The Classroom Conservative

Teaching, Week Twelve: What Is It All About?

For the most part, I have abandoned any in-term justification of our learning outcomes.  There are venues for this discussion, of course: recruitment evenings, advising sessions, and planning exercises.  Because we spend so much time teaching students to format, for example, there is hardly time to stop to reflect upon why it is important to pay attention to details.

But if a course progresses well, some of its practical significance should become clear, even before we undertake a summary.  We had a week like that this week, when the perpetual relevance of a study of the historical avant-garde presented itself to us all.

One of the surrealist challenges to the institution of art questioned the standing of the artistic artifact.  If one lived ones art, if it was impossible to make any distinction between art and life, was not the identification of a work of art – a book, a play, a film – a bogus activity?  Do not get me wrong: the surrealists painted canvases, of course, but they rejected any distinction between that canvas and the artistic standing of a conversation they had with someone, or the creative activity of taking a walk in the park.  When André Breton talks about the text he is writing, there is a palpable discomfort, but there existed for him no more appropriate nomenclature.

This examination of the artifact in conceptualizations of the institution of art leads us to a discussion of the artifact today.  What standing do the actual manifestations of works have with our students?  When Marcel Duchamps bought and signed a plumbing fixture, selling it as a piece of art, he was thumbing his nose at the idea of bourgeois appropriation of artistry.  A fortnight ago, Imaginus brought their travelling caravan of poster reproductions to our campus and did a brisk trade.  Except for the proliferation of images of women in their underwear kissing each other, very little has changed over the past generation.  We have all hung Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, or at least its inexpensive reproduction.  This is not the case with music.  Dorm rooms used to be filled with album sleeves, eight-track tapes, cassettes, and compact discs.  Students now download their music and store it electronically.  Why do they no longer feel the need to possess their music, as they once did, to hold the commodity over the heads of their friends?  On the other hand, when I was young we went to films and waited for them to be shown on television.  The idea of “owning” a film was foreign to us.  Dorm rooms now are littered with DVDs and Blu-Rays.  What is the significance of this distinction?  What does it tell us about the future of commerce and art?

Ultimately, the whole purpose of the historical avant-garde was to stand outside the society in which it existed to challenge the status quo.  How is it possible to do so?  It is as if one could levitate above a current along which one swims to watch fellow swimmers.  This problem was encountered by “Occupy” protestors, dependent as they were on the electronic gadgetry rooted in a manifestation of the system of capital they hoped to renounce.  These kinds of paradoxes presented themselves to the surrealists, as well.  The still had magazines and exhibitions; they hoped to use the tools of the artistic trade to undermine that trade, itself.  Are these protests valuable simply to draw attention to realities, or can they ever hope to achieve real change?  Looking up from their desks this week, I think that some of the students thought anew about what they hope to do when they emerge into a world that expects, at some level, their conformity.

Teaching, Week Eleven: Migraine

I wrote, recently, about conference travel during the semester.  The flexibility to cancel a class or two comes from the fact that, depending on the timeslot one is assigned, some classes meet more often than do others.  I burned two classes on conferences this term, using all my reasonable flexibility.

But this week I suffered from a migraine.

I have had them since at least my undergraduate days.  I have come to associate their onset with sleep deprivation, the consumption of chocolate, and the threat of a chinook wind, the last being a common occurrence in southern Alberta.  Over the past eighteen months, I have been getting them about once every six or eight weeks, but this autumn, on account in part of the pleasant weather, I had gone about three months without one.  On Wednesday, just after noon, I started getting symptoms.  By three o’clock, it had set in.  I cancelled a social engagement for six o’clock and hoped a short nap might break the cycle of pain.

No such luck.

A migraine sufferer knows all one needs to know of hell.  How could I possibly face preparing Thursday class notes?  Luckily, I needed only to add a few details: I try not to leave anything to the last minute.  But the larger question looms: what should a teacher do when ill?  These days, many of us have an enlightened view of not spreading contagion in the workplace, but even a necessary absence can be disruptive, if it has not been previously announced.

I am no hero, but I am proud to have missed only one class, unannounced, over the past twenty years.  And, clearly, if I did not have a class on Thursday morning, I would have gone nowhere near campus.  But unlike my colleagues whose syllabi assign topics by the fortnight, those of us who assign specific topics to individual class meetings find disruptions to be very, well, disruptive.  I think I did a poor job with my Thursday lecture, but we did cover what I wanted to cover, one week before term papers are due.

