To be or not? (Who am I to Interpret Hamlet? Part 1 of 4)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is the first in a four-part series of blog posts, “Who am I to interpret Hamlet?”
June 16, 2019: To be or not? (Part 1: English Studies & Teaching)
June 23: How Literally Did Shakespeare Take the Bible? (Part 2: Religious Studies & Assumptions)
July 30: Reading Hamlet through personal & national traumas (Part 3: Lies & PTSD)
August 6: Hamlet, PTSD & Entitlement (Part 4)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The first sentence in Hamlet is a question that Bernardo asks Francisco:
Who’s there?
Bernardo is speaking out of turn because he has not yet replaced Francisco at his post, so Francisco quickly corrects him:
Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.
My college Shakespeare instructor (like many others) noted that perhaps the audience should feel the question is directed at all of us as well: Who are we, reading or viewing this play?
And who am I to have a blog about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet and other various thoughts about Shakespeare? Here's a bit about me, in four parts. Part one:
BA
In college, I majored in English and Theology and studied classical guitar (as well as other styles). My Shakespeare professor was C. Robert Foy (Rob, d.2013), a generous and brilliant instructor who got me interested in biblical allusions and plot echoes in the plays.
[Rob Foy]
Writing poetry, fiction, and a play also occupied my time in college and a great deal of my attention and passion:
I studied poetry writing (and American Literature) with Lon Otto
[Lon Otto,]
and poetry and fiction with Jonis Agee, now at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where the literary journal, Prairie Schooner, is based.
[Jonis Agee]
John Orlock (now at Case Western Reserve U in Ohio) was my instructor for a memorable class in playwriting.
[John Orlock]
John's major assignment for the course was to have us choose a non-traditional theater space (mine was the hall by the window of the campus post office, after hours); choose a cast; and write a play with the space and cast in mind. This experience later made me reflect on how Shakespeare wrote his plays with London and his company of actors in mind (in spite of his having written many plays set in distant lands).
Serving as editor of the college literary magazine in my senior year, and previously as assistant editor in my junior year, were rich experiences. I also won some prizes for my writing, including a first prize from the Journal for Christianity in Literature, and a number of Dean's Prizes. One of my instructors later joked that I seemed to have set a record for the number of times winning the Dean’s award in creative writing. (Others have probably broken the record since then, I hope.)
I had an advantage of time: late in my second year, my grandmother died and I came down with a bad case of mononucleosis that forced me to drop a few classes, including Shakespeare with Rob Foy (which I took again later). I had not yet decided on a major but was considering social work or teaching, so I signed up for two work-study projects, one as a houseparent-counselor in a group home for girls with drug, incest and prostitution history, and another teaching poetry and creative writing in a senior transitional home (for seniors not yet ready for a nursing home).
To be or not to be? Social worker or teacher?
Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows
Of oppression and tend its wounded victims?
Or to sail waters of curiosity and wonder,
and take up arms against ignorance?
These house-parent and teaching internships were rich and challenging experiences, but they delayed my finishing the coursework and stretched my time in college, giving me an advantage of time and perhaps experience when it came to submitting work for the Dean's Prize.
I was lucky that my poetry instructors were open to experimentation in traditional forms that included Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets. This gave me an appreciation for Shakespeare's poetry and the poetic language in the plays. It may be hard to write a formal, rhymed sonnet in iambic pentameter on one's first attempt at such poems, but the more one does it, the more one starts to think in the ways that the form seems to demand. If one has never written a formal rhymed sonnet, one might think people of Shakespeare's time were doing a great deal of hard work in sonnet writing. Well, sort of. But it looks much harder from the outside; perhaps not so hard if one lives in a culture that reads and writes a lot of sonnets, or if one is a writer who does it frequently.
Visiting Writers
My college was in a consortium of five colleges that included Macalester, Hamline, Augsburg, St. Catherine’s and St. Thomas, and together, their creative writing programs sponsored a number of visiting writers that included Margaret Atwood (The Handmaiden's Tale, Negotiating with the Dead, and many other excellent works);
Donald Justice (the year he won the Pulitzer, 1980. He was not an admirer of experimental poetic forms, but that would describe the writing sample he received from me by chance as selected by my writing adviser);
Lisel Mueller (the year she won the National Book Award in poetry, 1981);
and Heather McHugh
[Heather McHugh]
(I remember her excellent poem, “Blue Streak,” was on the poster).
