Wanna take my class?

My course description for English 380 next term:

Section 002 – Schwartz
This course will introduce you to the methods, techniques, and theories associated with analyzing and writing about literature. We’ll deal mainly with three genres: the short story, the poem, and the novel. You’ll become familiar with literary terminology, a selection of basic critical methods—including “close reading”—and we’ll occasionally touch upon the relationship between literature and its contexts, mainly the political and social milieus from which texts originate.

Requirements for the course include a midterm and final, as well as 2-4 medium-length papers and one longer paper (+/- 10 pgs). We’ll read short stories by Faulkner, Joyce, O’Connor, Wright, and Melville; poems by Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Toomer, Auden, Yeats, and Keats; and Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963)

The Freshman

This might be my last term teaching freshman composition. I just received word I'll be teaching English 380 next term, a class required for the University's English majors. I've taught lit courses before, a summer lit and film course, for example, and I've assisted in a couple larger survey courses, but I've never had the chance to teach my subject area, during the school year, to a group of majors, and design and conduct the course myself.

It's a "literary analysis" class, which is much different from teaching composition almost every term, and cringing three to four times a term when I have to sit down with a stack of 50 papers and wonder why and how some of these students got into college. Once in a while, at least, the writing is so bad that cringes turn into laughs.

I always try to remind myself, however, that these kids are 18. It's difficult for me to remember my exact mindset when I was 18 years old, but I know that the stuff I'm asking them to think and write about, are the exact same things I was not very interested in 12 years ago, either. Man I feel old writing that. I usually just hope I'm able to teach them something. Usually I think I do, but only if they want to learn something. In a class full of business and nursing majors, however, that isn't always the case.

So I'm hoping that teaching majors will at least have the advantages inherent to teaching students who actually want to be in the classroom. Which will mean they'll also have a teacher that wants to be standing in front of them.

PS. On a sidenote, my efforts at becoming more calm are working, for now at least. As anyone reading this blog knows (is anyone actually out there?), I have been pretty obsessively keeping up with the presidential campaign. That is still true, but I've decided that given Obama's poll numbers right now (which are about as good as he can hope them to be), I'm just going to relax on the political posts for awhile so that I can keep my blood pressure down. Let's hope they're mostly accurate, as they mostly were in the primary campaign. Or else, two weeks from now, I might just finally erupt. Serenity now, Sam. Serenity now.

Upcoming post:
A review of Oliver Stone's W.

The New McCarthyism

Hmm. I'm liberal. I work on a college campus = I hate America!

It's the perpetual smile that's so loathsome. She's in congress. How could anyone vote for this person?

A Tribute from the Archive

A Year Ago

Who would I emulate in a crisis?

I've been working on keeping a cooler head about things lately. Something I've noticed about myself in the last five years or so is that I'm sometimes oversensitive and too easy to perceive any potential slight as a more serious attack on me that what it usually is.

Not to sound ridiculous, but this is why I'm so attached to my sports teams, to the novelists I love, my political opinions, and to basically anything else that deserves my loyalty. I don't think I'm going to change this about myself, but I'm trying to be cooler and calmer lately.

It's not that I run around frothing at the mouth--actually those who know me only casually might assume the opposite about me: that I don't show much emotion at all. But while I'm good at hiding my emotions physically, I'm terrible at containing them within myself. When something is bothering me, I lose sleep, I obsess, I seethe.

I don't want to sound too much like a partisan hack here, but the best role model out there for someone like me, who simply needs to calm down and roll with the punches, is Barack Obama. I find it incredible that a politican, and a presidential candidate nonetheless, has been able to inspire me. How long has it been since an American president's demeanor and carriage can be described as laudable and dignified? How long has it been since an American leader behaved like a leader?

The double-edged sword here is that I've become so invested in his candidacy, that the very model of serenity I'm hoping to emulate is the very cause of most of my restlessness lately. The polls are looking good, but this thing is far from over. And I'll be so glad when it's over.

Right now, as a nation in turmoil, we need someone calm, assertive, confident, and capable. For all their disparaging of Obama as a risky choice (now they're just outright calling him a terrorist), Obama is not the risky choice in this campaign. Whatever his ideology, we know this much: the man can take heat. The Clintons threw it at him (Bill still is, indirectly), the right wing's thrown it at him, and now the Barbie Doll from Alaska is throwing it at him.

He's been living in the kitchen for two years, and no matter how hot it gets, he just keeps getting better.