1. Realize that you might not be prepared. In your undergraduate program you were probably one of the smarter kids, so your professors liked you. But that makes you no different from any one else in your program. That does not mean that you are well-prepared for graduate work. It is very unlikely that you have read enough. I had never had a class in the BOOM so the summer before Grad school I read all the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Later I realized a lot of Latin Americanists don't even like these writers, but that's another story. The undergraduate degree in Spanish does not prepare you for Graduate Work. It just gives you a small taste of what it's all about. The same could be true of other fields.
2. Realize that the profession you've chosen is brutally competitive. You won't get anywhere by just being an average student in an average program. Choose a field in which the ratio of PhDs to tenure track openings is reasonable. Like Spanish. Even in this case, you have to be one of the better students from a better program to get one of the better jobs.
3. Take care of the basics. If you are doing a PhD with a language in its name (Spanish, French) then master that language. You will be teaching it your whole life. If the language is English, then make sure you have "got prose." Mere competence is the key, because, look around you, not everyone is going to be able to transform themselves from bright undergrad to competent scholar in six years.
4. Begin building your cv at the beginning of your PhD program not toward the end. (Added after reading comment by Clarissa).
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Convergence ...
happens when everything you have been thinking about for several years all makes sense to you as a coherent whole. You still have to draw the lines between the dots, but you know exactly how to do this.
Receptivity reaches a high point. Everything you hear and see confirms that you are on the right track.
My daughter showed me a paper she wrote for her AP English class. It made perfect sense in terms of my pedagogical approach to raising her to be a writer, musician, and artist. In my own image (fortunately or unfortunately), but very different from me in numerous ways. A key scene in her paper is when she is hearing an explanation of "Pictures in an Exhibition" in a music-appreciation class in elementary school. She hears the convergence between sounds and images and something reaches the level of Joycean epiphany in her head. (The paper was supposed be inspired by Portrait of the Artist). The paper ends with her choosing an instrument to play for band. I ask her (in the paper) whether she wants to play jazz or classical. She says "both."
So all of a sudden, my life makes sense to me. I should treat my students like my daughter. When I take her to Starbucks, that is like what happened when I went with my dad to Fluffy Donuts when I was the same age as she is now. My dad loved music, art, and literature just like I do, and he was an academic.
"Transmission" is not the communication of information as in the "banking model" of education, but the handing down (tradition) of a way of receiving or appreciating these things that are so important to us.
Receptivity reaches a high point. Everything you hear and see confirms that you are on the right track.
My daughter showed me a paper she wrote for her AP English class. It made perfect sense in terms of my pedagogical approach to raising her to be a writer, musician, and artist. In my own image (fortunately or unfortunately), but very different from me in numerous ways. A key scene in her paper is when she is hearing an explanation of "Pictures in an Exhibition" in a music-appreciation class in elementary school. She hears the convergence between sounds and images and something reaches the level of Joycean epiphany in her head. (The paper was supposed be inspired by Portrait of the Artist). The paper ends with her choosing an instrument to play for band. I ask her (in the paper) whether she wants to play jazz or classical. She says "both."
So all of a sudden, my life makes sense to me. I should treat my students like my daughter. When I take her to Starbucks, that is like what happened when I went with my dad to Fluffy Donuts when I was the same age as she is now. My dad loved music, art, and literature just like I do, and he was an academic.
"Transmission" is not the communication of information as in the "banking model" of education, but the handing down (tradition) of a way of receiving or appreciating these things that are so important to us.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Pedagogy
Some reflections on my teaching philosophy. This is what I think I ought be doing while teaching. I am hoping that by articulating this I will be able to implement it better. I am far from the most successful teacher, but I do feel I have been effective with certain students. Some aspects of my philosophy might make me a less effective instructor for many students.
1. Setting the bar. One of the most significant things a professor can do is to establish a certain intellectual level to which one should aspire. This should be a level higher than the students might have previously imagined was even possible. I remember particular professors who did this for me, like the Dante specialist John Frecerro. Some professors who set the bar in this way come off as arrogant, like Frecerro often did. This is a risk. Gustavo P-F once told me one of the best professors he had was PI at Michigan. PI was not a good classroom teacher, but he established an expectation of what intellectual life should be. I feel that APD, who was a beloved mentor to many, never set a high-enough bar for his students.