Atwood Had a Cold the Day We Met
Meeting these writers and hearing them read their work was life-changing, especially with Margaret Atwood, who pulled no punches about shortcomings she found in student writing, but who also singled out a poem by a young woman who was a classmate of mine, as well as my own poem, for high praise.
At the reading she gave, among other things, she read an intriguing piece about a woman who married an executioner, because it was her only way to be spared herself from execution, a work that Atwood wrote long before The Handmaiden's Tale. (This suggests how meeting, reading and hearing Margaret Atwood may have helped me notice political and patriarchal oppression in Shakespeare.)
When I arrived at Hamline University for her reading, she was walking the same sidewalk toward the same building; I had seen a picture of her on posters for the reading, so I introduced myself and asked how she was doing that morning. Terrible cold, she said, but she was kind to chat on the path to the event. Later, I recall her saying something to the effect that just because someone is a good writer doesn't mean they're a good human being. This seemed a strange thing for her to say, even in retrospect, given that Atwood is politically active and expects government leaders to be somewhat good people who make relatively good choices, but perhaps it was a warning to writers that they should beware of their idols, or perhaps a way to create a kind of opening for young writers who may feel imperfect and intimidated by the writing life. Or both. I would think of this in later years as I read about more evidence surfacing of T.S. Eliot's racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny...
[Margaret Atwood in the early 1980s]
What To Do After College?
When I finished the B.A., I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue studies in creative writing or pursue a doctorate in Religion and Literature. I was accepted into programs in R&L at three schools: Syracuse, the University of Chicago Divinity School, and the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Syracuse offered a full scholarship, but then I had second thoughts about whether I’d rather study other writer's work, or be a practitioner of the arts and seek an MFA.
To be or not to be? To study others’
Writing, or strive to fashion poems, stories?
To suffer slings, arrows of thesis advisors,
Or to court elusive muses?
I took a break to think about it, did some church work, eventually directing choirs and liturgy in Northfield, Minnesota (where we still live), and also participating in a liturgical music composer's forum that included Marty Haugen, David Haas, and the composer of "On Eagles' Wings," Rev. Jan Michael Joncas. (Edit: David Haas was later exposed as being involved in a sexual scandal, so while his music had been very popular in the U.S., many parishes banned his music.)
So I did church work, yes, in spite of having been somewhat radicalized by my Theology studies (more on that next week). My spouse and I were married around this time, and we played grad school leapfrog, first one, then the other seeking higher degrees.
MA to MFA
I started in an M.A. program at the Minnesota State University-Mankato with a thesis in Creative Nonfiction, but shortly after I graduated, they expanded the program to an MFA and gave recent graduates an opportunity to come back and upgrade to the MFA, with an additional thesis as an option along with more coursework. I wrote a new thesis in poetry. The faculty there was very good, and the visiting writers were also remarkable—poets like Tony Hoagland and Bruce Weigl, fiction writers like Tim O'Brien and Alison McGhee.
As an academic writing about Shakespeare, I may seem a little out of place with an MFA in Creative Writing instead of a Ph.D. in Shakespeare Studies or Early Modern Literature. I've done a lot of continuing research, but still, often interpret Shakespeare as a creative writer might—as a poet and as a person who has written at times in traditional forms and wrestled with how to write politically informed poems without sounding didactic.
The Way of the MFA
Unless people with MFAs publish a few books early, they often end up teaching Introductory English Composition courses as adjunct/lecturers in colleges and universities. So that the tenured faculty at some universities won’t have to teach introductory literature courses to non-majors, English departments sometimes let these adjunct lecturers teach one section of lit each semester. If a tenured professor doesn’t have squatting rights on all the creative writing courses, they sometimes let adjuncts teach intro creative writing sections.
This was the pattern of my life for about 21 years. It had its injustices and disadvantages, but introductory lit courses with non-majors can be wonderful.
