Professor Hudspeth once mentioned that he has often taught from notes he made while reading for his quals. I didn't ask what kind of notes he made; I supposed I knew that his comments would resemble the ones I scribble through most everything I own.
Now I wish I'd asked. I wonder what kind of notes people would prefer to teach from. If anyone has a very specific idea what matrix of notes he or she would most like to to prepare classes and curriculae, that might guide us in preparing entries here.
I find I enter a class hoping to teach a very few concepts, but to do so in a way that provokes students to rework methods and assumptions. Could I get away with just naming or describing concepts briefly, I could compress a semester to an hour or two, maybe less.
I've come to believe this is all normal for an English class, probably for the humanities in general.
In practice, what students get they produce themselves, most often quite apart from what I hope to impart. That process seems to involve long stretches of conversationally milling about one or another idea, and which idea will attract such attention seems hard to predict, since it depends on the students.
All of this requires an object or project on which a class may work communally, or with sufficient communality to engage discussion. In a literature class, said object must generally be a text; the projects, traditionally, are essays -- though I have seen blogs, websites, and wikis used. (I found one of the blogs particularly successful; the wiki may have even more potential, but I haven't really explored it.) So, if authors pre-prepare texts and students must prepare their projects, what do teachers prepare?
I'm thinking it amounts to whistle-stop itineraries through each text and through canon.
What's useful for those itineraries?
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I'm not sure that student groups work all that well. They foster a certain kind of thinking ("Jenny will do the work!"), and wikis seem ripe for that kind of abuse. I'm not really against student groups, but they need tight oversight.
I don't think it's all that hard to impart information to the students, though. I'm inclined to think our first order of business is to supply them with the material itself, selected by us and filtered through our perspective and expertise. After that, we have to let them cogitate it, guiding them with carefully supplied (if not always successful) tools. Then, we course-correct.
Teaching, though it often feels like "guiding," is very often the process of shared experience, with my greater experience helping my students (re)learn the lesson. At least, that's how I conceive my role.
That, or I spit out a bunch of facts and they repeat them verbatim on the tests. I'm slowing coming to believe that's an exceedingly valid approach, especially if you're willing to do comprehensive examinations.
The more "modern" my teaching experience becomes, the more I'm convinced the "old school" worked better (sorry about the pun).
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