I often try to remember what it was like when I taught in St. John’s and in London, Ontario, two locations that are prone to weather cancellations.  What did my syllabi look like then?  Clearly, they were disrupted on a regular basis.

Clearly, as well, I did not use any discretion or flexibility afforded me back then to travel to conferences.

Teaching, Week Ten: Hurray For Surrealism

We moved this week from Virginia Woolf to André Breton, and it was if a great light was turned on.  Some of our assumptions about students are true: they are, for example, drawn naturally to establishment challenges.  The surrealists refused to make any distinction between art and life; Breton wanted to live his art.  The historical avant-garde challenged everything about how works were created, disseminated, and received.  Although they found Breton’s primary work as impenetrable as everything else in the course, the class took to his ideas, asking pointed questions and providing insightful comments.

It would be unreasonable to expect that we teach only things that engage easily our students’ imaginations.  Of course, it is our job to engage their imaginations with everything from Ezra Pound to Eugene Jolas, but when our job is made easier, when the ideas sell themselves, we have to be ready to take advantage of those moments.  As a result, we had the two best classes of the semester this week, and that was not just because we turned back the clocks and benefited from an additional hour of sleep.

Surrealism appeals to students, but it did cross my mind that, after a couple of months, the class does have enough background in the subject to follow enthusiastically all the discussions in a course on modernism.  Is there anything we can do, I wonder, to speed along their coming up to speed?  Are there more background documents, more introductory material that can be taught in the first weeks?  Should we have a more restrictive set of prerequisites to ensure that students have more background before the course even begins?  Would moving to full-year courses leave us bored in January, or could we look forward to months and months of informed debate?

It comes down, once again, to the hermeneutic circle.  You cannot understand things until you have seen it all, and you cannot appreciate what you are seeing until you understand it.  The most gratifying part of teaching is seeing that light go on and benefitting from that glow.  We can do everything we can to rush to that point, but we spend each semester building to that moment, praying for it to come.

How that feels, how this week felt, is why I do this, and faith that it will come again and again is the best reason for a teacher’s optimism.

Teaching, Week Nine: The Snowy Streets Of Philadelphia

It is an inevitable fact that some of the most interesting academic conferences of the year will be held during the semester.  While some gatherings are known for meeting over Christmas or in May, for example, other conferences will interfere, inevitably, with teaching.  I tell my students that, while I have administrative and research responsibilities, they are my first priority during the semester.  So how do I reconcile conference travel with my presence in the classroom?

Well, this semester I scheduled two trips: one at the beginning of October, one at the end of the month.  The timing was not ideal, though it was better than travelling over successive weekends, say.  In both cases, I had skills exercises that were completed in my absence.  Because of the vagaries of scheduling -- holidays, the asymmetries of night classes, amongst other things -- there is an allowable range of contact hours across different sections, and so two missed classes fell within the margin of error.  The problem, of course, comes when unscheduled absences complicate the schedule.  As much as possible, of course, I now need to avoid illness, car trouble, or misplaced notes, the kinds of things that interrupt us at the best of time.

I was not ready for mother nature.

Early autumn in Pennsylvania brings weather in the teens.  Usually.  Last weekend, there was a snowstorm.  “Jack the Ripper Through a Wider Lens” was held at Drexel University, a half-hour stroll from the Independent Hotel.  I do not recommend walking in the slush in a mackintosh and Allen Edmunds.  By Saturday night, the return leg to Ottawa (continuing to Calgary) was in serious danger of cancellation.  What would happen if the itinerary was pushed back a full day?  I had a bag full of mid-terms, but getting home just before my return to class was not appealing.  Just before bed, I decided to have one more look at my iPhone: my flight had been cancelled at 11pm, ten hours before it was scheduled to depart.  The evening weather had prevented the U.S. Air equipment from arriving in Philadelphia.

By travelling through Phoenix, instead of Ottawa, after a nine-hour delay, I got through customs in Calgary after midnight on Monday.  In bed by 3:30am, after driving down to Lethbridge, I was able to take my place at an 8:30am Economics candidate lecture on technology investment and education in Pakistan.  I still had three or four papers to finish.

I find travel a chore, at the best of times.  When the clock is ticking and campus commitments beckon, it is even more stressful.  I would not trade my experience at Drexel for anything.  But the enduring lesson is to leave plenty of time on either end, just to make sure that one can fulfill our commitments to our students.