Teaching Series: Syllabus 200
It strikes me as odd that I’ve not talked about teaching yet. I do not think of teaching as the thing that interrupts my writing. Instead, I understand it as a practical arm of the research, a way to bring my thoughts to a small audience. In the next few weeks, I’ll write about how I blend my teaching with my writing.
Last week, I talked about the structure of the syllabus, specifically how to create some ease for yourself. Here’s a truism I’ve learned: the battle for your time is won or lost at the level of the syllabus. All the assignments. All the readings. This is as true for the students’ time and learning as it is for my writing and sanity.
I think the question of assignments is fairly clear in that when you assign less, you mark/grade less. I appreciate my undergraduate education for forcing me to accept that attending class was crucial to learning. I had to learn how to ask good questions and explain the difference between what I gleaned from the reading and what the professor was saying. (This was sometimes welcome and sometimes not. I learned regardless.) I keep that principle in my own teaching: the bulk of the hard work is doing inside the classroom where we clear up misconceptions, answer questions, and learn new ways of thinking. Putting pressure on the classroom – since I have to be there anyway – allows me to take the pressure off of their reading (they don’t have to “get” everything) and my preparation (I rely on their questions to run the class).
I also credit my formal education for priming me to think about two major assignments: a short paper and a long paper. This isn’t particularly creative pedagogy. But, it is the steady hewing of the mind through discussion and writing. The short paper lets students experiment with articulating their ideas: moving from summary to explication, pushing away some writing habits that do not serve them. The longer paper grants them the opportunity to create and sustain an argument. I don’t assign papers because one day a supervisor is going to demand 10 pages on African American speculative fiction. I assign papers because having an informed opinion and being able to substantiate it is a crucial part of living in the world. Also, it need be said that I enjoy reading student papers, so I give them assignments I like. This is another way I create ease for myself in the structure.
Let me double back for a moment. I want to talk about what I assign for reading. I always assign material about which I’m writing. This semester, I am writing about Waiting to Exhale. That is on my syllabus. This semester, I am thinking about creative non-fiction, so I keep asking them to tell me about scenes, mood, and narration. I am also thinking about poetry, so I assigned some poems I’d like to revisit like Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville. I not only save myself some time, but I also crowd my mind with the concepts that I know I want to consider. In that way, none of the work in class feels extra to me. It all aligns with what I want to discuss or is so familiar that a discussion isn’t particularly taxing.
Thus far, I have connected the syllabus to writing as a way to think about ease. The reasons for this are idiosyncratic: I have found teaching to be quite difficult for reasons that are out of my control. When the students are wonderful, they are wonderful. But, they are in a developmental stage that means they act petulant or willfully misunderstand our shared objective. For some of them I am the first Black woman at the helm, or the first disabled person at the helm of their classroom. For some, they mistake me for family or expect that my personality with neatly correspond to an archetype. I cannot control this. What I can control is my relationship to the course and how much it aligns with the goals I’ve set for myself.
I’m making it work. How can you make next semester’s syllabus work for you?