Teaching Walden in West Virginia

27 January 2017: "I get it. That's what I left my home to get away from." --a student in my ENGL 204 class today, when talking about a passage in Walden which sometimes stumps first-time readers.

Thoreau writes, "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in." After I share that passage with them, I ask my students, "What's so bad about inheriting land?" For lots of people, especially Americans, the idea that inheriting land can be a bad thing initially sound strange. And in this class we've already talked about the important role land ownership takes in early articulations of the messy, malleable, powerful, and lasting idea of the "American Dream."

Of course, it's not really (entirely) about the farm. It's about the lack of choice or deliberation or active embrace of agency. It's about just walking into the life someone else set out for you--that's what Thoreau is pushing back against. It's about imagining you can do something different. As he puts it in one of his most uplifting sentences, "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor." You can make your life different and better. (And no, "better" doesn't mean wealthier...)

That pushing back that Thoreau's doing is so important and I love love love it. It's a key part of his call for us to wake up and live with purpose and meaning and intention.

So my student's response--the one included above--excited me because, hey, he got it! But more than that, it excited me because it reminded me how what Thoreau outlines here can be so hard to live out, especially for people like some of my students, students from places where very few people break free, break out, or break away. People who, in order to live the lives they have imagined for themselves, have to make painful choice--leaving places that seem safe, leaving the people they know, and in lots of cases being seen as traitors--for wanting to do something different. It's so useful for me to remember this and to let that mindfulness cast light back on my reading of Walden.

I often find myself saying, "Easy said than done, Thoreau" when I read Walden, even though I know he's right about just about everything. But I think some of that acknowledgement of how hard it can be gets a bit muffled when I talk to these students about the text. The young man in my class today reminded me of the value of speaking as plainly and honestly as possible about what Thoreau's up to.

"Desiree's Baby"

12 October 2016: Wednesday was a long and busy day, but like so many others, a good one. One of the highlights was teaching "Desiree's Baby" in my ENGL 204 class. This is probably in my top five of the pieces I teach in this class. It never fails and teaching it is always energizing and exciting. So we'll call this story Wednesday's good thing.

Email from a student

6 July 2016: Today's good thing comes from an email from a former student. An art major, she took my core curriculum Survey of American Literature in her last semester (this past spring). I always say that this course is one of my favorites to teach because of the material and the students; they are rarely English majors, so my job is to get them excited about American literature, see that it matters, and see that they have something to say about it. And it usually works. This email provided some more validation. She also included an attachment--a quotation she came across that she thought I would like. She was right.

"Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain..."

20 January 2016: I got to teach some Anne Bradstreet poems in my beloved ENGL 204 classes today. I haven't taught that class in a year and I forgot how much flippin' fun it is to teach her. The post's title comes from one of my favorite lines from her poetry, the first line of "The Author to Her Book." Bradstreet is just so awesome: a woman balancing so many competing identities with skill, humility, humor, and a deep and abiding faith. For me, she puts a very human face on the Puritans. And Lord help my students because on Friday (assuming we have class...stay away, Blizzard of 2016!) we get to my favorite Puritan poet, Edward Taylor. The forecast calls for major geeking out.

They never fail...

[A lot of catching-up posts to get through. Sorry about that. It's been a strange week...this stupid tooth thing is really cramping my style.]

10 June 2014: The summer schedule means that I have to cover a lot of material each day in class. Tuesday brought us to Dickinson and Whitman. It's a bit overwhelming and exhausting to cover them both on one day (and no, it isn't even close to actual "covering"), but it's also always exhilarating. Easily the highlight of my day.

"so sweet / and so cold"

31 March 2014: Best thing about Monday--the thing I am thankful for? That this little teaching trick still works so very well. Back to back classes that were amazingly fun and (yay!) educational.

"To Build a Fire"

21 March 2014: It's strange...I'm not a great fan of this story by Jack London, but in ENGL 204, it's always a highlight of the semester. Students just love it and love talking about it. Friday's classes were especially strong--and fun. The two fifty minute classes flew by and got the day off to a great start.

Good old Walt...

19 February 2014: Walt Whitman has been the subject of conversation these past two days in ENGL 204. As you can imagine, that makes me happy all on its own. But there's more...

As I've noted before, all the snow days this semester have made establishing a good class rhythm and report a bit difficult. Today, though, students who hadn't had much to say before responded--and responded well--to Whitman.

