Academic Anxiety Dreams and a Question for Medievalists

Last night, I had my second anxiety dream about teaching Chaucer.  The first one, I was without any syllabi on the first day of classes, and then for some reason, went home instead of going to my first class (intro to the major) and then was trying to get back for the Chaucer class, but still didn't have any syllabus or calendar for any

The next day, I wrote up the basic academic calendar template for next semester.  That was three weeks ago, I think, soon after the previous semester finished.

Last night, my dream was more focused on not having the Chaucer calendar ready.  And when I woke up, I was thinking, but that's three weeks away, almost.  And it is, but there's no telling the dreaming that.  So today I'll start rereading the Canterbury Tales and thinking about the calendar.

I was looking at the Harvard Metro site the other day, and on one of the teaching pages, they suggested starting with the Shipman's Tale, as easier to read (in part because it's short and has a really basic plot-line) than the General Prologue.  So I'm thinking of doing that...  are there medievalists out there with thoughts?

Running in Place

On Friday, I went to the office, turned on the computer... and waited.  So I started cleaning up my office, which was pretty messy, as happens towards the end of the semester.  It took about half an hour for the computer to get to the log in stage.  So I logged in... and waited.  And reshelved my books, put away files, the usual.

I tried to do computer stuff, the things I'd come to campus to take care of, but every time I tried to open a program or something, I got the "(not responding)" thing, and it hung up.

Finally, I called the nice people at campus tech support.  The person who answered was, well, hesitant.  I said I needed help because my computer was so slow, and they suggested I could wait until next week.  I said I needed the computer sooner to do my work, and finally they agreed to send out a tech.  So I started reading.  And the tech came, and started doing stuff on the computer.  And waited...  because it hung up every time.

So at least it wasn't just me.

The upshot was that the tech took away my computer for re-imaging, and I'm supposed to meet with someone this afternoon who will bring it over and set it up for me.  So, YAY!  That should be good.

I have so much to do before classes start:

Chairing a search committee: our application deadline is soon, and we have to read everything before our first meeting.

Rereading the Canterbury Tales, because I haven't taught Chaucer in about 5 years.

Reading The Dolls' House, because I'm teaching intro to lit and the theater department is putting it on.  I don't think I've ever read it before...

Reading a couple of books.

Trying to exercise.

Practicing the violin...

A New Year Begins

Happy New Years.  Let's hope 2020 gets better.

(Though I saw that the US military basically committed an act of war...)

I spent much of the break so far with my Mom, helping her travel to visit my brother's family for Christmas, and then at her retirement community, trying to help make things work. Her short term memory has really failed over the past several months.

A medicine she was taking may be at least partially responsible.  So she's off that medicine for almost a month now, and seems slightly less confused, but she's not at all where she was 6 months ago.  (She began taking the medicine about May, and it was stopped in late November, I think.)  I don't know if things will get better or not.

It was a hard year for her: she had to move from a retirement community she loved that closed (because the fire department said it couldn't be made reasonably fire safe or accessible for firefighting) to a much smaller one.  And she got a cancer diagnosis (very early stage).  And her last sibling died.  These are all very hard things, and there's a lot of uncertainty, and it's all taxing for her.

Fortunately, my brother has stepped up wonderfully, as have two of my aunts (my Dad's sisters), so I'm very grateful.  Still, it's hard when you can't make things any better, not really.

I got home last night and slept in my own, comfy bed.  I'm happy to be home, and have a lot of work to prepare for the coming semester and for taking over as chair.

There may be big changes in our department.  We may drop our tiny and weak MA program.  That would mean that we'd lose four grad courses a year and a two course faculty reassignment, so basically 1.5 FTE in support for graduate students.  (We'll have to continue at least some grad courses for at least a year so the folks in the program now can finish.)  I'm imagining we can teach a couple more general education type courses, which would be helpful for the university. 