2. Kicking ass. You have to be somewhat hard on the students in order to let them know where they stand in relation to this standard. A critique of student work should be rigorous but never personal. "This introduction doesn't work because of the following reasons..." not "You are a crappy writer." Once again, beloved mentors may not have kicked enough ass. Their students might have benefited from someone who demanded more of them.
3. The expectation of equality. You can only give a rigorous critique if you think of the student as your (potential) equal. The model is a peer review, in which scholar 1, who is reviewing work by scholar 2 anonymously, will be reviewed the next month by scholar 3. Disagreeing with a student should not take the form of "pulling rank," but having the better argument. This is tricky because holding back to be a nicer guy ends up undermining equality. But going at a student full force can be perceived of as bullying. Giving assignments that do everything but dot the i's for the student is not ideal, even if the students love it (they will).
4. The expectation of disagreement. The student's responsibility is not to give me what I want, but to kick the ass of the assignment. The student should never have to agree with the perspective of the professor. The success of the professor is judged on whether the students grow intellectually, and this might entail a complete disagreement with the perspective of the mentor.
Notice I've said nothing about classroom techniques. It is implied that the students should come ready with something to say about the material. Without that, I have very little to work with. The material I am working with is what the students bring to the table.
1. Setting the bar. One of the most significant things a professor can do is to establish a certain intellectual level to which one should aspire. This should be a level higher than the students might have previously imagined was even possible. I remember particular professors who did this for me, like the Dante specialist John Frecerro. Some professors who set the bar in this way come off as arrogant, like Frecerro often did. This is a risk. Gustavo P-F once told me one of the best professors he had was PI at Michigan. PI was not a good classroom teacher, but he established an expectation of what intellectual life should be. I feel that APD, who was a beloved mentor to many, never set a high-enough bar for his students.
2. Kicking ass. You have to be somewhat hard on the students in order to let them know where they stand in relation to this standard. A critique of student work should be rigorous but never personal. "This introduction doesn't work because of the following reasons..." not "You are a crappy writer." Once again, beloved mentors may not have kicked enough ass. Their students might have benefited from someone who demanded more of them.
3. The expectation of equality. You can only give a rigorous critique if you think of the student as your (potential) equal. The model is a peer review, in which scholar 1, who is reviewing work by scholar 2 anonymously, will be reviewed the next month by scholar 3. Disagreeing with a student should not take the form of "pulling rank," but having the better argument. This is tricky because holding back to be a nicer guy ends up undermining equality. But going at a student full force can be perceived of as bullying. Giving assignments that do everything but dot the i's for the student is not ideal, even if the students love it (they will).
4. The expectation of disagreement. The student's responsibility is not to give me what I want, but to kick the ass of the assignment. The student should never have to agree with the perspective of the professor. The success of the professor is judged on whether the students grow intellectually, and this might entail a complete disagreement with the perspective of the mentor.
Notice I've said nothing about classroom techniques. It is implied that the students should come ready with something to say about the material. Without that, I have very little to work with. The material I am working with is what the students bring to the table.
What Maisie Knew
The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had happened which must matter a good deal and looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause. It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.--Henry James
That's where I got the title "What Lorca Knew."
More introduction
The hermeneutics developed by writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Harold Bloom provides a way of understanding the ongoing legacy of a hyper-canonical figure like Lorca, who presents interpretative problems of dizzying complexity. Because Lorca has been the object of endless translation, creative transformation, and commentary over the course of nine decades, his achievement calls out for an acute awareness of the historical vicissitudes of interpretation. An author is “hypercanonical,” in my definition, when he (or in rarer cases she) not only forms part of a standard canon or reading list, but comes to be regarded as quasi-sacred. Borges defines the classic text in the following terms:
Borges, with his characteristic skepticism, does not view the canonical work as possessing intrinsic qualities that make it eligible for this treatment. The decision to regard a work as a classic is a contingent, variable, collective decision, taken over time.
