Apparently the semester is over

I've started many a blog post in the last few weeks, only to discard it, dissatisfied. I'm in a bit of a strange lull lately, despite having the usual gigantic heap of work on my hands. I submitted an essay relatively recently, but not the essay, and I'm on the fence about how deeply to revise the essay right now (versus after I hand it to some readers). Common sense tells me to cobble together something remotely worthy of a response and send it out for feedback, because I've been staring at the thing for too long. Reading the essay tells me to scrap the whole thing, go vegan for three weeks, maybe seek enlightenment, and then try again.

I'm hoping for some middle ground, since abandoning cheese just isn't going to happen.

I've meant to do some critical reflecting on the course I most recently taught, Didactic Modernism. I've actually written pages on the subject (scrapped). Partly those pages veered into reminiscences about books I've read, courses I've taken, things I wish I knew.

How you never really know what your students are thinking. How you, as a student, often only find out what you're thinking after the lapse of years. As a teacher, likewise.

How strange course evaluations are. How Alan Jacobs argues that course evaluations should be given at least a semester after the course has ended. How a student said that my expectations for the final exam made me "as pompous as Ezra Pound." How I chose to read this as evidence of the student's having learned that Ezra Pound expects you to know a lot, which is true. Also that Ezra Pound could be pretty pompous. Also true.

How another student said that Berkeley should give me tenure. How this saddened me for a variety of reasons.

In short, I seem to be too near to it still to do anything but ramble.

The essence of it is that it seems difficult to separate one's teaching methods from one's memories of being a student, even when you remember that you were by definition an atypical student. And I can't kick the belief that what makes a course a great learning experience is incredibly arbitrary and contingent. It is the lot of an English major to sit through many sub-par discussions. The trade off is that you've read Moby-Dick, and carefully. You forget the one, and remember the other, and return to it for the rest of your life.

How do you create the conditions for that? Well, you assign Moby-Dick, for one thing. But of course there's more to it. But what is that more, and for whom?

I was the kind of student who responded well to being set tasks. Given something hard to do, I rose to the occasion. I was a nerd; that's how I ended up in grad school! This is clearly not the case for all students. I've heard many students say that as soon as something is an assignment, they don't want to do it; it sucks out all their creativity and they stop trying. Also that if something isn't required, they won't do it.

This may be the first semester I've given an extra credit option. The option, in this case, was to do something slightly more onerous than a standard course blog post, in order to make up for missed blog posts of past weeks. Here was an interesting scenario. You couldn't lose credit, but you could gain it. There was no penalty for trying. (There is, some might point out, never any penalty for trying, insofar as getting no credit is always worse than getting a low grade. This seems to be beside the point when it comes to the psychology of grades.) Several students decided to do extra credit. Some really really needed it; some only sort of needed it. One asked if she could do it when she did not need it. There were easier and more difficult ways to do this extra credit, and some chose more difficult ways.

How can you rig a course so that it all seems like extra credit? Would it even be wise?

I once memorized "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" "for" a course, while studying for the final. The course was a pretext; I memorized it for the poem.

You never know when your students are doing that, or doing something like it for a different class--not that you necessarily want to know.

The pedagogical uses of grading continue to puzzle me. Clearly it functions differently for different people. In some ways it's a form of gamification, which some people find motivating and others find stressful and demoralizing. Grades certainly confuse the issue of learning.

These are, of course, questions I've been pondering precisely because my students this semester were so very excellent. It so clearly wasn't all about carrots and sticks for most of them. So then--what? Did I already do my bit by assigning Gertrude Stein? Will my students remember Tender Buttons forever?

On these matters my course evaluations are silent.

Welcome to fall

This is the first semester in a long time that I'm on fellowship. Not having had it for a long time makes me very much appreciate the luxury of full-time research (in! an! office!).

I'm just the slightest bit sad that I'm not teaching, though; it's the beginning of fall semester, which is pretty much my favorite time of year, and though I live in the right part of town to have the White Noise moment every year, the line of minivans and the rolling Tupperware drawers on the sidewalk don't give me remotely the same feeling of ennui.* I love it when the new students arrive (although I wish they wouldn't be quite so loud at night). I love overhearing them as they wander around campus and marvel at Berkeley, freedom, dorm food, and the mysteries of the registrar's office (of which there are many).

Done right, college is an amazing thing. You can take classes in subjects you didn't even know existed, make friends with people you couldn't have encountered before. It's the intellectual big time, and scary smart people are dropping scary smart books on you and expecting you to have read them by next Thursday.

First-years are a particular delight, because it's all so new to them. Granted, this involves a certain degree of clue-lacking, sometimes a maddening degree. (The library is. Right. There.) But they're also still new enough at this college thing not to feel like they have to fake a cool sophistication, or to be really bad at it if they do feel that way. I'm sorry to be missing my own little slice of this year's first-years--something I'm used to getting in the fall from teaching composition. They're often amazingly creative and delighted to encounter new things.

