009-03-05T09:02:00.002-05:00

Yesterday in the hallways of Michel Foucault Memorial Panopticon, I heard the following conversation as two student passed a classroom labeled "Distance Learning Classroom."

Student #1: What's a Distance Learning Classroom?

Student #2: It's where they broadcast a video of a professor's lecture from a remote location.*

Student #1: They do that?!

*Well, actually, it's where they film such lectures -- in front of a live audience! -- to broadcast later to students *not* in classrooms. But as I used to say in the fifth grade, "same diff."

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

2009-02-25T20:24:00.003-05:00

Or in other words...."I'm not dead!...I feel fine!"

Blogging will resume. I promise.

Realization of the day

2009-01-29T14:27:00.002-05:00

If you "friend" your colleagues on Facebook and you take a wee little break to play WordTwist (or enter your FB time-wasting activity of choice) it's really easy to feel really guilty about not working when they send you a chat message!

OK, now I'm *really* going to get back to work!

Research/theory question for the medievalists and early modernists

2009-01-22T11:19:00.005-05:00

ETA: Maybe this *isn't* just for the early modernists! All suggestions welcome!

I'm trying to work out something I've been thinking about for awhile, and that I presented a paper about at last year's Kalamazoo (so if you know me, and you're so inclined, you could go look up the specifics, since the rest of this post is likely to be vague). I'm starting to be convinced that a particular text, conventionally regarded as having a medieval origin, is actually an imitation of things medieval. I don't think it's a fake -- I'm not talking about something like Chatterton's forgeries here -- but I am starting to think it's an early-modern anti-Catholic representation and parody of medieval modes of thought, rhetoric, and genre. (When I presented on this at Kalamazoo, I argued for the parodic elements, but I assumed it was coming from within late medieval debates and anxieties. Now I'm not so sure.)

So, my question for you all is this: if you were writing on imitation or parody --whether or not in the context of early modern polemic against the Roman church? -- what theories and texts would you look to to help you think through this (medieval, early modern, or contemporary)?

Yeah, I know, completely vague. But maybe you can still help.

Helping Neko Case help Best Friends help companion animals

2009-01-15T22:41:00.005-05:00

Neko Case has a new album coming out, and she's making a song from it available for free download. And for every blog that posts the download, she and her label, ANTI-, will donate $5 to Best Friends Animal Society. And since I like *both* Neko Case and Best Friends, I'm happy to help out.

Click here to download "People Got a Lotta Nerve." To find out how you can post it to your blog and help out, too, go here (where you can also preview the song first, if you want, before you download). (And if you can figure out how to get the code for the imeem player to work, let me know.)

About Best Friends (from the ANTI- page on how to blog it): Founded in 1984, Best Friends advances nationwide animal welfare initiatives by working with shelter and rescue groups around the country. On any given day Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, the nation’s largest facility for abused, abandoned and special needs companion animals located in southwestern Utah, is home to approximately 2,000 dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, birds, and other animals. The society also publishes Best Friends magazine, the nation’s largest general interest, pet-related magazine with approximately 300,000 subscribers.

I personally learned about Best Friends from the Pastry Pirate, who has visited them in Utah and was very impressed with the work they do.

When dissertation directors have too much power

2009-01-10T14:10:00.013-05:00

Sorry for the long silence. Crazy holiday travel schedule + frantically getting ready for the semester + stupidly becoming addicted to TimeWasteBook = a blogger's absence.

Anyway, I'm back in Rust Belt, enjoying the peace and quiet caused by a snowy weekend before the semester begins. So while Bullock makes us a new TV/Entertainment stand in his workshop, I'm catching up with all things electronic. Heck, even Pippi's quiet and mellow. She's dozing on the window seat that Bullock made for, occasionally looking up to watch the snow fall. Soon we'll be out there shoveling again, but for now I have time to write a SUBSTANTIVE post. Really!