"What," I asked them, "do you remember that we covered last time when we talked about Whitman?"

"Swagger!" one student answered. I love this answer because it is a response to this little presentation I always do, showing students images of other nineteenth-century poets (traditional head or shoulders-and-up shots of men in suits gazing off into the distance) versus this iconic picture of Whitman.

In response, we talk about how this visual representation of the poet--the representation he gives us in place of a name--echoes the themes he'll celebrate in his poems. And we talk about that swagger, (although I didn't use that exact word, at least not before today). How that swagger is his, but how he wants you, his reader, to have it, too.

I could go on and on, but I won't. I'll just say that the classes--both sections--were awesome today. Walt never lets you down.

Summer School: Day One

The first day of the summer session went pretty well. I've got a small class this time (only 14 students!), which is pretty surprising. However, changes to our university's core curriculum have left the class I teach every summer (and just about every regular semester, too) no longer mandatory, but one of many options for students. I hope that this is the big drop and that next summer won't be even worse. I like the money--especially with $1100 dental bills coming in! (And that's just the first bill...)

So far, they seem like a cool group of students. So here we go!

Tiny Teaching Triumph

(I am borrowing "Tiny Triumph" from one of my favorite podcasts.)

The William Carlos Williams class was awesome, folks! I won't share any of the students' "This Is Just to Say" poems, but let me say that they were so much fun. Some quick observations:

1) They excelled on sex-related poems. No comment.
2) 2012 campaign managers, take note: economics ("Sorry I stole your money...") was the second most popular subject.
3) About half-way through the first class (I teach two sections), I started thinking, "Either these folks have done (or thought about doing) some awful things, or they've had people doing them wrong." I also decided that I didn't want to know which it was.
4) I'll totally do it again.

"This is Just to Say"

I am pretty darn excited to teach a couple of William Carlos Williams poems in ENGL 204 on Friday--even more excited than usual. First, we'll discuss the venerable wheelbarrow poem, but I'm really excited about when we get to "This is Just to Say." After some discussion, I'm going to play this segment from This American Life, which talks about the poem and then includes a bunch of terrific riffs on it. Then we're going to write our own "This is Just to Say" poems. I even found a cool template on the NCTE website.

Yeah, it's not an incredibly innovative plan, but I can't help but look forward to it. Should be fun!

End of the semester tallies

Although I've said before that you never want to do the actual math, here we go:

Total pages of end-of-the-semester term papers I've graded so far: Approximately 680 (!). But hey, these are 680 graded pages. On to the exams!

Still waiting to be done:
32 ENGL 204 exams (not too bad--these go kind of quickly)
20 ENGL 312 exams (these are essay exams, so they'll take awhile; each is about 6-8 pages)
16 ENGL 101 final papers (being dropped off by students as I write this, these are mercifully short--about 2 pages each, and because of such a high rate of attrition this semester in ENGL 101, I only have 16)

Already completed: 17 ENGL 377 portfolios.

Interestingly, so far the soundtrack to this season's end-of-the-semester grading has been Broadway. Yesterday was Evita and The Secret Garden. Today has been kind of eclectic: Rent, followed by Man of La Mancha, which I haven't listened to in years. It's amazing how much I remember.

Back to school...

It's been a weekend of digging out and cleaning up and getting back to life as usual. I was thrilled to make it back up to my office on campus both Saturday and Sunday (today). If you know me, you know I do really well with normal routines, etc. and getting lots of work done at school is a major part of my routine. (Yes, even on the weekends...sad, I know).

Campus looks great--the grounds keepers are amazing. Of course, there are a lot fewer parking spots (again, where do you put 40+ inches of snow?), but on the whole, we should be back in business tomorrow--even with another snow blast hitting us tomorrow afternoon/evening. (This one should be relatively tame--maybe 6 inches at most. Funny how your definition of "tame" changes...)

Some follow-up on the discussion board experiment: I think it actually worked really well. I am especially pleased with the English 204 boards. All I had to do was ask some questions (admittedly leading questions) and then sit back and watch them go. They covered all the important points I would have made if we had class. This morning, I spent about 90 minutes reading over both classes' responses and then summing up/concluding each thread. One frustrating item to note: lots of students didn't post anything, or only did half of what they were supposed to do. If they don't show up with their reading responses tomorrow (the alternate response), I am not sure what to do. Maybe some zeroes for quiz grades? (This also means giving people who did their work some 100s for quiz grades.)

