Why I Prep at the Kitchen Table

I don't have to be anywhere in particular today, astonishingly (other than office hours at 2, but we all know how vital those are), so I'm sitting at my desk in front of my laptop prepping for tomorrow. Normally I don't prep this far in advance anymore--only 1.5 semesters in and I've developed the habit of prepping at 7 am the day of class--but I (again, astonishingly) don't have much vital work to do today, so I'm trying to do what I can ahead of time.

Normally I prep at the kitchen table, because normally it's 7 am and I'm eating breakfast and drinking my coffee as I work. And at 7 am, that's the only spot in the house that has access to any kind of natural light, which makes it a little more pleasant to be up and working.

My god! I can't prepare when the computer is available. I write down a discussion question, note a single passage, and then go through the Internet Cycle (two email accounts, bloglines, statcounter, blogger comments). There's nothing new in any of these places, or very rarely anything--I'm running through the cycle every 5 minutes, after all. When I do get an email, I am now replying with shocking alacrity, for normally I am not a good email-responder. This is wildly unproductive. No wonder it used to take me 4 hours to prep for a 50-minute class back in the early days, when I did all my prep at my desk.

Part of my problem, too, is that I still have it in my head that I need 4 pages of notes (handwritten, peppered with questions) to get through a 50-minute class. I established this ratio back when I adjuncted my first class in 2005. I probably established it, in fact, the very first time I prepared for a class: that was what I needed that one time, so that is what I have needed every subsequent time. Never mind that I've now clocked in more than 250 class hours at this new gig (a 4/4 load does beef up one's experience pretty damn quick). And these days, in this class in particular, 2 pages of notes really seems to get the job done--I rarely finish up everything that I want to cover anymore. But I still have the 4:50 ratio in my head, and I don't feel at peace until I have all those pages filled and/or an Emergency Backup Group Activity jotted down in the margins. (I almost never need said activity--which is good, because they're usually kind of stupid.)

Here's the thing. I have no idea how other people prepare for classes. I have no idea what their notes look like. Now, I'm sure that different things work for different people, and that modeling my prep on someone else's wouldn't be a good idea. But it troubles me that I'm essentially working from an only slightly evolved version of what I did the very first time I ever taught (by which I mean the first *day*, not the first course). True, I have more discussion questions now and a whole lot less leading the students through the narrative, unless we're dealing with something particularly tricky. And this class is going really well, so I think that my discussion/lecture method is working--it's the literal preparation, what I'm putting down on paper and how I'm organizing myself (and how much time I'm putting into it), that I sometimes suspect could use some improvement.

So, what do you guys do when you're prepping a class? Literature classes would be most obviously relevant to my own needs, but I'm interested in whatever you've got.

On a related note, I haven't been to very many undergraduate classes since I was an undergraduate (as a TA, I just attended lectures, which is not what I'm doing), so I've completely forgotten what kinds of things my professors used to say to get us talking. Once in a while I find myself asking a question that I really don't endorse: "What does this poem mean?" "What point is the author making in this story?" "Why did the author choose that particular image?" What I'm getting at is legitimate, but the questions themselves (as I phrase them) make me really uncomfortable, as they seem so...reductive. And based in authorial intention in a way that I find troubling. But often I can't think of another way to phrase them that the students will understand. (When I'm working off the cuff, I have a tendency to ask really wordy, convoluted questions that utterly baffle my students (and they should baffle them--they baffle me half the time), so I usually end up rephrasing them in a way that goes too far in the other direction, as in the questions above.) So, as a secondary, extra-credit question, what kinds of questions do you ask students to get them talking about the "deeper" levels of a literary text?

Blah

So I'm having a bit of a tough time over here. I don't really want to blog about it. Well, I sort of do, but I'm also trying really hard not to dwell more than I already am on things that are making me unhappy right now, so I'm not going to. Maybe later, when I'm on a more even keel.

K?

What's with the All the Hating, David P?