So while I was at MLA, having a good time on my part since I was neither being interviewed nor giving a paper, I was also feeling great sympathy for all those people on the market -- including the 14 we were interviewing -- and picking up on the crazy-stress vibe in the main conference hotels. (Btw, do you ever get the feeling that *everyone* is staring at you when you walk into those lobbies? Maybe they are, since everyone is looking for the people they're meeting, but it makes me feel really weird.) I was also hearing everyone's stories -- successes, disappointments, frustrations, and triumphs -- as well as the stories they'd heard. And one of those is what inspired the title of this post.

A friend and I were talking about whether our respective hiring committees were afraid of ABDs not finishing in time, and if we tended to prefer people with the PhD in hand or a set defense date, or whatever. And that brought up a story of a friend of this friend, whose dissertation director wouldn't let the person file his dissertation, year after year, for about three years running. And so the person kept going out on the market as an ABD and not getting many bites and not getting a job. When the director finally let the person file, he got an embarrassment of riches in the interview department, more than one campus visit, and a job. (There were, of course, a couple of articles published in there, too.)

According to my friend -- or according to her friend, the one who was prevented from filing -- the reason the director wouldn't let his student file wasn't because the diss wasn't finished or wasn't good enough to be a diss. Rather, it was because it wasn't good enough to be a book. He thought he was doing his student a favor, getting him to shape it into a book while still a student, rather than once the tenure clock started running. I have to say that when I was a grad student, I kind of thought that way, too, and so did some of my friends, especially those of us who had one or more years of dissertation fellowship. But now I think that's messed up.

Here's why. A graduate student on fellowship or working an assistantship makes peanuts. An assistant professor, even at the most poorly paying school, makes a lot more. But it's not just about a couple of years of higher salary. A graduate student making peanuts isn't paying off her credit card bills; she's accruing interest on them. A graduate student isn't contributing to her retirement account, and so is not only losing that year's contributions, but also the earnings it accrues (okay, okay, let's leave aside the tens of thousands of dollars my TIAA-CREF account lost this particular year). Add just those two things together and the financial difference is exponentially greater than just the amount of salary difference. Then there's the fact that if you're a professor getting any kind of raise or merit pay or cost of living adjustment -- or even summer school pay -- it's likely based on your base pay. A graduate student is losing out on years of having that base pay and having it increase each year. The graduate student is likely also not saving for a down-payment on a house, saving for her kid's college fund, or, for that matter, saving at all. Such investments and savings also (ideally) accrue value over time (again, let's leave aside the current financial and real estate markets for the moment).

But it's not just about money. There's social and professional status and general self respect involved, too. I can't begin to explain what a difference it made to my sense of authority in the classroom just to be a lecturer with a Ph.D. versus a grad student in my own grad program. Faculty treated me differently -- I got invited to the secret faculty party! -- and so did the students. Teaching upper division courses rather than lower div ones also went a long way to making me feel like I had some real expertise and authority in my subject. And even before I got the tenure track job, my family felt like they could stop worrying about me for once -- I was finally no longer a student. It even influenced my personal life; you get a better reaction from strangers when you say "I teach at such and such a place" than you do when you say "I'm a Ph.D. student at such and such a place."

And there's still more that's problematic about the dissertation director who expects a finished book rather than a dissertation, and its a problem that affects more than his individual student. First of all, a circumstance like this is an abuse of power. While it's different in degree from the spouse who won't let his partner have her own life, it's not that different in kind. And the student in such cases likely acts like the abused spoused: she internalizes the "it's for your own good" justification; she can't bring herself to leave and start all over again (whether that means something as drastic as leaving academia or just switching advisors); and she probably tells herself that she's partly/mostly to blame - if only she'd just write a better book. I've seen people who had such directors still have doubts about themselves and their work years later and it affects their productivity.

