My Marcuse Break

I find myself blessing Herbert Marcuse. After five weeks of Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Lukacs, we're finally reading a book whose Germanic style doesn't require minutes per page and whose words mean, for the most part, what they mean in other books. I'm flying through this stuff.

Beowulf is never going to cruise along, but the translation is getting less tedious by the week as I internalize more vocabulary. Besides that, reading about flesh-eating man-monsters makes just about any translation worth the time.

I've decided that when I find some time cleared out, I'm going to write a Saul book. Samson has his famous Miltonic tragedy, and Jesus has Milton and Kazantzakis, and Moses has movies, and David has sculptures. What of Saul? (No, not the one who later goes by Paul.) Certainly he's as much a tragic thug as Samson, and certainly his stories would translate to the big screen as well as Moses's. This might not happen in any real way before I finish grad school, and it might never see the fluorescent light of a bookstore, but I'm still going to write a Saul book. I don't know whether it'll be a play or a novel or a poem (I've never written a play or a novel, and all my poetry has been brief and lyric), and it might not be any good, but one of these days, I'm going to write me a Saul book.

(BTW, if any of my readers know of any Saul book that's already been done, let me know in the comments section.)

Classes went well this week. As with last spring's classes, this group hit its stride with the David narratives. 1 and 2 Samuel are the perfect places, IMO, to bring agnostics and Jews and Christians together for good conversations. The stories resist theological reduction, so the Christians have to stay on their toes, yet YHWH comes in not as a boring philosophical concept but as a fiery and unpredictable and genuinely good character, so the agnostics don't have much impetus to back away. This week we spent one lesson on the rise of David's fame in Israel, one on the witch of Endor scene, and one on David's coronation and royal career. Monday we'll take on David and Bathsheba, the second-most-familiar David story and also the one whose conclusion, which features what either comes across as David's unflappable piety or inexcusable callousness. Then we'll get to Absalom, where the real fun happens.

I love teaching David.

Grading paper 2 has come along smoothly. For the most part the papers have been good, competent college papers, and I'm looking forward to teaching fine-tuning rather than basic organizational skills.

The cantata approaches, and semester papers loom, and Micah turns two in less than two weeks. Hwaet!

Recent Micah pics

With Micah's birthday coming up and Uncle Ryan flying down, I cleared our camera's memory card. Here are a couple recent pics.

Third Post Down

It's funny. I don't care who you are.

Link

My current draft of my teaching philosophy

At UGA this semester I'm in the process of putting together a university-approved teaching portfolio, and one element of that portfolio is a teaching philosophy. Here's my current workup of that philosophy, and I hope my faithful readers can give me some feedback.

Teaching Philosophy

An unstated conception of teaching and learning is one beyond critique; thus for the sake of humility, I begin by agreeing with Wittgenstein when he writes, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus 5.6). Before one goes about changing one’s world, one ought to understand the shape and character of that world, and every subject’s interaction with objects happens through and with and in response to words and ideas and debates and traditions. Whatever else happens when a college professor teaches college students, the class’s vocabulary should grow, not only in words but also in concepts and categories. As an apprentice chemist learns the notations and categories that make up the chemist’s discourse through study and experiment, so a student of literature learns both the terminology with which the scholarly community converses and studies with a more experienced practitioner texts and other artifacts that the teacher decides might be worth studying. Both practices expand and refine vocabularies, hopefully to the end of shaping human beings as self-conscious and world-conscious intellectuals.

As vocabularies expand, practical disciplines anchor intellectual pursuits in embodied communities, a key for the humble appreciation of the discipline. My classroom is not a time and a space simply for lecturing and note-taking but also for moral formation, the kind of thing that happens when a coach teaches a player how to excel within the rules of basketball or when a practicing scientist mentors a laboratory assistant in the ways that the scientific community lives a scientific life. With English in particular moral learning must necessarily involve honesty at the level of research and composition but also extends to the ways in which a community asks difficult questions together, the practice of kindness as well as suspicion in reading texts, and diligence in adjusting one’s self and one’s vocabularies to the inquiry at hand. When I evaluate and grade a paper, my purpose is not primarily to communicate to graduate schools a student’s talent abstracted from the aims of the class but to let the student know where the next step towards competence lies. When we read texts together my aim is not merely to “problematize” conventional wisdom but to model and to develop those aptitudes that allow one to live well alongside and within complex situations (including those most complex of entities, human communities). Every incoming college class is in some sense a chosen class, those young people with the drive and ability to effect change for good. My classes always attempt to make small steps towards developing that class.

