It seemed like a good idea at the time but now I'm wondering what possessed me to agree to this bizarre teaching schedule for the spring semester.
Only 60ish students spread out over four classes? Excellent! The smallest class has 9 students and the largest 22, while the other two sit neatly in the middle with around 15. I can manage 60ish students as long as they don't all turn in drafts on the same day.
Four preps? No problem--except three of them are new. I've taught American Lit Survey every spring since the dawn of time (except when I was on sabbatical), so I can draw on past lecture notes, exams, and class activities. For my other three classes, on the other hand, I'll have to create everything from scratch, which takes a lot of energy. What made me think I could do this?
Four syllabi? Manageable, as long as I maintain a master list of major assignment deadlines so I don't end up with 60 drafts needing comments the same week. It's like a jigsaw puzzle: if I put the Film exam here, I'll have to put the Comedy exam over there and move the Honors presentations a week later--but I can make it work. Just a few more tweaks to the schedule and I'll be ready to post my syllabi to Moodle.
And what an interesting semester it will be!
American Lit Survey: a perennial favorite, with a few updates to reading and writing assignments. I've finally figured out how to return Howells's "Editha" to the syllabus, which makes me very happy.
Honors Literature: A small group of gifted first-year students focusing on literary journeys, from Whitman's "Song of the Open Road" to Death of a Salesman, Cold Mountain, and The Namesake. My favorite assignment requires each student to present information that will help their classmates comprehend the historical and cultural contexts of either Cold Mountain or The Namesake.
Concepts of Comedy: Too much to cover in one class so I'm struggling over what to cut. We'll start with three plays (Lysistrata, Love's Labors Lost, and The Importance of Being Earnest) and end the semester with a honking big novel--Richard Russo's Straight Man, which simultaneously demonstrates and theorizes various concepts of comedy. It's the short stuff in between that's giving me trouble. I want to juxtapose mock-heroic battle scenes from Don Quixote and Invisible Man, but that makes nearly every author on the syllabus a dead white male. This is a problem. I'm working on it. Quickly.
Romancing the Beast: My only upper-level class this semester and I'm really excited about it! It's a special topics course featuring both historical and theoretical readings and some wonderful films demonstrating various passionate entanglements involving animals: Bringing Up Baby, King Kong, Whale Rider, The Electric Horseman, and Grizzly Man. The best part, though, is that the students will take over the class for the last three weeks, becoming experts on various films or genres and presenting the results of their research in class. Or at least I hope it's the best part. We'll see.
I get really excited when I think about the content of my spring courses, but the logistics scare me. Which suggests that I probably ought to get back to work tweaking deadlines and finalizing readings instead of complaining about it. Write! Right?
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