But more troubling -- or perhaps just troubling on a greater scale -- is the impact such expectations have on the discipline and academia in general. If dissertaton directors keep expecting more of the dissertation, hiring committees can expect more of applicants -- perhaps a book contract from an ABD. And if hiring committees are expecting more, T&P committees will expect yet more -- it's two books for tenure at some places now. It's utter madness. I know some of the directors doing this are probably justifying by thinking that they're only preparing their charges for these increasing expectations. But isn't it a mutually supporting system? If those of us on hiring committees see these superhuman grad students with book deals, aren't we going to expect more of our applicants, consciously or unconsciously? So it doesn't stop only with those of us on that end of things -- the dissertation directors have to stop having such high expectations, too. I don't think a dissertation that's just a dissertation and one article is too much to ask of a student, or too little to make them look ready for the profession (and, in fact, I think the craft of the journal article is one that needs to be taught more explicitly in graduate school -- but that's a post for another day). But keeping your student from graduating because his dissertation isn't yet a book is damaging to both the student and the profession.

Let me close with two quick case studies. One is me. The other is someone who graduated from college at the same time I did -- indeed, from the very same college. I took three years off from school before going back for the Ph.D., and she went straight to grad school, so you'd think that this other person and I would be about 3 years apart in our "academic age," wouldn't you? But no, I just got tenure last year and she's a full professor now. I think she may even have an endowed chair. Of course, there are a lot of differences between the two of us that accounts for part of this (for one, she's a workaholic, which she herself admits). But a big chunk of that difference is that she actually finished the Ph.D. in 5 years -- even doing field work for part of it -- because she had a director who thought of a dissertation as a dissertation. My once-peer wrote a 150 page dissertation (in a "wordy" field - not a math or hard science). I wrote a 450 page behemoth for a director who didn't exactly expect a finished book -- and certainly didn't keep me from graduating (I did a lot of that myself) -- but did have pretty high expectations, and often referred to the thing as a book. Though to be fair, he often said things like "this is something you'll want to think about more when you turn this into a book." So I didn't have the kind of director I'm troubled by in this post. But I also didn't have the kind that my one time peer did. And I think that's made a lot of difference in our career and life trajectories.

The profession as a whole -- and especially those fields where we write books -- needs actively to rethink what we expect of Ph.D. students, because the state of the market right now and in the future is likely to drive us all into more insane expectations if we don't start setting some reasonable limits now.

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T15:31:00.004-05:00

Looks like Pippi got a head start on the revelry.

For your distraction and entertainment needs

2008-12-20T08:13:00.003-05:00

I've been too caught up in end of the semester madness to blog. Btw, if I could single-handedly get rid of our rolling admissions for our MA program, I would. Who on earth decides on December 15th that maybe they should do an MA in English and that they should definitely start it next month? These are the same people who are asking all of you for letters of recommendation right about now. Oh, and they need it by Christmas, btw.

Anywho, since this madness is keeping me from blogging -- and don't forget the approximately 650 pages of grading I'm doing now -- I thought I'd introduce you to a new blog. It only has two posts so far and they're pretty damn funny. I especially like the top one, "Dude Who Never Comes to Class," in which our writer wonders,

Are you the embodiment of the recurring dream we’ve all had? The one where you completely forget about a class for the entire semester and then somehow realize your horrendous mistake two minutes before the final exam? And you go to the test and have no idea how to answer any of the questions and wake up absolutely panic-stricken. Are you living that dream? If so, that really sucks dude.

It's called Acadammit and you can find it here.

A meme for a lazy Saturday

2008-12-13T17:21:00.002-05:00

Things I’ve done are in bold.
Things I am indifferent towards or actively would like to avoid are crossed out.
Things in normal type face are things I’d like to do.

Comments in parentheses are my addition. I got this version from Squadratomagico (though I took off her additions).