Night Classes, Tag-Team Parenting
Some of my teaching years were spent teaching night classes after our two children were born so that we would not have to put them in day-care. My spouse had pregnancy leave and then went back to her tenured job teaching elementary school after our children were born, and I was the daytime dad-on-duty. We called it “tag-team parenting,” stealing an analogy from professional wrestling.
To be or not to be? Publish or perish?
Parent, or perish? Whether ‘tis nobler
To write and seek publication, trusting
One’s children to endure paid caregivers
In whose company they’d spend more waking
Hours than in the company of parents,
Or to take arms against a sea of diapers,
To love smells and coos of two wee babes?
You may note that after I chose the path of the MFA, by that time I'd had all sorts of wonderful experiences in the BA and MFA with good writing teachers and visiting writers.
What happened? You might ask: Why has he not published more poetry or fiction? This was a kind of "To be or not to be" moment for me: To be a dedicated writer or not? To be a dedicated parent or not? Our children were born about four years apart, and I got to be the at-home dad during the day, teaching at night. I could have neglected them to focus more on my writing, or I could have neglected writing and submissions to focus more on being a dedicated parent. I ended up writing some poems about parenting, but for the most part, wrote less and almost completely stopped submitting work for publication. So I fell in love with parenting, and eventually, with teaching literature.
Dean: Good Work
It was during these years that I usually taught a Shakespeare play in my literature sections, often Hamlet, influenced by a very positive experience with my own Shakespeare professor in college. The more I taught the plays, the more insights I stumbled upon, sparking new interest and research. My student evaluations from my university literature sections were stellar, and I received more than one letter of commendation from the dean for that as one indicator of good work.
"You Really Love What You Do"
One year I started off the first class of a section of literature by retelling the Grimm’s Brothers’ tale of Hansel & Gretel and then exploring it in terms of its details about gift exchanges, and how those seem to drive the story. At the end of the class, one young woman commented, “You really love what you do. It shows.” This was sweet to hear, but when I asked if it seemed her other teachers also seemed to love what they do, she said not so much. Sad news.
Captive Comp Audience
While my student evals for literature courses averaged in the high 90 percentiles, evals from composition students were often ind the low 90s or high 80s. Composition was a required course while literature was an elective, so that explains some of it. Literature was more fun to teach because the students were there because they chose to be, not because they were required to be. In college composition, many students who disliked writing essays in high school bring to the course all their under-developed writing habits and unresolved feelings about past English instructors. It can be a tough crowd, as comedians might say.
Adjunct-lecturers do some of the most difficult teaching for many of the largest sections of English courses. Some of the more enlightened universities have tenured professors teach a section of Composition each term, and others let adjunct/lecturers list online a course description for their section that includes texts for the course and the essays that will be written, allowing students to select a "flavor" of English composition that seems more suited to their unique tastes and interests. This can help, but still, many students choose a section based merely on schedule and convenience.
Teaching Torture
Some of my years teaching college composition were during the Iraq war and 2006 economic crisis, teaching at a university in a rural setting, and having students research climate change, or credit default swaps as one of the causes of the crisis, or international law and ratified US treaties outlawing torture.
Because many students were conservative sons and daughters of farmers, and since the sitting president (George W. Bush) was Republican, I designed the torture unit so that among politicians, we read only Republicans who disagreed, some supporting Bush and the CIA practices of "enhanced interrogation," and some against it. This raised significant questions and troubled some conservative students, to have to think about how the Republican party was so conflicted about torture, and who felt they should support the Bush administration and whatever harsh measures the CIA, military, and independent contractors were using, even torture, because we were at war. Some students considered soldiers who leaked photographs of tortured prisoners unpatriotic and treasonous, regardless of the constitution and ratified U.S. treaties against torture.
To be or not to be? Challenge students
Or plot an easy path? To question in
A nation’s darkest hours, or make the job
Easy money while Rome burns?
Some students loved these controversial topics even though the research pushed conservatives outside their normal ideological comfort zone; some said they changed their opinions on a number of issues because of the course. A few others complained to the department chair. Student evals indicated that this was a minority of students, but I was not tenure track; I was underpaid and taking more risks on essay topic options than some adjunct/lecturers would have thought advisable.
Course Design for Success
The department chair who had hired me was very supportive and appreciative in spite of occasional challenges and complaints that I seemed to be of the opinion that Muslim prisoners should not be tortured and that international law should be respected.
