MLA Thoughts 3

by Dr Davis on January 2, 2010

Yes, these will be going on forever! (Okay, not really.)

I have become a lot less formal on the blog recently. I’m not sure how that fits with my academic persona (as mentioned in the last post), but it fits who I am.

Conference buddies
2-students-bigBeing totally on my own at a conference is NOT great. I need to find out if Mikee is going to K’zoo. (Just FB’ed her.)

I think she mentioned going and taking grad students with her. …Hmm. I’m jealous. I don’t have any grad students. Oh well. I can’t have everything.

Scholarship
I was asked twice what I had done that the person might have read. I felt very… under-academic? bad?

I said I hadn’t done anything they would have read, which was true.

But I have done stuff. So what do I call that?

One of my friends said to say that I primarily work in “the scholarship of teaching.”

When I got that note, I was like, What? I do not. I mean, I don’t do a lot of research… And then I realized that, yes, I do. What I do IS scholarship of teaching. So, wow. I do something scholarly. They still wouldn’t have read it, but at least I have an area of expertise now.

Comfortable
I feel more comfortable with the community college teachers. (Probably, a little, because of the section above.)

CC teachers do what I do, they put the focus on their teaching.

Then I wondered if I am more comfortable with CC teachers because I feel better than them? Am I MORE worthy because I publish, or whatever? No. It isn’t like that. I am doing less than my co-presenter. So it’s not that I feel better.

I think it really is that we feel the same way about teaching. Teaching is our focus.

I wish, though, that the CCs in my area had what my other co-presenter has… Her load is 3/4. Ours is 5/5. And, as you know, as an adjunct, I’ve been doing 6/6.

Anyway, I wonder, once again, if this means I should track myself entirely in CCs.

But I don’t think I should. I think that my work also is valid at SLACs. Certainly it is not at an R-1, but I don’t want to teach at an R-1, so that’s okay. (My mother, of course, thinks I should. But she doesn’t get the difference.)

So, CCs and SLACs are my preference. … I would like to do rhetoric and composition at the higher levels, so I guess my preference is still SLACs.

But for MLA, the choices are “big schools” and CCs. Of those two, I’m definitely a CC kind of gal.

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Going Back in Time?

by Dr Davis on January 2, 2010

I am teaching Early British Literature again in the three week mini-term next May. But, since Computers and Writing is in May instead of in June, I will need a substitute for the first week of class.

What do you think of the idea, a daring one I know, of going backwards in time?

What if, instead of a history of the British Isles from prehistory through 800 and then starting with Beowulf, I go backwards from now and start with Swift?

gulliver2I could do my usual three days on Gulliver’s Travels, and then move on to Shakespeare. Since I usually have the students watch two plays, that would give me the days I need for C&W.

Then we’d go through the poets (Marlowe, Raleigh, Shakespeare, Herbert) and then hit Chaucer. After that Sir Gawain and Everyman. Etc.

What do you think of this idea? Is there any reason we have to go forward?

This class is NOT really sequential with Later British Lit. Most people who take it only need one sophomore literature course. So it’s not like they’d be confused when they got to 800 and then started back up with 1751.

I did a trick with little kids, which I might use some version of for the sophomores.

With the little kids, when I was telling a story in the past, we handed out smarties. Each package of smarties had ten (or twelve?) smarties in it. So that was basically a decade. Each decade we went back in history, we handed out one smartie package. Eventually we ended up with so many smarties the kids didn’t want to eat them all and we shared them. I won’t be going quite that far back and these are college students, so I probably won’t have to give away extra smarties.

Does anyone have any feedback on this approach? Have you ever tried it?

I think I may do it since it will a) allow me to participate in my conference and b) mix the class up for me in what might be an interesting way.

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