Start my own blog
Sleep under the stars
~~Play in a band~~
Own a cell phone
Visit Hawaii
Watch a meteor shower
Give more than I can afford to charity (Well, in this case, "more than I can afford" means on the credit card, to be paid next month)
Visit Disneyland / Disneyworld (both!)
Climb a mountain
~~Sing a solo~~
~~Bungee jump~~
Participate in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony
Teach myself an art from scratch (If you define "art" broadly, this is what academics do all the time)
~~Adopt a child~~
Purchase real estate
Had food poisoning
Visit Parliament / Capital Hill
Grow my own vegetables
See the Mona Lisa in France
Sleep on an overnight train
Have a pillow fight
~~Hitchhike~~
Take a sick day when you’re not ill (but only prior to becoming an academic)
Build a snow fort
Hold a lamb
Go skinny dipping
Run a Marathon
Been on television
Ride in a gondola in Venice (how about a punt in Cambridge?)
See a total eclipse
Watch a sunrise or sunset
Hit a home run
Go on a cruise
See Niagara Falls in person
Visit the birthplace of my ancestors
See an Amish community
Teach myself a new language (Haven't done it yet, but I'm thinking Old Norse.)
Have enough money to be truly satisfied
See the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
Go rock climbing
See Michelangelo’s David
Sing karaoke
See Old Faithful erupt
~~Buy a stranger a meal at a restaurant~~
Visit Africa
Walk on a beach by moonlight
Be transported in an ambulance
Have my portrait painted
~~Be arrested~~
Go deep sea fishing
See the Sistine Chapel in person
Go to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
Go scuba diving or snorkeling
Kiss in the rain
Play in the mud
Go to a drive-in theatre
Be in a movie (but I've been on a number of sets)
Visit the Great Wall of China
Start a business
Take a martial arts class
~~Visit Russia~~ (one of the few places I don't really have a burning desire to visit)
Serve at a soup kitchen
Sell Girl Scout Cookies
Go whale watching
Get flowers for no reason
Donate blood, platelets or plasma
Go sky diving
Visit a Nazi Concentration Camp
~~Bounce a check~~
Fly in a helicopter
Save a favorite childhood toy
Visit Quebec City
Eat Caviar
~~Piece a quilt~~
Stand in Times Square
Tour the Everglades
Been fired from a job
See the Changing of the Guards in London
~~Been on a speeding motorcycle~~
See the Grand Canyon in person
Published a book
Visit the Vatican
Buy a brand new car
Walk in Jerusalem
Have my picture in the newspaper
Read the entire Bible
Visit the White House
~~Kill and prepared an animal for eating~~
Had chickenpox
Save someone’s life
Sit on a jury
Meet someone famous
~~Join a book club~~
Lose a loved one
~~Have a baby~~
See the Alamo in person
Swim in the Great Salt Lake
~~Been involved in a law suit~~
Been stung by a bee
Ride an elephant

Totals:
56
15
29 -- I better get cracking!

For all my internet friends

2008-12-11T13:47:00.003-05:00

Amanda French wrote this awesome song for all of her internet friends, and I'm passing it along to all of you as an early holiday gift. Click on the link to go play it and/or download it. Feel free to pass it along to *your* internet friends, since, as she sings, "all my internet friends give things away / They just really like to make stuff even when it doesn't pay."

H/T Michael Bérubé

Frakbook

2008-12-09T22:07:00.002-05:00

Because of a torrent of invitations lately to join freakin' facebook from a bunch of people with names (first or last) beginning with J (seriously, it was weird), I finally joined the damn thing. I really didn't want to. After hours lost in early 2003 to stupid Friendster, I thought I was over the social networking thing. But I couldn't take the peer pressure any more! I feel like those idiots at REM concerts who think it all began with Monster.

I'm under my full real life name -- middle initial included -- so if you know it, feel free to friend me!

Now, could ya'll tell me what you do about students? And, um, Bullock seems to have his own fb life -- should we leave it that way? What's the netiquette here?

