I haven't been posting much in the last few months because most of my reading time has been taken up by prepping for my women's lit class. Teaching this class has been a learning experience for me. I came into it with all sorts of assumptions--e.g., that students taking a women's lit class would automatically be enthusiastic about the material, that many of them would be practiced readers, and that they would already be familiar with canonical novels like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre from high school or other English classes. On the first day, I realized how naive I had been: only two or three of them had read P&P or JE, few of them had experience (much less enjoyed) reading fiction, and most of them were there to fulfill a general education requirement.
We began the semester with Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, two books that I originally worried would be too familiar, but also assumed everyone would be excited about reading. As it happened, the students were overwhelmed by the reading load and I'm fairly confident that they weren't all able to keep up. Even the more advanced students found the prose really difficult to understand, so it was hard for them to get through over a hundred pages per week.
As a result, the focus has been on making the texts legible by walking through extended scenes, reading aloud, and focusing on who's speaking and what's being referred to. Our most productive time in class has been spent taking turns reading sections aloud to help the students figure out what is happening in a particular scene before attempting any kind of analysis. My hope is that the novels have made more sense to them and that--maybe--they've even enjoyed them more as a result.
For the second half of the class, we're reading a series of short stories from the Norton Anthology of Women's Literature, and I'm hoping that the reading will be more manageable and more enjoyable for them because they won't be racing to keep up. Next time I teach this class, I'm going to assign more short stories so that we can really break down each story in class. Last week, we did a close reading exercise using a passage from Edith Wharton's "The Angel at the Grave," and the students seemed to find the process of paraphrasing the text to be both challenging and productive. It's so tempting to stray from the text in discussion, but a paraphrase exercise forces you to focus on what's on the page. Once they had a better idea about what the passage was saying, they were in a better position to pay attention to its language and imagery--and then to move on to thinking about the effects of those elements.
On the whole, I can say that I have learned as much this semester as (I hope) my students have. I am looking forward to teaching this class again at some point so that I can incorporate what I've learned into the syllabus from the beginning. It's easy to forget that a syllabus is more than just deciding what you want the students to read and that it can take several iterations before you have crafted a successful class. For this semester, it has been enough to be reminded that my job is to teach my students how to be readers and thinkers rather than just to expose them to a series of greatest hits.
