[As of next week
my
sabbatical is officially done and I’m back to full-time teaching. So this
week I’ll share some previews for my Spring 2020 classes, focusing on new
readings I’m adding this semester and leading up to some updates on book talks
and projects. I’d love to hear what you’re up to as well!]
On a change in
readings that highlights the fundamental limitations of an online literature
course, and why I’m happy to be making it nonetheless.
This spring I’ll
teach my third entirely online
section of The Short Story (and the second in its accelerated,
half-semester form; I’ve also taught our American
Literature II survey online four times now). For the first two sections I
used texts from the Best
American Short Stories 2013 anthology for our contemporary readings
(paired with older short stories available online), but since I last taught
this class I discovered and taught in a couple different settings the (Roxane
Gay-edited) 2018 edition, which features some of my very
favorite short stories. But here’s the thing: those stories have become
favorites not only on their own terms, but also because of the joy of
discussing them with a group of students and fellow readers. And not just in
general terms (although of course I value such conversations generally)—many of
these stories are ambiguous, strange, puzzling, demanding of extended attention
and conversation if we are to develop our thoughts and ideas about them. But in
an online class, we quite simply won’t be able to have those conversations—of
course I ask the students to respond to each other’s weekly posts, and I have
found that our students are pretty good at doing so substantively; but that’s
still an entirely different thing from in-person, multi-vocal conversations
about a shared text in front of us.
Those realities
of online classes (especially online literature and humanities classes, as I
suspect things can work quite differently in online math courses or the like)
are what they are, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get to a point where I feel
better about them (although as with any topic I cover here I welcome thoughts, responses,
suggestions, etc.!). That’s the main reason why I hope never to teach more than
one online class a semester, or at the very least that the vast majority of my
teaching will remain in person. But if online literature classes are going to
exist (they are) and if I’m going to be one of our English Studies faculty who
teach them (I am and am happy to be), those classes and experiences will unquestionably
go better, feel more positive for me, and be more successful and meaningful for
all concerned if I get to share
great authors and texts with the students in them. So while I will greatly
miss the chance to talk together with those students about “Boys Go to Jupiter” and “Control Negro” and “Come On, Silver” and others, I am
nevertheless hugely excited to share those wonderful stories with this
community, and to read their responses and readings and analyses.
Next preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What’s on
your Spring 2020 horizon?
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