A holy day of obligation I'll never forget

2008-12-08T12:50:00.002-05:00

Growing up Catholic and going to 12 years of Catholic school, I had plenty of people to remind me back then of the various holy days of obligation (the ones lay Catholic are obliged to observe). Now I often don't even know when Easter falls. But hey, it moves!

However, there's one holy day I'll never forget and that's today, December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (not a movable feast). And that's because it's *also* my brother Fast Fizzy's birthday (which means he always had the day off from Catholic school, the bastard!). And it is *also* his only child's birthday, who was born on his 40th birthday -- nice present, eh?

So happy birthday to Fast Fizzy and Youngest Niece, who turn 55 and 15 respectively today!

Oh, yeah, and happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception, too, if you celebrate it.

(FYI for those of you not in the know, the feast of the Immaculate Conception celebrates the conception of *Mary*, the mother of God, not her conception of Jesus. Oh, and "immaculate" means unmarked, spotless [as in sinless] -- not miraculous, though I suppose it has a touch of the miraculous. Still, that's not the primary meaning. Just think of someone's "immaculately clean" house. While the "immaculate reception" was a funny *sounding* sports pun, it actually made no sense whatsoever. I'm still trying to figure out how a reception could be spotless. I suppose, though, it could be clean in an additional metaphorical sense, but that's not what they were trying to convey. Anyway, this bothers me almost as much as the misuse of "literally" and "aggravating," for which, see below. Usually I'm not this pedantic, but for some reason these three things get to me. Oh, and the redundancy of "irregardless." Shudder. That one was made worse by the fact that I once had a boss who used that 'word' about 10 times a day, usually to mean, "Stop talking -- I don't care what you have to say," so he was both rude and redundant.)

A snapshot from the Virago-Bullock home

2008-12-06T15:05:00.003-05:00

On the taped episode of The Office we watched last night, Michael misused the word "literally" -- as so many do -- to describe something that was very obviously figurative. (I can't remember what it was exactly, but that doesn't really matter here.) The following exchange resulted:

Virago: I just love it when people misuse "literally" like that.

Bullock: Yeah, it's really aggravating, isn't it?

Te-hee!

Thanks!

2008-12-04T09:08:00.002-05:00

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions and encouragement in the posts below about my Chaucer class and my medieval lit. survey course. You've definitely convinced me that doing adaptations of Chaucer in a Chaucer course isn't crazy, and you've given me lots of ideas for the medieval lit. class. After this year, I won't be teaching either again for three years, since next year I have the Old and Middle English linguistics classes, the research methods class for the grad students, and a special topics honors seminar on the subject of my book, and then the year after that I hope to be on sabbatical for the whole year. But that just gives me plenty of time to plan for big changes.

Anyway, I suspect things are going to be a little quiet around here for awhile because of various end of the semester madness. But I'll see y'all at your blogs. And hey, who's going to be at MLA? Medieval Woman is organizing a get-together.

Changing up Chaucer

2008-12-01T17:16:00.004-05:00

This post is in part a follow up to the post before last, in which I lamented my boredom with doing the same-old, same-old in the big medieval class. It is also, in part, for Meg, who asked, in another context, for ideas for new stuff to do in her Chaucer class.

Now a class on Chaucer is hard to change very easily. Your big questions are: Do I try and do a little of everything (Troilus and Criseyde, a dream vision or two, a selection of The Canterbury Tales, maybe even some of the short poetry or a single legend from The Legend of Good Women)? Or do I stick to The Canterbury Tales? (This is your choice unless, that is, you're teaching at a school with separate Canterbury Tales and Troilus-and-everything-else courses. Oh, and I suppose you could just do the Troilus-and-everything-else course, but I can't bring myself not to do the Tales at least in part.) I alternate between those two options, and in the little-bit-of-everything version, I change the Tales or the selections from the other works when I get bored.