We sometimes commiserated about habitual writing errors that many students perhaps should have overcome (ideally) in high school or middle school; I thought about how to change the course to make it easier for students to succeed, and harder to leave the class without improving these typical poor writing habits.
One problem was the common errors in student writing that didn't seem to show any sign of improvement from composition 101 (basic writing) to composition 102 (research writing). Another was the problem that students often skipped assigned reading and came to class unprepared for discussion. What to do?
What I came up with
1. I changed the syllabus: students needed to show improvement on common errors and do well on reading quizzes. The quizzes would be short and simple, but if they wanted an A for the course, they needed to keep an A average in the quizzes, because except for dropping their 2 lowest quiz scores, their quiz average would be their course grade "cap." (This also resulted in students coming to class much more prepared with the assigned readings, ready for easy reading quizzes which they might have failed without doing the reading.)
2. I also let students have retakes on the common sentence error quizzes. They could retake these during my office hours, or I'd set up extra times to meet with them. They could also conference with me: I would explain which skills they seemed to have trouble with, and how they needed to change their habitual thinking to do better on the retake.
I never had so many appointments during my office hours in all of my teaching career, and came to know many more of my students more than in previous years. Students with habitual errors noticed that they were improving on the skills. It involved some extra work for me and for them, but it was very gratifying.
I explained on the syllabus that if a student objected to this arrangement of a grade cap from the quiz averages, we could make other arrangements. Only one student asked for special arrangements (out of hundreds).
How I knew it was working
I tried the new approach for two years. The next spring, I had been scheduled to teach sections of 101 (introductory college writing), but because of unforeseen circumstances, the department needed to change me to two sections of 102 (introductory research writing) that had been listed in the course catalog as taught by "Staff."
This meant that in 102, I would probably have a mix: some of my former students, plus some new students in the same sections.
It was an opportunity to see if my former students had retained any of the skills related to the common sentence error work we had done, compared to the students who didn't have me for 101. At the start of the term, the students took an ungraded quiz to find out how my former students compared at the start of 102 to those new students who had not had me for 101. (Ungraded in the sense that it would be scored, but their score would not apply to their course grade; in that sense it would be formative assessment, not summative.)
70 to 40 for the Win
The results were dramatic: Students who'd had me for 101 averaged 70% on the ungraded quiz, while students who hadn't averaged 40% on the quiz. I shared the results with the department chair, and also with the dean, who was impressed. I applied for and received a grant to continue to study and improve the course design.
All Good Things...
Then the chair who had hired me retired, and a new chair came in who said I had to stop using quiz averages as grade caps—in spite of support from the dean. This was a disappointment. I felt I was making a difference. Giving that up was hard.
I suppose I should look on the bright side: Having me stop using quiz averages as a grade cap resulted in less student traffic congestion in the English Department hallways.
To be, or not to be; to teach, or not?
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to endure
The whims and biases of rookie chair-men,
To stay and teach and make my teaching's
Excellence be its own sweet revenge,
Or to write the book—ay, there's the rub:
For in that writing what dreams may come
When we trust the paths our insights show
Might give us joy—there's a hope
To make a gratifying life.
Meanwhile, the more often I taught Shakespeare, the more I realized I had a book to write about biblical allusions in Hamlet—and perhaps that I needed to reduce my teaching load to get it done. For a variety of reasons, my wife and I were (somewhat unexpectedly) in a financial situation that enabled me to limit my teaching hours and do more writing.
Debt to Rob
My greatest debt for my interest in biblical influences in Shakespeare I owe to Rob Foy, my college Shakespeare professor, who I kept in touch with after college until his death a few years ago. We often went out for lunch and talked about literature, especially Shakespeare, and he would share with me his ideas about echoes of the biblical King David tales in the history plays, and I would share hunches about biblical influences in Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, and others.
What the Life Says
So it may seem my path has not prepared me to interpret Hamlet or to have much worth sharing, lacking a Ph.D. from a Shakespeare Studies program. But in other ways, my life has prepared me as well as my independent research.
NEXT WEEK
Next week I’ll write a blog post about how my theology studies changed my thinking, and how the resulting ideas inform some of my interpretations of Shakespeare.