In an otherwise inoffensive Chronicle article ("Get Another Life"), David Perlmutter makes the following two derogatory references to the Middle Ages:

• The university is the site of a perfect storm of 21st-century expectations and medieval bureaucracy, and the promotion-and-tenure process is the clashing point.
• The tenure track may feel like the medieval torture of having each limb pulled in a different direction by whipped horses.

Without any genuine outrage, I nonetheless ask: What's the deal? Yes, everyone knows about drawing and/or quartering; no need to be all elliptical and toss the "medieval" in there. (According to Wikipedia, by the way, the horse-related torture is actually French quartering, and occurred as late as the 18th century. Medieval, I ask?)

More baffling, however, is this "medieval bureaucracy" of which DP speaks. Okay, this might be legitimately outside of my field, but I had no idea that the Middle Ages were particularly known for their byzantine bureaucratic processes. When we think of awful bureaucracy, what usually comes to mind? That's right--Kafka! Not even close to the M.A., my friends.

I sometimes wonder whether periodism is really as legitimately charged an issue as I often make it out to be (if only in my thoughts), but I can't help rolling my eyes--even with a well-maintained sense of humor--at this kind of thing.

Oh well. It's a losing battle.

Observation

A startlingly large number of people reach my blog by doing an image search on "let the cat out of the bag." Now granted, I too once did such an image search for the purposes of this post (and resulting in its rather awesome illustration), but that seemed like a somewhat unusual quest. What, I wonder, are all of these people looking for?

--I do mean to post some more pictures of my trip sometime, by the way. I just need to reduce the file sizes and whatnot and I'm horrifically lazy when it comes to doing things like that.

By the Way

--I saw Juno over the weekend. I found it extremely depressing, for some reason. And also kind of dull; the soundtrack was totally overdone and it was kind of like one long indie-rock video. Maybe it had been talked up too much for me to appreciate it on its own terms? Anyway, I was pretty disappointed--it looked so cute in the previews. Oh well.

Better

(I'm leading this post with a picture from my trip--one advantage of jet lag is plenty of odd middle-of-the-night hours to do things like download your photographs. This is a stretch of the Great Wall that we hiked along.)

I haven't really slept at all. I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 2:30; I finally got out of bed at 4. I had all four of my classes today, too--luckily I had three of them doing a totally student-generated discussion thing that didn't require much of me, but my 2:00 class, in which I lectured/led discussion, was dismal. Oh well. That class usually rocks and I told them ahead of time that, to me, it was 3 am, so I think they were okay with it. Plus I let them out five minutes early.

Anyway, despite the sleeplessness, things are looking better than they did yesterday. Just having a work day and remembering that it isn't totally horrible here helped a lot. I've stopped rehearsing my misery in my head--which I'd been doing on and off for two full days, with particularly forceful dwelling during the 19-hour journey home. It's good to shut down that conversation for a while.

To that end, I'll change the subject altogether with a couple of pictures from my trip (I was in Beijing). I'm too tired for extensive writing, so the images will have to speak for me for the time being.

The very coolest thing that we did was a rugged 10k hike along the top of the Great Wall.


A bit of the view:

Here are some monks at the beautiful Lama Temple.


And these are some doors that I liked.

Drained

I just got back from the Other Side. I have some pictures and things that I'll post later--it was a great trip on the whole--but right now I'm feeling, as the title suggests, drained.

I'm exhausted, of course, since I'm in a time zone that's 13 hours ahead of this one and I have to teach at 9 am tomorrow. But the drainage is primarily emotional.

There was a lot of serious talking over the last few days of my trip and, while I'm not going to get into the details and nothing really traumatic is going on, none of it made me look forward to coming back here. In fact, I spent most of my layover in Big Nearby Airport on the verge of tears. Because I don't want to be here. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I have never felt any real delight at the fact that I now have a tenure-track job at this school. Any. And I don't think that that's entirely the school's fault. It's just that I'm filled with resentment--in an undirected, targetless way--at how much this profession is asking me to give up, and at how very much I stand to lose. I may well lose a lot to this career, such as it is. And I don't know that it's worth it.

It's hard to know what to do when a success feels like a failure.

I'll feel better in a day or two, I know. But right now things are just kind of rough.