question three/take one

What is the biggest surprise about teaching writing?

In a nutshell: That I have consistently enjoyed myself for the past ten years. Meaning that I’ve found the work both challenging and thought-provoking, that I always ending up learning about, seeing, having had the occasion to think about new potentials for making and negotiating meaning, etc. That I found this surprising has to do, of course, with my assumptions about and expectations for teaching writing courses to start: Back in 1997, I assumed (not really knowing what the fyc course at U of I was for or about, what kind of choices I might be able to make, etc.), that I would not like it or find it terribly interesting. Also, when I entered the program, I did so as a lit student eager to teach to my (then) strengths which were lit and writing about lit. The way the system was configured then, one would expect to teach fyc for a year or two and then, after one took the teaching lit prosem, he/she might choose to teach one lit course and one fyc course. Prior to having the opportunity to teach my first fiction course, I had really enjoyed teaching the fyc course in spite of the fact (or perhaps even because of the fact) that the course was required for some students but not for all which, in turn, meant that I would likely have a roomful of students who didn’t want to be there, who were angry or disappointed that they didn’t “test out” and so on. While others I had entered the program with might have been especially eager to finally be able to teach lit, I was like, “either way.” (Truth was, given how much I really enjoyed teaching fyc, I often wondered if I was doing it incorrectly.) Why, I wondered, was I not especially eager to get away from fyc and teach a course that was decidedly more in keeping with my (then) research interests and that students could take as an elective?

After taking and passing the second prosem, I built and then taught my first (and as it turned out to be my only) intro to fiction course, one that focused on different paradigms of and for desire, and one that students could elect to take to satisfy their comp II requirement. I loved the design of the course and the questions it allowed us to ask about what it means to love, what kinds of bodies qualify as loveable, and how concepts of love/desire are articulated and then complicated in or across different kinds of texts: Short stories, fairy tales, children’s books, teen fiction, and finally, a famous literary novel that we read alongside the Cliffs Notes for that novel. At one point in the semester the class was divided into four groups and each group read a different Harlequin romance. The idea here was to test the claim that these texts, the stories they are invested in telling, their characters, their narrative pacing are so much alike that they are essentially interchangeable. If this were true, we’d be able to have a coherent conversation about the texts despite the fact that we had read different books. My point here is that I loved the course design and it was a course that I would have taken if it had been offered. Students seemed to enjoy the class well enough, perhaps because of the focus/topic of the course, perhaps because they were reading kinds of texts they hadn’t expected to be asked to read (especially the Cliffs Notes—which many students ended up claiming had ruined the experience of reading Madame Bovary for them), perhaps because they had elected to take the course. Problem was, I often found the class, or my approach to the class, not boring per se, but limited. I certainly take the blame for this but it seemed like we did the same thing every day (i.e., we read a text before coming to class and then we talked about our readings of that text in class). It seemed the class was in a rut, but I couldn’t think of a way to open things up, to rethink the potentials of our day to day practice and to finally get us out of what I perceived as a rut. And that, to me, was frustrating and more than a little scary. I’m not sure if the “in a rut” feeling had to do with how I was teaching the course (i.e., the fact that this was my first time teaching this course and the material) or with the material itself but it was (and, again, I blame myself for this) a decidedly less active, “happening” place than my fyc courses tended to be despite the fact that I was bringing the same approach to writing/communicative practice to this new context. The point is that from that point on, when teaching preference forms came around I would request two sections of fyc, preparing myself to feign surprise and disappointment over not having received permission to teach another section of the intro to fiction course.