My well is dry this week. I'd been mulling over what I could write about, but no topic coalesced. I read the news but nothing elicits a strong enough reaction for me to put thought to paper, as it were. My main preoccupation these days is the new course I'm teaching with new students at a new school, or more precisely, a new kind of institution from the ones I've known up to now.

On the heels of two wildly successful openers on the state of graduate teaching, I conclude my series (and my stock of new ideas for 2008) with this, the third and final installment, which is to the series as the NY Giants' final drive was to the Super Bowl, minus to be sure the horse-faced leadership and the surprising reversal of fortune. (And for those of you who missed the game's most racist ad, see here.)

Last week I laid out some initial thoughts around the question of graduate teaching. J Lee and H Saussy both responded, and I'm going to begin this week by addressing some of the things they wrote, mainly as a way of getting myself started. First, J Lee asked if the point of graduate education in the humanities was actually to train future professors, since that isn't always the case elsewhere. That can of worms is particularly large, and part...

I've been having a minor crisis of confidence around my teaching lately. The problem is more or less this: I don't really know if we know what we're doing, especially when it comes to the kind of work we assign. The problem feels different (and simpler) in the undergraduate classroom than in the graduate one. I take the goal of undergraduate teaching to make students smarter, more capable of analytic thinking and expression, and more able to ...

We have spent two weeks now on this process of dissecting, marinating, fermenting, and squeezing Mallon’s questions, hoping, perhaps, for some alchemical transformation to occur. I almost feel sorry for the guy... NOT. (I finally saw Borat.) Despite Mallon we have, I think, managed to have an interesting discussion about the current intellectual environment, and pose some of our own questions. I’m going to follow E Wesp’s lead and step back fr...

After the fine posts by E Hayot, C Bush, and S Shirazi on Mallon's unfortunate list, I feel a little like the last guy on line at the Kiwanis dunk-tank booth at the local fair--the clown inside is already pretty soaked. Still, I've paid my dollar, so to speak, and it's fun to send Mallon down into the cold water again. And it's for a good cause. So to speak.

Next week we'll be devoting the site to answering a series of questions posed to humanists by Thomas Mallon, author of a number of novels and former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanites, in a recent issue of The American Scholar (the official publication of Phi Beta Kappa, for those of you hooked up to the secret handshake). We'd like to invite you all to participate in this series of responses, either via the comments o...

I often read The Skeptical Inquirer, the publication of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. I have even assigned pieces from the journal/magazine to my students. I find the articles useful as exaggerated (a term which I do not use critically here) examples for evaluating arguments. Though I have a soft spot for the pseudosciences, I like that the Skeptical Inquirer does not limit itself strictly to eva...

Nipping at the heels of S Shirazi's review of canvas sneakers, and mine of my new flat-screen television, I offer here another product review for your instruction and delight: books of theory I taught in my undergraduate comparative literature class this quarter. The mode of consumption to which this product review refers is, then, a pedagogical one. I have rated each book in three categories: Difficulty (10 is Heidegger, 1 the Cathy comic str...

In the spirit of E Hayot’s short but bitter posting on Friday, I offer a few scattered reflections and factoids. Deconstruction Aids in the War on Terror Something for the file of the travels of the word “deconstruct” and its kin. Kai Ryssdal of the NPR finance show “Marketplace” reported last week on the political fallout of “the deconstruction of the Dubai ports deal.”

The last time I felt like a failure was during the final meeting of an ostensibly three-week-long workshop on Constrained Writing. I pitched the workshop to the directors of 826 Chicago, and, weirdly, at least one of them seemed enthusiastic about it. (Note: if you don’t know about 826, you should check it out – it’s a pretty great program [co-founded by author / publishing maverick Dave Eggers], and anybody who finds themselves despondent ove...

I have writer's block. It's not crippling, but like a chronic illness, it's something that needs to be managed, and I am at an impasse right now. I've always struggled with writing—I was the kind of writer who spent hours and hours on a single introductory paragraph, unable to move forward until I felt I had each sentence and word in its place. I'm a little better now. I can use some form of note-taking and freewriting to get myself started; ...