But now I've been doing that and I'm bored again. So now I'm futzing with *how* I teach it all -- from the emphases I give the course to the assignments I give. Last year I borrowed and adapted a writing assignment sequence from Jeffrey Cohen that builds skills from comprehension of Middle English (through translation) to analysis of passages, to arguments with other critics. To that I added one of my own favorite assignments, in which I ask students to write a modern imitation of a Chaucerian dream vision (albeit in prose), which is an exercise in genre analysis in disguise. I think I may keep most of that this time around, though I may be getting rid of the dream visions this time around, so no imitation. And in the last go-round, I assigned the passages for translation and analysis, but I may let students pick their own next time, because trying to figure out what's worth talking about in close detail is an analytic and interpretative skill, too.

But the big change I'm thinking about making is kind of wacky. And I'm wondering what you all think. I'm thinking about focusing on transmission and adaptation, from the manuscript to early print editions to later imitations and adaptations of Chaucer's work (and also Chaucer's adaptation of his sources), and so I'm thinking of having the class read Henryson's Testament of Cresseid and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida after we're done with Troilus and Criseyde. And I'm thinking of giving a day over to discussion A Knight's Tale; of using some or all of the BBC's fairly recent adaptations (I have the Wife of Bath episode on VHS); of playing some of Baba Brinkman's hip-hop Chaucer along the way; and of utterly traumatizing students with a bit of Pasolini's Racconti di Canterbury at the end of the semester, if I can get my hands on either a tape or DVD of it. Or maybe instead of Pasolini at the end, we could read one of the 15th century continuations of the tales in the TEAMS edition edited by John Bowers. But I'd also assign critical articles as "adaptations," too, because part of the point of this would be to talk about adaptation as interpretation -- and so, interpretation as adaptation. And in the writing assignments and other discussion we'd be talking about translation as adaptation and interpretation, too.

Out of 16 weeks, this would take away three weeks (six classes) from Chaucer "proper" -- the rest would be blended in and done in excerpt alongside Chaucer "proper." It would mean a lot of reading, but I think it might enrich the discussion of Chaucer's own works immensely, and put them in broad context of reception and interpretation. And that might also help students put themselves and their interpretative activities in context and in a greater conversation, too. I worry, often, that when I teach Chaucer only in his 14th century contexts -- as cool and interesting as that can be -- that students consciously or unconsciously feel justified in filing him away as "classic." Shudder. That's such a deadly word. Although I bring in the present or the very recent past all the time in all my classes, I think maybe a smattering of adaptations from the centuries immediately following Chaucer and our own age would make the point better that "Chaucer" is not confined to the 14th century.

What do you think?

What do Puritans and my dog have in common?

2008-11-28T12:14:00.009-05:00

Answer: They both object to Nativity scenes.

Yesterday evening the neighbors set up their garish Nativity scene on their patio and plugged it in to glow its tacky plastic glow all evening. It's one of those molded plastic numbers that light up from inside, which brings new meaning to the Christmas song lyric, "...With their faces all aglow!" They used to put it out front, but the baby Jesus was stolen one year, so now they set it up in back. (Hmph. Serves them right for putting out baby Jesus *before* Christmas!) Last year they set it up around the concrete goose already back there -- you know those ones that you can dress up, that people often have on their front stoops? -- and gave the goose a Santa hat as it gazed upon the baby Jesus. Yeah, I know, it boggles the mind.

Anyway, this was all done while Pippi was indoors and paying more attention to Bullock's pork roast* than anything outside. But when we let outside before bed time, she quickly spied the tacky ensemble, raced over to the neighbor's fence, raised her hackles and barked at it in her "I don't like you one bit -- back off!" bark, which she usually reserves for the poor UPS men, all of whom are terrified of her. (This bark is not to be confused with her "hey you cat/raccoon, get out of my yard!" bark of mild warning or her "squirrel! squirrel! omg, squirrel! must get the squirrel!" Technicolor whine of madness.)