Maybe I'm nostalgic because, planning this trip east, I've been in touch with several of my own college friends. I still have fond memories of a whole pack of us first-years heading to physics first thing in the morning, through the snow, usually after a perfectly repulsive dorm breakfast. (It was in college that I learned the true value of toast.) Back then I was allowed to take physics! Imagine that. I took math, too, lots of it. I took history. I read Foucault for the first time. It was great.

I think a lot of people my age are a little nostalgic for that period of life, when you're old enough to know something but young enough to be allowed to not know things--when you're, like Queequeg, an undergraduate. I was always the kind of student who was excited to get back to school, and seeing the new students always reminds me of that particular state of openness and possibility.

By calling it nostalgia I'm already putting the memories in scare quotes, of course. There are things I really don't miss about that period of my life, and I sometimes see those things (exaggeratedly, perhaps?) in my own students. Many of the women won't speak up in class, for instance.

I remember when I realized, to my very great surprise, that I always framed objections as questions. It would go something like this:

Me: "I'm not sure I understand your what you're saying, especially as it relates to this thing on page X. I'm probably just being slow. Could you explain it further to me?"

Translation: "The passage on page X says the exact opposite of the account you just gave of it. Did you even do the reading?"

I didn't even realize I was doing this, let alone take it into my head to stop, until my fourth year of college. I could vote before I could undisguisedly argue with a classmate! It was absolutely unconscious, automatic. I had to train myself out of it; it took a few years.

On the whole, I'm glad I'm out of that phase. Still, college was a particularly delicious kind of difficulty. I hope our students find that, too. Autumn is my favorite season, noise and all.




*Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985):

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags, with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags -- onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

I've witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years.

Once again, I should reiterate that I don't play piano and never have.

But at some point in high school I borrowed one of my mother's music books and learned to more or less plunk out Beethoven's "Für Elise," that old standby of piano pedagogy. (I was significantly less good at it than this seven-year-old.) I was pretty terrible at reading music for two hands then (I still am, but less so now) and, then as now, had no piano technique.

I've recently been trying to remember how to play it. Katherine doesn't seem to have the music in her house, and I don't want to play it so badly as to track it down in the music library. Instead I've been trying to remember, and it has been a lesson in the strangeness of memory.

So far all I can remember is the opening sequence and a little bit of the B section. I remember how the rest of it sounds, but not how to play it. I started with nothing; I couldn't remember a thing except for where to place my right hand for the first note. Slowly it comes back.

I don't at all remember how the music looks on the page; consequently I can't reconstruct any of the fingerings logically.

I also have no visual memory of where the right hand goes; it is necessary that I not look at my right hand. That memory is in the muscles.

Conversely, I must look at the left hand. The left hand does some hopping around, and when I learned the piece I didn't have the technique to memorize that kind of motion. I always looked at the left hand when I learned the piece, and I must look at the left hand to remember.

It's funny, because I didn't remember what my left hand was supposed to look like at first. I started to remember by making some jabs at the keyboard and listening, trying to remember the right sound and the right movements and, finally, the right visual cues. It's the visual cues that make playing the left hand a sure thing.

It's different with the right hand. Staring at it does nothing (and anyway I couldn't play the left-handed part while looking at my right hand). Sometimes I make a lot of mistakes and sometimes I don't. There's nothing solid for me to rely on to prevent mistakes. If there's music in front of me I can remind myself to be sure to play that accidental, or concentrate on the sequence I'm about to play. Without music, without any visual sense of where my fingers are supposed to go, I can only prevent mistakes one way: suspending intention and dwelling in a physical memory. I have to trust my frankly unreliable fingers to remember on my behalf.

What else do my fingers know that I don't? I ask this by touch-typing on a computer keyboard, of course.

Like many people, I had some formal musical training (violin) when I was pretty young and left off serious study about mid-college. I don't consider myself a musician.

Now I find myself with sudden access to a piano. I do not play piano; I never have. I have, however, tried to pick out music on pianos many times. It's the sort of thing I find irresistible: there is the music, there is the keyboard. See what you can realize just by taking a stab at it.

It's startling to me to notice what is and is not difficult about it to me now, in contrast to earlier periods in my life. Reading bass clef seems more natural than it once did. Reading two lines together seems easier. It seems less necessary to look at the keyboard than it once did. On the other hand, I'm far more aware of my lack of fingering technique, and the limitations it imposes, than before. And I can feel the effects of typing a dissertation in my hands.

It seems the relationship between my brain and my hands has changed without my noticing. Hello, my fingers; we meet again.