"We dangle our three magic letters (Ph.D.) before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time of life when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent" ––William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus", 1903. In 1978 Theodore Streleski, a Phd student in Mathematics at Stanford, bludgeoned his advisor, Karel deLeeuw, to death with a ball peen hammer...

Anyone who bothers reading the forums over at the Chronicle of Higher Education's website will eventually come across discussions about teacher-student relationships. Most of these begin with an apparently naive poster saying something like, "I find myself becoming friends with a student and want to meet her [it's always a her] outside of the office. I don't think my wife will mind, and I don't have any feelings towards the student; she's just...

As part of my administrative duties, I am visiting the classes of new faculty in our program. For the graduate student lecturers who are only with us for the year, it’s part of their “faculty development” and mentoring so that they’ll become better teachers wherever they’re headed next. For our full-time faculty, in addition to faculty development, the class visit is one element among many in evaluating performanc...

I pulled an all-nighter to write my first college English paper, on an electric typewriter. The paper was on Beowulf and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I got a disappointing B on it. But it wasn’t just a B. It arrived with the phantom of another grade; for my professor had blotted out the + or – next to the B with such thoroughness that no amount of holding the paper up to the light could determine whether she had demo...

My students and I talk a lot about "ideology" lately. They are writing research papers in which they are required to come up with a conspiracy theory (or simply a reading of a thing or event against the mainstream accepted narrative). I asked them for suggestions of a film we might watch later in the term. Overwhelmingly, I got requests for--you guessed it--Conspiracy Theory, starring Mel Gibson. A close second was everybody's favorite ideolog...

Dear Printculture readers: Since I started my new administrative position three weeks ago, my email traffic has increased exponentially. I write to inform you that because the bulk of my waking hours are occupied by sending and receiving emails, I have not had occasion to read or hear or see or do anything of much interest. Much of the email traffic is about meetings to come and meetings just past. When I am not attending to my email, I am a...

A followup to E Wesp's post on trading classrooms: a month ago I had an idea for a new television show called, you guessed it, "Extreme Teaching." Possible challenges: the competitors get handed a novel they've never read five minutes before class begins and have to lecture; competitors have to teach an entire semester of a language they've never studied (this is my personal dream, though no one will--rightly--ever let me do it); competitors h...

I have spent this summer trying on my new administrative wings (and webbed feet) as one of three assistant directors of the writing program (expository, not creative). My official appointment began July 1, but I’ve been working on and off since late May. So far, so good. I’ll still be teaching half time, so it’ll be interesting learning to balance the roles of teacher and administrator when the school year begins. Moving fr...

Last Sunday the New York Times published a long article on the state of state-sponsored higher education in this country, focusing entirely on the stories of five University of Arizona undergraduates. To say that the article was not good publicity for the university would be to understate the case considerably. The major things I got out of the piece were that our professors don't care about teaching, just research, that students can get degre...

K Klingensmith's Friday post reminded me of one of the more useful heuristic concepts in my little arsenal of ideas: Ted's Law. Ted's Law was invented by my friend "Ted" when he was about 10 years old. His class was studying mathematical powers (you know, where 103 equals 10 x 10 x 10 equals 1000), and Ted came up with a way of explaining that rule in plain English for his classmates. His formulation, which I can't quite remember, was immortal...

For the second unit of my writing course called “The Social Life of Things” (title taken from the volume edited by Arjun Appadurai), I assign Agnès Varda’s 2000 documentary film The Gleaners and I [Les Glaneurs and La Glaneuse]. The film first introduces us to the traditional practice of gathering leftover crops after the harvest, as depicted in famous paintings by Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton, and then moves on to t...

On Monday I finished the first draft conference of the semester with my students. Conferences entail meeting with each of my 24 students one-on-one for half an hour over the course of three days to discuss the draft of the first essay. Before meeting with them, I read their drafts, make margin comments, and write about a page, single-spaced, of end comments. I’ve gotten much better over the years, so that I don’t have to stay up in...

Several years ago, there was a late-night dating show called “Ship Mates” in which two people met for an extended blind date on a weekend cruise ship. Sometimes, you could watch the entire arc of a relationship unfold in the space of half an hour. On the eve of meeting my new students for the first day of Spring semester classes, it occurs to me that teaching is a bit like an extended blind date (though never having been on a blind...