Hypercanonical authors are typically subject to hyperbolic and hagiographic treatment. They are saints or martyrs, the inventors of languages, entire national literatures, genres, or grandiose generalities like “the human” itself. It goes without saying that such authors will normally form part of academic reading lists, and become the subject of critical industries, but their afterlife will never be exclusively, or even mainly, academic: they will live on in other artistic or literary works, in translations and adaptations, and in the popular imagination. Hyper-canonical authors live on not only in the classroom but in other creators of culture: Cervantes in Borges; Shakespeare in Lorca
Clásico es aquel libro que una nación o un grupo de naciones o el largo tiempo han decidido leer como si en sus páginas todo fuera deliberado, fatal, profundo como el cosmos y capaz de interpretaciones sin término. Previsiblemente, esas decisiones varían.
A classic is that book that a nation or group of nations or a long period of time has decided to read as though everything in its pages were deliberate, predestined, as profound as the cosmos and capable of endless interpretations. Predictably, these decisions will vary.
Borges, with his characteristic skepticism, does not view the canonical work as possessing intrinsic qualities that make it eligible for this treatment. The decision to regard a work as a classic is a contingent, variable, collective decision, taken over time.
Hypercanonical authors are typically subject to hyperbolic and hagiographic treatment. They are saints or martyrs, the inventors of languages, entire national literatures, genres, or grandiose generalities like “the human” itself. It goes without saying that such authors will normally form part of academic reading lists, and become the subject of critical industries, but their afterlife will never be exclusively, or even mainly, academic: they will live on in other artistic or literary works, in translations and adaptations, and in the popular imagination. Hyper-canonical authors live on not only in the classroom but in other creators of culture: Cervantes in Borges; Shakespeare in Lorca
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Bad Sentences (1)
"This is the latest of the ideas I introduce in these pages,and to commemorate it, and for future reference, I inscribe this early moment of my book with excerpts from the last pages of this play."
This is by a writer who is a super-famous Ivy-league professor, but whose prose is full of this sort of meandering sign-posting of the umpteenth degree. I have never known him to get around to a real point, although lots of people swear that he absolutely brilliant, the true heir to Emerson and Thoreau. I think he is a pontificating windbag whose pretentious posturings divert attention from the banality of his insights.
If you worship this author, please don't let me stop you. If he ever got around to his point, then I would be able to judge whether it is as brilliant as you say it is.
This is by a writer who is a super-famous Ivy-league professor, but whose prose is full of this sort of meandering sign-posting of the umpteenth degree. I have never known him to get around to a real point, although lots of people swear that he absolutely brilliant, the true heir to Emerson and Thoreau. I think he is a pontificating windbag whose pretentious posturings divert attention from the banality of his insights.
If you worship this author, please don't let me stop you. If he ever got around to his point, then I would be able to judge whether it is as brilliant as you say it is.
Why can't it always be this way?
I got up at 7, had some coffee. I have been a little sick so I didn't sleep well. During the night, intermittently, I read blog comments, which were flowing in from another blogger who was up all night grading. I even spoke on the phone with her (in a dream). I took some cold medicine with pseudo-ephedrine in it, and then I took my daughter to the High School: they (some kids from her school) are going to Columbia MO to try out for All-State Band / Orchestra. Back at 8 or so, I began to write. I wrote about 600 words of finished prose, and stopped shortly after 9. I got several new ideas that I will develop tomorrow. I was not distracted even by stressful emails I received while working. While writing, I almost felt as though I were taking dictation.
So why can't it always be like this? Working so well despite physical and emotional distress? The beginning of a project can always be energizing. Perhaps the cold medicine helped. And would it even be desirable to be this inspired every day? It might be exhausting. In any case, I will bank up this experience so that I won't forget that it can happen.
So why can't it always be like this? Working so well despite physical and emotional distress? The beginning of a project can always be energizing. Perhaps the cold medicine helped. And would it even be desirable to be this inspired every day? It might be exhausting. In any case, I will bank up this experience so that I won't forget that it can happen.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)