This is the first in a four-part series of blog posts, “Who am I to interpret Hamlet?”
June 16, 2019: To be or not? (Part 1: English Studies & Teaching)
June 23: How Literally Did Shakespeare Take the Bible? (Part 2: Religious Studies & Assumptions)
July 30: Reading Hamlet through personal & national traumas (Part 3: Lies & PTSD)
August 6: Hamlet, PTSD & Entitlement (Part 4)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The first sentence in Hamlet is a question that Bernardo asks Francisco:
Who’s there?
Bernardo is speaking out of turn because he has not yet replaced Francisco at his post, so Francisco quickly corrects him:
Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.
My college Shakespeare instructor (like many others) noted that perhaps the audience should feel the question is directed at all of us as well: Who are we, reading or viewing this play?
And who am I to have a blog about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet and other various thoughts about Shakespeare? Here's a bit about me, in four parts. Part one:
BA
In college, I majored in English and Theology and studied classical guitar (as well as other styles). My Shakespeare professor was C. Robert Foy (Rob, d.2013), a generous and brilliant instructor who got me interested in biblical allusions and plot echoes in the plays.
[Rob Foy]
Writing poetry, fiction, and a play also occupied my time in college and a great deal of my attention and passion:
I studied poetry writing (and American Literature) with Lon Otto
[Lon Otto,]
and poetry and fiction with Jonis Agee, now at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where the literary journal, Prairie Schooner, is based.
[Jonis Agee]
John Orlock (now at Case Western Reserve U in Ohio) was my instructor for a memorable class in playwriting.
[John Orlock]
John's major assignment for the course was to have us choose a non-traditional theater space (mine was the hall by the window of the campus post office, after hours); choose a cast; and write a play with the space and cast in mind. This experience later made me reflect on how Shakespeare wrote his plays with London and his company of actors in mind (in spite of his having written many plays set in distant lands).
Serving as editor of the college literary magazine in my senior year, and previously as assistant editor in my junior year, were rich experiences. I also won some prizes for my writing, including a first prize from the Journal for Christianity in Literature, and a number of Dean's Prizes. One of my instructors later joked that I seemed to have set a record for the number of times winning the Dean’s award in creative writing. (Others have probably broken the record since then, I hope.)
I had an advantage of time: late in my second year, my grandmother died and I came down with a bad case of mononucleosis that forced me to drop a few classes, including Shakespeare with Rob Foy (which I took again later). I had not yet decided on a major but was considering social work or teaching, so I signed up for two work-study projects, one as a houseparent-counselor in a group home for girls with drug, incest and prostitution history, and another teaching poetry and creative writing in a senior transitional home (for seniors not yet ready for a nursing home).
To be or not to be? Social worker or teacher?
Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows
Of oppression and tend its wounded victims?
Or to sail waters of curiosity and wonder,
and take up arms against ignorance?
These house-parent and teaching internships were rich and challenging experiences, but they delayed my finishing the coursework and stretched my time in college, giving me an advantage of time and perhaps experience when it came to submitting work for the Dean's Prize.
I was lucky that my poetry instructors were open to experimentation in traditional forms that included Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets. This gave me an appreciation for Shakespeare's poetry and the poetic language in the plays. It may be hard to write a formal, rhymed sonnet in iambic pentameter on one's first attempt at such poems, but the more one does it, the more one starts to think in the ways that the form seems to demand. If one has never written a formal rhymed sonnet, one might think people of Shakespeare's time were doing a great deal of hard work in sonnet writing. Well, sort of. But it looks much harder from the outside; perhaps not so hard if one lives in a culture that reads and writes a lot of sonnets, or if one is a writer who does it frequently.
Visiting Writers
My college was in a consortium of five colleges that included Macalester, Hamline, Augsburg, St. Catherine’s and St. Thomas, and together, their creative writing programs sponsored a number of visiting writers that included Margaret Atwood (The Handmaiden's Tale, Negotiating with the Dead, and many other excellent works);
Donald Justice (the year he won the Pulitzer, 1980. He was not an admirer of experimental poetic forms, but that would describe the writing sample he received from me by chance as selected by my writing adviser);
Lisel Mueller (the year she won the National Book Award in poetry, 1981);
and Heather McHugh
[Heather McHugh]
(I remember her excellent poem, “Blue Streak,” was on the poster).