The upper division classes' boards are (predictably) looking very good. I haven't finished reading/responding to them yet, but I am looking forward to doing so.

Thanks, by the way, to those of you who suggested strategies for keeping on schedule using online teaching.

At the risk of making this an all-weather-related blog...

...here comes another weather-related post. We've got gotten an email from the VPAA announcing that "on campus" instruction has been canceled for the rest of this week. That's how bad things are around here--several major roads are still a mess (not to mention backroads) and even with snow-removal crews working non-stop, there just hasn't been enough progress made. At some point, after all, where do you put the snow? Calls are still in the 10-20 inch range for the latest round, which has just gotten started.

Fear not for me...I actually got out a bit today (thanks to a friend with a four-wheel drive) and picked up some more groceries. I even finally cleared out the huge blockade of snow that was at the end of my driveway--the mini-mountain that the plows refused to touch even though it was clearly (at least 2 feet) on the road, not my driveway. At this point, I feel like I can shovel away the next twenty inches that falls. After the 30 inches this weekend, I can handle it. (Although my aching back and arms might argue a bit...)

What I am wondering about, though, is if I should follow the VPAA's suggestion to hold classes online in some capacity. The concern is that a whole week of classes missed can get us into some trouble, especially with lots of winter still out there. We have a program called Sakai (a lot like Blackboard, if you are familiar with that) which can let me do things like discussion boards and even chat rooms. I think that discussion boards could work for my two upper division classes, filled with mostly English majors and minors.

I am not so sure about my two sections of English 204. I might post some study questions for each text on a separate thread (one big question per thread) and invite the 204 students to respond. Then, after they've had lots of chances to do so, I'll sum up the important points of each question. Now, should I require them to participate? I hesistate to do so since I am not sure if everyone has reliable internet access at home. But without some real incentive to participate, I can't see a lot these general education students doing so.

I also don't want to require a bunch of reading responses because, well, I don't want to grade them. I've got 70+ students in these two sections...what I need is discussion.

To my teacher friends especially, but any one else, too: any additional thoughts you might have for shifting a regular class to a temporarily online class would be much appreciated!

Adventures in Grading: Fall Semester Wrap-Up

It's way late to be posting these, but I hate to let these gems of bad/funny/strange writing go unshared.

From an English 204 Paper: "The impact of words such as this pierces deep into the soul and grinds up a person's insides like mashed potatoes." I actually kind of like this one because you can at least tell that the words moved the student. I do wonder how this student feels about mashed potatoes, though.

All of the rest are from English 204 Final Exams...

"Her aunt was named No Name Woman because she got prego when she shouldn't have and her village kicked her out." Where to begin? The idea that this student seems to think the woman was actually named "No Name Woman"? The use of the word "prego"? Another student, writing on the same story, put another unique twist on the aunt's predicament: "Her aunt got pregnants."

"No matter if you are dead or alive, family is always with you." That's just creepy.

"Her story, though fiction, has very accurate idealization of what it was like for slaves before the Civil War." I am not sure what "accurate idealization" of slavery is...

"A plum is simple, yet delicious, so the form he uses is short, descriptive wording that sends the reader on a taste adventure into Williams' perspective." Okay, I kind of like this one, too. Perhaps this student has a career in advertising awaiting him or her. (Yes, it's about "This is Just to Say.")

"This story shows how something as petite as the color of one's skin determines who you love." An example of how your internal thesaurus can lead you astray.

"The male domination should be counterbalanced with some stories of women smacking a few men around and see how they like it." Not that I am in favor of violence, but one must admire that a male student wrote this.

Finally, from Part I in the exam, where students identify quotations from works we've read...I thought it might be fun to share some butchered versions of the title of one of Emily Dickinson's most famous poems, "I heard a Fly buzz--when I died:"

"Before Death Comes a Buzz--Then Die"
"A Fly flew by and buzzed when I died"
"There was a fly by my death bed"
"Something about a fly buzzing"

Onto the Spring Semester, which starts on Monday!

Take that, Midterm Week!

