I taught my first seminar in Modern American Autobiography on Tuesday afternoon. Eventually, once the course hits its stride, we will begin with student position papers, but for now it is strictly "sage on the stage." It was unexpectedly tiring. I ran into a colleague afterward, someone who taught the same slot, and I had to observe that he looked as I felt. Is this a sign of middle age? When I started teaching, I liked a fifty-minute slot because I had the attention span of someone in his mid-twenties. Now, at forty, I am wondering if anyone can talk for three hours with only a short break and not feel all tapped out. If Jimmy Stewart's character in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington had been a middle-aged professor, I suspect the filibuster would have fallen flat!
I feel such a fool reading out the class policies, the rules I have developed over the past two decades. How stupid is it to have to say that students must respect the conventions of our discipline, employ MLA citation in their papers? And, yet, in spite of my demands, I had last semester a young woman cite with footnotes -- footnotes! -- and do so with roman numerals. Who thinks it is reasonable to draw my attention to reference "lxxviii"? So, as foolish as it sounds, I tell them not to cheat, not to roll into class fifteen minutes late and disrupt everything, not to go the whole semester without using my office hours.
In my introduction to modernism, this time, I raised again how avant-garde ready-mades challenged the distinction between use value and commodity value. It strikes me that comparing a Beatles song downloaded for free and played on an MP3 player with a song purchased on compact disc, packaged in a velvet box helps demonstrate this distinction.
How nice it is to see the flash of recognition that comes when we connect with our students. That's the best classroom feeling.
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