Atwood Had a Cold the Day We Met
Meeting these writers and hearing them read their work was life-changing, especially with Margaret Atwood, who pulled no punches about shortcomings she found in student writing, but who also singled out a poem by a young woman who was a classmate of mine, as well as my own poem, for high praise.
At the reading she gave, among other things, she read an intriguing piece about a woman who married an executioner, because it was her only way to be spared herself from execution, a work that Atwood wrote long before The Handmaiden's Tale. (This suggests how meeting, reading and hearing Margaret Atwood may have helped me notice political and patriarchal oppression in Shakespeare.)
When I arrived at Hamline University for her reading, she was walking the same sidewalk toward the same building; I had seen a picture of her on posters for the reading, so I introduced myself and asked how she was doing that morning. Terrible cold, she said, but she was kind to chat on the path to the event. Later, I recall her saying something to the effect that just because someone is a good writer doesn't mean they're a good human being. This seemed a strange thing for her to say, even in retrospect, given that Atwood is politically active and expects government leaders to be somewhat good people who make relatively good choices, but perhaps it was a warning to writers that they should beware of their idols, or perhaps a way to create a kind of opening for young writers who may feel imperfect and intimidated by the writing life. Or both. I would think of this in later years as I read about more evidence surfacing of T.S. Eliot's racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny...
[Margaret Atwood in the early 1980s]
What To Do After College?
When I finished the B.A., I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue studies in creative writing or pursue a doctorate in Religion and Literature. I was accepted into programs in R&L at three schools: Syracuse, the University of Chicago Divinity School, and the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Syracuse offered a full scholarship, but then I had second thoughts about whether I’d rather study other writer's work, or be a practitioner of the arts and seek an MFA.
To be or not to be? To study others’
Writing, or strive to fashion poems, stories?
To suffer slings, arrows of thesis advisors,
Or to court elusive muses?
I took a break to think about it, did some church work, eventually directing choirs and liturgy in Northfield, Minnesota (where we still live), and also participating in a liturgical music composer's forum that included Marty Haugen, David Haas, and the composer of "On Eagles' Wings," Rev. Jan Michael Joncas. (Edit: David Haas was later exposed as being involved in a sexual scandal, so while his music had been very popular in the U.S., many parishes banned his music.)
So I did church work, yes, in spite of having been somewhat radicalized by my Theology studies (more on that next week). My spouse and I were married around this time, and we played grad school leapfrog, first one, then the other seeking higher degrees.
MA to MFA
I started in an M.A. program at the Minnesota State University-Mankato with a thesis in Creative Nonfiction, but shortly after I graduated, they expanded the program to an MFA and gave recent graduates an opportunity to come back and upgrade to the MFA, with an additional thesis as an option along with more coursework. I wrote a new thesis in poetry. The faculty there was very good, and the visiting writers were also remarkable—poets like Tony Hoagland and Bruce Weigl, fiction writers like Tim O'Brien and Alison McGhee.
As an academic writing about Shakespeare, I may seem a little out of place with an MFA in Creative Writing instead of a Ph.D. in Shakespeare Studies or Early Modern Literature. I've done a lot of continuing research, but still, often interpret Shakespeare as a creative writer might—as a poet and as a person who has written at times in traditional forms and wrestled with how to write politically informed poems without sounding didactic.
The Way of the MFA
Unless people with MFAs publish a few books early, they often end up teaching Introductory English Composition courses as adjunct/lecturers in colleges and universities. So that the tenured faculty at some universities won’t have to teach introductory literature courses to non-majors, English departments sometimes let these adjunct lecturers teach one section of lit each semester. If a tenured professor doesn’t have squatting rights on all the creative writing courses, they sometimes let adjuncts teach intro creative writing sections.
This was the pattern of my life for about 21 years. It had its injustices and disadvantages, but introductory lit courses with non-majors can be wonderful.
Night Classes, Tag-Team Parenting
Some of my teaching years were spent teaching night classes after our two children were born so that we would not have to put them in day-care. My spouse had pregnancy leave and then went back to her tenured job teaching elementary school after our children were born, and I was the daytime dad-on-duty. We called it “tag-team parenting,” stealing an analogy from professional wrestling.