When a student leaves my classroom, I have contributed three months’ instruction to a life that spans at least seventeen years and often longer. Thus humility ought to inform my goals for students. In one semester a student in my English class ought to have a stronger grasp of critical and conceptual vocabularies relevant to the texts at hand. She should have practiced, at least for the span of one major project, those virtues proper to a truthful and diligent researcher and synthesizer of the scholarship available. Depending on the sort of class, he also should have at least a working familiarity with the spectrum of approaches that might lead to a good life in a world made more complex and some apparatus for evaluating those approaches. If the student reaches those things, then the person leaving my class will have partaken in the humanities, those disciplines that bring consciousness and ethics and imagination together for the good of a larger community.

Into David

A busy week it's been.

I presented on Georg Lukacs in our literary theory class and by all accounts did well.

I translated another 150 lines of Beowulf.

I read another book-and-a-half of Milton criticism.

I took Micah to a doctor's appointment and our Matrix for its 15K mile service.

And I started grading another batch of freshman papers.

And that's outside of teaching my class. The last two days we started tackling biblical narratives in some more detail, doing Ruth on Wednesday and David and Goliath today. On both days I relied too heavily on the students' agendas. I think for the next week I'm going to set (for the most part) each discussion's subject matter and try to be open to the students' taking the class away from me. I really ought to spend more time helping them close-read and showing them where paper topics naturally arise out of each narrative, but the last couple days I've been improvising with poor results. I'm not sure it's apathy so much as shell-shock; they seem to be looking for the "right" things to talk about, whereas I just want to talk intellectually about something.

Monday I've got the post-Goliath, pre-Philistine-mercenary stories, so there ought to be plenty of material there. Besides that I've got to work in some writing instruction. There's just not enough time in a semester...

Sorry

I realize the chart below is hard to read, but it also gets mad and crashes my browser when I try to edit it, so I'm going to learn my lesson about grumpy html and leave it alone.

Last Ten Posters

I saw it on Slim's blog, and it looked cool, so here are the locations of my blog's last ten visitors:

1		United States	Kalamazoo, Michigan
2		United States	Orange, California
3		United States	Amf Ohare, Illinois
4		United States	Conyers, Georgia
5		Germany	Berlin
6		United States	Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania
7		United States	Kingsport, Tennessee
8		United States	Somerville, Massachusetts
9		United States	Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania
10		United States	Orange, California

Okay, I have to say it

GO COLTS!

More Revisions

So here I am, between revision meetings, scrambling to say something to each paper as it comes to me. I've got six more groups to go (I think), and each one wears me down a bit more. As I say every semester, the value of these meetings, both as exemplary for the practice of group revision and as feedback into my students' writing, is valuable enough that I'm willing to kill myself once a semester to do it. But I can't even fathom how some of my colleagues read preliminary drafts of every paper.

We've moved on from Hegel to Marx in Cole's class, and the readability difference is massive. I'm cooking through The German Ideology where I crawled through Phenomenology of Spirit and even Philosophy of History. I know that once we get into twentieth-century literary theory the readability is likely to depart again, so I'm not going to get used to it.

The David unit is coming up, and I still haven't written any quizzes. Perhaps this afternoon.

Revision Meetings, Day One

So far none of my students has fought me when I suggested rewriting.

Audrey Guenther, are you reading this? :)

Monday groups pick up a bit, and the whole shebang culminates on Wednesday, when I meet with four groups, then finishes out with two meetings on Friday.

I need to write some David quizzes before that unit starts up--that's when and where a goodly (badly, really) number of students will stop reading the daily assignments. It's a long semester; it happens.

Not much time for bloggery lately

This semester really is turning out to be a grinder. But if I make it through this one, I'm done with major coursework operations. Mission Accomplished, one might say.

Well, one might.

The Psalms unit just plain went too fast. I'm glad that I spread out the revision days over more than a week (I tried doing them all in a week before and nearly killed myself), but three class periods just wasn't enough time really to talk about more than a couple poems a day. I hope that the paper-writing itself proves to be helpful to my students.

I'm about a third of the way through grading paper 1, and the quality of the prose on the whole is pretty good. They're muddling their conceptual agents and their grammatical subjects, and their conceptual actions and relationships often don't land where the grammatical main verb is, but that's why we teach writing, and I'm confident I can help them do that bit better.

We finished our discussions of Hegel texts last night and move on to Marx next week. Three hours make a long class. Three hours of literary theory make one tired. Three hours of Hegel at night makes one quite tired indeed.

And I've got Beowulf done for the week and have next week's text printed out and ready to translate. Hwaet!