If there were a hidden camera in my office, it would have just recorded what I am sure was an interesting, amusing, and potentially disturbing sight: yours truly doing a happy dance* celebrating the end of my midterm grading. That's right: I've finished grading 100 ENGL 204 exams and 20 ENGL 101 papers. I've also survived AHWIR week, the Sigma Tau Delta conference, and a weekend visit from the 'rents. I might even survive this cold.

Cue another happy dance!

*the soundtrack: "The Air That I Breathe" by the Hollies. Not the best choice for a happy dance, but it's been in heavy rotation on my ipod since I downloaded it earlier this week (after seeing it on last week's episode of Fringe).

Adventures in Grading: 'Favorite Sentences from Exams' Edition

It's just after 1:00 on Saturday and I am done with grading. Yay! I didn't collect as many gems from the flood of papers as I usually do. Most of the awfulness was just plain awful, not funny-awful. But there were a few awesome keepers worth sharing with y'all.

1) "Up through the 1900s, ethnicity threw-up boundaries between people."

It's the hyphen (that makes "threw-up" kind of like a noun--but not really--just enough to conjure the image of vomit) that does this one in, of course. Nothing major, but it made me laugh, and then gag a bit.

2) "Connie could no think at all. She is petrified in udder disbelief."

Sorry, but "udder disbelief" just kills me. I could try to explain how this is wrong, but if you don't get it, it's like a cow's opinion. And no, this student is NOT an ESL writer. He's just a horrible editor of his own work. In his next sentence, he refers to a "gold hot rub," when what he really means is "hot rod." At least I hope that's what he means...

3) And finally, I've saved the best for last: "When we think of love and sex, we think of happy endings and how the female is getting her happy ending. This semester, we looked at authors that take it beyond that."

Look--I know that on the surface, this is a perfectly harmless set of sentences, but come on, doesn't it also sound like the opening from an final exam essay for "PORN 101: New Depictions of Female Satisfaction in Adult Films"? By the way, I bet that's a real course somewhere...like Berkeley.

Adriana Trigiani at Shepherd

I've been meaning to post about Trigiani's visit earlier this month for some time now, but it's been a crazy few weeks. Now, though, I've got about 20 minutes before my next class, and instead of working on my SAMLA paper, I will blog some more instead. Go priorities!

Trigiani's visit was amazing. She was funny, energetic, engaging, and even inspiring. In my years as a student and teacher at colleges and universities, I've seen quite a few visiting writers, but never one quite like Adriana. From the moment she arrived on campus, she was on--and we loved every bit of it.

Some pictures:


The Sigma Tau Delta volunteers who handed out programs and served as ushers at the Wednesday night event. They're a great group of students and I am enjoying being their sponsor.


The crowd beginning to gather for the Wednesday event. You can see Trigiani in the front row, talking to people. She was like that--she would start conversations with anyone, remember their names, and make them feel like they mattered. I can't tell you how many people she gave her email address to.


Dr. Shurbutt and Trigiani.


Desiree, one of my best ENG 204 students, getting her book signed by Adriana. The book signing events were great--Adriana talked to each person for a long time and wrote meaningful messages in each book. She and Desiree talked at length about what Desiree thought of Big Stone Gap, how she connected it to her own life, and writing in general.


Another awesome ENG 204 student, John, talking with Adriana. She loved her some John--and he seemed pretty smitten with her, too. John loved Big Stone Gap and even bought Big Cherry Holler so he could see what happens next. What a testament to Trigiani's power as a writer and a speaker! She makes fire-fighters in their mid-twenties want to read books that many have dismissed as "chick-lit."


Adriana with Laura and Kate, two Sigma Tau Delta members.


At the Thursday event, Russell Myers receives his 2008 West Virginia Fiction Writers Competition award from Adriana.


Finally, yours truly with Adriana, right before Dr. Shurbutt dragged her away so she could catch her plane.

Editing Dickinson

One of the biggest areas of critical attention in Emily Dickinson studies is the way she has been--and should be--edited and published. People have fought over this ever since Dickinson's sister found those fascicles of poems neatly bound up in her sister's bedroom. It is an area of some interest to me as I continue to work on a project about editing in the nineteenth century. My interests here extend to the classroom as well.