To be or not to be? Publish or perish?
Parent, or perish? Whether ‘tis nobler
To write and seek publication, trusting
One’s children to endure paid caregivers
In whose company they’d spend more waking
Hours than in the company of parents,
Or to take arms against a sea of diapers,
To love smells and coos of two wee babes?
You may note that after I chose the path of the MFA, by that time I'd had all sorts of wonderful experiences in the BA and MFA with good writing teachers and visiting writers.
What happened? You might ask: Why has he not published more poetry or fiction? This was a kind of "To be or not to be" moment for me: To be a dedicated writer or not? To be a dedicated parent or not? Our children were born about four years apart, and I got to be the at-home dad during the day, teaching at night. I could have neglected them to focus more on my writing, or I could have neglected writing and submissions to focus more on being a dedicated parent. I ended up writing some poems about parenting, but for the most part, wrote less and almost completely stopped submitting work for publication. So I fell in love with parenting, and eventually, with teaching literature.
Dean: Good Work
It was during these years that I usually taught a Shakespeare play in my literature sections, often Hamlet, influenced by a very positive experience with my own Shakespeare professor in college. The more I taught the plays, the more insights I stumbled upon, sparking new interest and research. My student evaluations from my university literature sections were stellar, and I received more than one letter of commendation from the dean for that as one indicator of good work.
"You Really Love What You Do"
One year I started off the first class of a section of literature by retelling the Grimm’s Brothers’ tale of Hansel & Gretel and then exploring it in terms of its details about gift exchanges, and how those seem to drive the story. At the end of the class, one young woman commented, “You really love what you do. It shows.” This was sweet to hear, but when I asked if it seemed her other teachers also seemed to love what they do, she said not so much. Sad news.
Captive Comp Audience
While my student evals for literature courses averaged in the high 90 percentiles, evals from composition students were often ind the low 90s or high 80s. Composition was a required course while literature was an elective, so that explains some of it. Literature was more fun to teach because the students were there because they chose to be, not because they were required to be. In college composition, many students who disliked writing essays in high school bring to the course all their under-developed writing habits and unresolved feelings about past English instructors. It can be a tough crowd, as comedians might say.
Adjunct-lecturers do some of the most difficult teaching for many of the largest sections of English courses. Some of the more enlightened universities have tenured professors teach a section of Composition each term, and others let adjunct/lecturers list online a course description for their section that includes texts for the course and the essays that will be written, allowing students to select a "flavor" of English composition that seems more suited to their unique tastes and interests. This can help, but still, many students choose a section based merely on schedule and convenience.
Teaching Torture
Some of my years teaching college composition were during the Iraq war and 2006 economic crisis, teaching at a university in a rural setting, and having students research climate change, or credit default swaps as one of the causes of the crisis, or international law and ratified US treaties outlawing torture.
Because many students were conservative sons and daughters of farmers, and since the sitting president (George W. Bush) was Republican, I designed the torture unit so that among politicians, we read only Republicans who disagreed, some supporting Bush and the CIA practices of "enhanced interrogation," and some against it. This raised significant questions and troubled some conservative students, to have to think about how the Republican party was so conflicted about torture, and who felt they should support the Bush administration and whatever harsh measures the CIA, military, and independent contractors were using, even torture, because we were at war. Some students considered soldiers who leaked photographs of tortured prisoners unpatriotic and treasonous, regardless of the constitution and ratified U.S. treaties against torture.
To be or not to be? Challenge students
Or plot an easy path? To question in
A nation’s darkest hours, or make the job
Easy money while Rome burns?
Some students loved these controversial topics even though the research pushed conservatives outside their normal ideological comfort zone; some said they changed their opinions on a number of issues because of the course. A few others complained to the department chair. Student evals indicated that this was a minority of students, but I was not tenure track; I was underpaid and taking more risks on essay topic options than some adjunct/lecturers would have thought advisable.
Course Design for Success
The department chair who had hired me was very supportive and appreciative in spite of occasional challenges and complaints that I seemed to be of the opinion that Muslim prisoners should not be tortured and that international law should be respected.