She has since made her peace with the set in the daylight -- thank god, for us and the neighbors (whom I like, despite their lapses in taste) -- but she still occasionally gives it the stink eye when she sees it from the corner of her eye and momentarily mistakes it for a threatening intruder.

I think my dog may be a French Huguenot (well, she *is* a Brittany). Either that or she just has good taste.

*With no kids and no old people this Thanksgiving, we chucked the whole turkey tradition. Who wants turkey when you can have pork??

Prof, bored with course, needs new ideas

2008-11-26T12:51:00.003-05:00

OK all you smart medievalists and medieval lit teaching early modernists out there, I need your advice.

For five out of the last six academic years, I've taught our medieval-literature-excluding-Chaucer class, which is one of those monstrous 800 years in 16 weeks kind of courses. It's like I'm the only person in the department who has to teach a real survey course, and frankly, I'm not fond of survey courses. After doing this five times I can see very clearly just how superficial our discussion of *everything* is. And there are certain texts I feel like I have to do every time, which means that even though they're texts I like very much and find something new in every time (e.g., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), I'm still getting bored with them or with the discussions and papers they provoke. And a bored teacher is a bad teacher. One semester after winning that Awesomest Prof Ever award and I'm starting to look more like Lamest. Prof. Ever.

So I talked with Milton about this, as he's the chair of the undergrad lit curriculum committee. We discussed the possibility of splitting the class into two -- one Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic (and Latin!), and one Anglo-Norman and Middle English (and Latin!) -- or about just alternating the subject each time I taught it. See, in our curriculum, students don't have a lot of historical period requirements -- they simply have to take at least one pre-1800 lit class and one post-1800 lit class in the British lit offerings -- so it's not like I'd be gypping them on their way to their early modern class if they got the ASNaC version instead of the late medieval version. But yeah, I would be exposing them to less of the broader medieval period, of course. (An aside: I've become more and more convinced over time that specific content knowledge is less important than the broader intellectual experiences and skills learned in a variety of classes, across the curriculum and across the major. But that's a post for another day.) So Bullock suggested that in changing the course description (if I keep it a single course), I should also make it repeatable if the content is different, which will be especially important for undergrads and grad students who want to go on to the Ph.D. and specialize in medieval literature -- it will actually give them *more* instruction in the field. I'm now also thinking that I want to keep the option of doing the whole 800-year shebang so that if I want to do a thematic course across the period, I can. Plus, we all know how porous that 1066 boundary is. Finally, I want to be able to throw a bit of Chaucer in there if I want. This "excluding Chaucer" business is nutty, especially since it's not like students are definitely going to take the Chaucer class for their single author requirement, since they have a range of choices.

So here's what I'm thinking of doing. I'll keep it one course, but I'll change the title to something like "Topics in Medieval Literature" (or maybe just "Medieval Literature") and write a general catalog description that makes clear that some offerings might be ASNaC oriented, some might be about the late medieval period, and some might be thematically focused, and students may repeat the course when the content changes. (We have departmental course descriptions that give a better sense of the specific course and its expectations.) And then, starting with the next time I teach the class, I'll start developing different variations.

Now, here's where you come in. First of all, what do you think of this general plan? Am I missing any possible significant repercussions? I don't think enrollment will be an issue, since most of our students pick courses by a) what's required (in this case, that means pre-1800 lit), b) what fits their schedule, c) where the class is located, and d) who is teaching the course, so no matter what specific topic or area I'm doing in a given semester, I'm likely to get more or less the same students. I think. But is there anything else I'm not taking into account?

Second, if you were to do an ASNaC course, what Norse and Celtic literature would you assign? And are there good secondary works (guides, companions, or histories) that you have found useful for yourself or your students? One of the things, ideally, that I'd like to do in each of these revamped courses is not only give students more experience with the primary texts of a given period or genre, but also make some room for both historical contexts and the literary scholarship of the field. I'm especially ill-informed on the Norse and Celtic side of the ASNaC trinity.

Suggestions welcome!