I've blogged before about the way that Emily Dickinson helps us talk about the significance of things like dashes, italics, and quotations marks in poetry. When I teach Dickinson, I like to have the poems on the Smartboard in class, so that we can read them and mark them up. In order to prepare for today's ENG 204 course, I painstakingly transcribed the poems as published in the Norton Anthology into a word document so that I could use them in class. For Dickinson, this kind of transcription is necessary since simply cutting and pasting from a website won't work as web editions differ in their use of capitalization, dashes, etc.

Several of these poems, of course, I had taught before--out of the 6th edition of the Norton Anthology, so I already had those in Word documents. Those, I thought, I can just cut and paste.

Not so fast. Check out these competing versions of a poem often referred to as "'Faith' is a fine invention":

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see-
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.


"Faith" is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!

The first version is from the 6th edition, the edition we used at Shepherd up until this semester. The second is from the 7th edition. A quick look at the introductions to Dickinson in each book gives us an explanation. The first is based on Thomas H. Johnson's 1960 The Poems of Emily Dickinson. The second version is from R.W. Franklin's 1999 The Poems of Emily Dickinson.

I suppose it makes sense to use the Franklin edition since so many scholars have argued that it is more accurate than Johnson's. But in this case, I can't help but feel that the change is for the worse and that this poem's impact suffers in the Franklin version. The differences might seem small, but when we are talking about a four line poem, small is a relative term.

Notice the deletion of the italics on "Microscopes" in the second version. This takes away the attention and emphasis given to this very important word and its linkage to "see" in the second line. Notice, too, the change from "When Gentlemen can see" to "For Gentleman who see!" The second version implies that some gentlemen see and some don't, and that idea certainly changes the meaning of the poem. Finally, do notice those exclamation points, completely absent from the first version, but popping up in two dramatic places in the second. They really don't seem to work either, adding lots of drama to a poem that I've always read as a relatively calm and witty observation. Anyway, I really prefer the earlier version, as you can maybe tell already.

Apparently, Dickinson herself is to blame for some of the confusion, as she sent the different versions to different people in letters. I find myself wishing I owned a copy of this edition that reproduces Dickinson's manuscripts so I can see how she wrote it down in the fascicles.

When I pulled the earlier version up on the Smartboard and noticed the differences between it and the textbook, I was thrown off my game--significantly. The students thought it was all pretty funny and much ado about nothing. So yes, I was a bit flustered by the differences (and there were slight changes in other poems, too). But one of them did ask, "Well, what difference does it make if the line is 'For gentlemen who see'?" And that opened up some good discussion about the very issue I mentioned at this entry--because it does make a difference. Those exclamation points change things. Those italics are important. But perhaps, unintentionally, I was able to get that point across to students more effectively than ever before.

End-of-Summer Syllabizing

I haven't gotten nearly as much work done as I wanted to this summer, but I am rather proud of this accomplishment: as of today, 2 August 2008, I have all my syllabi ready for the Fall semester. Not bad, right? I just put the Xerox requests in and everything. My webpages are ready to go. Go me!

You can check out the fruits of my labor here, if you are so inclined. While I've taught ENG 102 and ENG 204 before, I had to do some re-arranging on two counts. First, each course has switched to new editions of its respective textbook,* which meant adjusting page numbers and, in some cases, reading selections for each. Second, the days both courses meet have changed. In the past, I taught ENG 102 as a MWF class. Now it's a TR. In the past, I've taught ENG 204 as TR. Now it's a MWF. Those kinds of changes do require some reconceptualization, especially for ENG 102, which is a writing course. I rather like the changes made to the 204 syllabus--I've even included three new writers (Richard Wright, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jhumpa Lahiri). I am not so sure yet about 102. It looks a bit rushed at certain points in the semester (at least on the page), but maybe it will be okay.

ENG 346 is the new one for me--and I am pretty excited about it. It's a version of a class I taught at Richmond, but whereas that course stopped in 1865, I am framing this course as a study of the American novel from the beginning until 1900 (well, technically 1896, ending with Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs). The reading schedule is a bit ambitious, I know. I've already had one student email me and say "You don't believe in light reading, do you?" However, they can handle it--especially if they want to be English majors.

*Don't even get me started on this whole "new edition" issue. I understand the need to keep updating things, but some of these prices are insane. I don't get to choose the books for the gen. ed. classes I teach (101, 102, 204)--and if I did, there's no way I'd pick the hugely over-priced Perrine's. It's a great book, but not worth over $100.