We sometimes commiserated about habitual writing errors that many students perhaps should have overcome (ideally) in high school or middle school; I thought about how to change the course to make it easier for students to succeed, and harder to leave the class without improving these typical poor writing habits.
One problem was the common errors in student writing that didn't seem to show any sign of improvement from composition 101 (basic writing) to composition 102 (research writing). Another was the problem that students often skipped assigned reading and came to class unprepared for discussion. What to do?
What I came up with
1. I changed the syllabus: students needed to show improvement on common errors and do well on reading quizzes. The quizzes would be short and simple, but if they wanted an A for the course, they needed to keep an A average in the quizzes, because except for dropping their 2 lowest quiz scores, their quiz average would be their course grade "cap." (This also resulted in students coming to class much more prepared with the assigned readings, ready for easy reading quizzes which they might have failed without doing the reading.)
2. I also let students have retakes on the common sentence error quizzes. They could retake these during my office hours, or I'd set up extra times to meet with them. They could also conference with me: I would explain which skills they seemed to have trouble with, and how they needed to change their habitual thinking to do better on the retake.
I never had so many appointments during my office hours in all of my teaching career, and came to know many more of my students more than in previous years. Students with habitual errors noticed that they were improving on the skills. It involved some extra work for me and for them, but it was very gratifying.
I explained on the syllabus that if a student objected to this arrangement of a grade cap from the quiz averages, we could make other arrangements. Only one student asked for special arrangements (out of hundreds).
How I knew it was working
I tried the new approach for two years. The next spring, I had been scheduled to teach sections of 101 (introductory college writing), but because of unforeseen circumstances, the department needed to change me to two sections of 102 (introductory research writing) that had been listed in the course catalog as taught by "Staff."
This meant that in 102, I would probably have a mix: some of my former students, plus some new students in the same sections.
It was an opportunity to see if my former students had retained any of the skills related to the common sentence error work we had done, compared to the students who didn't have me for 101. At the start of the term, the students took an ungraded quiz to find out how my former students compared at the start of 102 to those new students who had not had me for 101. (Ungraded in the sense that it would be scored, but their score would not apply to their course grade; in that sense it would be formative assessment, not summative.)
70 to 40 for the Win
The results were dramatic: Students who'd had me for 101 averaged 70% on the ungraded quiz, while students who hadn't averaged 40% on the quiz. I shared the results with the department chair, and also with the dean, who was impressed. I applied for and received a grant to continue to study and improve the course design.
All Good Things...
Then the chair who had hired me retired, and a new chair came in who said I had to stop using quiz averages as grade caps—in spite of support from the dean. This was a disappointment. I felt I was making a difference. Giving that up was hard.
I suppose I should look on the bright side: Having me stop using quiz averages as a grade cap resulted in less student traffic congestion in the English Department hallways.
To be, or not to be; to teach, or not?
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to endure
The whims and biases of rookie chair-men,
To stay and teach and make my teaching's
Excellence be its own sweet revenge,
Or to write the book—ay, there's the rub:
For in that writing what dreams may come
When we trust the paths our insights show
Might give us joy—there's a hope
To make a gratifying life.
Meanwhile, the more often I taught Shakespeare, the more I realized I had a book to write about biblical allusions in Hamlet—and perhaps that I needed to reduce my teaching load to get it done. For a variety of reasons, my wife and I were (somewhat unexpectedly) in a financial situation that enabled me to limit my teaching hours and do more writing.
Debt to Rob
My greatest debt for my interest in biblical influences in Shakespeare I owe to Rob Foy, my college Shakespeare professor, who I kept in touch with after college until his death a few years ago. We often went out for lunch and talked about literature, especially Shakespeare, and he would share with me his ideas about echoes of the biblical King David tales in the history plays, and I would share hunches about biblical influences in Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, and others.
What the Life Says
So it may seem my path has not prepared me to interpret Hamlet or to have much worth sharing, lacking a Ph.D. from a Shakespeare Studies program. But in other ways, my life has prepared me as well as my independent research.
NEXT WEEK
Next week I’ll write a blog post about how my theology studies changed my thinking, and how the resulting ideas inform some of my interpretations of Shakespeare.
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