At least some folks in the administration want us to continue our grad program: grad students pay much more tuition.  At least one administrator wants us to go all on-line, and promises massive help recruiting people in business.  However, we've never been able to support or compensate faculty for working with thesis (or whatever project) students.  And we're very much a regional university, and have served students in our region.  If we go all on-line, then the regional students might as well do an MA at a much stronger program (there are many).  (Our program's strongest days were in the 80s or so, when local schools gave teachers who earned an MA a raise; then the education program started doing an MA in teaching program that was pretty... weak and easy.  Once we lost that cohort of teachers, our program got even smaller and weaker.  And then the raise went away...)

I'm hoping as chair I can help be creative and get a course reassignment for one of our writing non-tenure track folks to work deeply with our Writing Center and Writing Program folks to develop and support a Writing Across the Curriculum initiative.  Currently, the upper admin in charge provides some financial support for a couple of MA students, but they don't have the education or experience to really do the higher level work we need done.  And once they're all on-line, they won't be on campus to do that work.  On the other hand, if we can provide a course reassignment for a PhD in writing stuffs to work on it, I think we'd make better progress.

The other thing, though, is that with another 1.5 FTE to put into work with undergrads, we'll have a hard time justifying any new hires unless something really specific comes up.  (It's been more than a decade since anyone around here has been able to do an old-fashioned line replacement, the thing where a Victorianist retired and a department got to hire a new Victorianist.  That's a thing of the past, and it's not coming back.)

So there's lots to think about.

Two questions: for anyone who's been chair of a department: please suggest stuff I should read/learn.

And two: I'm teaching Chaucer again, for the first time in maybe 5 years.  I'm looking forward to it, but I'd love some suggestions of the most useful and important books or articles to read before the semester starts!

Sometimes a Great Student

One of my students was so brilliant today; we were discussing "The Prioress's Tale," and he talked about how he'd hated it (but not in a "so I didn't bother to read it" but in a smart, engaged way), and when we got to the latrine description, he said that that's where he'd basically slammed the book shut and been done with it until later.

It was just great, you know?  I love when students have a strong, engaged reaction, and how can you have that reaction to "The Prioress's Tale" without wanting to slam the book shut at several points?

Bringing it All Together

Yesterday, my Chaucer class had its second day on "The Clerk's Tale."  I'd put together a handout with passages to look at, and things to think about, finishing with looking at how the tale responds to "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale." 

Let's just say that if it wasn't disastrous, it wasn't hugely successful, either.  My students can't seem to remember the basics of what happened in the WoB's prologue or tale.  I'd put suggested places to look on the handout, and also suggested they refer to their notes, but their notes seem remarkably skimpy overall. 

I've now put them on notice that they have to be able to make connections between the various texts in order to do well, and I'll try to encourage that further in class discussion. 

Count me: disappointed.

The Verse Moment

I was teaching "The Clerk's Tale" the other day, and wanted to talk a bit about how the rhyme royal stanza works as a stanza.  And then I realized that my mostly English major students have no idea how to talk about verse as verse; they have no idea because we aren't teaching them in our lit courses.

So, I tried on the fly, and I don't think I did terribly well.  (I used "Adam Scriveyn" to try, and I should have gone with something different, probably.  But there it is.)  We did get to talking about how meter feels in the mouth, how repetitions work in the mouth and ears, and so forth, and a little to how the stanza builds.  Let's just face it: it wasn't my best teaching moment.

So the question of the day:  where/how do your English majors learn to read verse as verse, if they do?

And how do you teach students to read verse as verse, if you do?

What strategies do you use?  What examples?

Fake Medievalist

I'm teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in spring semester, as I do about every other year.  I love teaching Chaucer's CT.  It's a blast. 

But.

I'm not a real medievalist, and it's hard to feel like I'm caught up enough on CT or Middle English stuffs to do a good job.

Last year, when I put in to teach it, and also had a course release coming, the chair said that it might be better if I taught the other 3 credit course, a lower level GE, than the Chaucer course, an upper level, mostly majors, but also GE.  And I told her that if I didn't teach Chaucer, then I probably wouldn't put in to teach it again.  (Since I'm the only one who ever puts in to teach it, it would disappear from our curriculum totally.)  And she looked at me like I was nuts, which might be so, because I don't want to cut off my own nose to spite my face, so to speak, and asked why.  And I told her that it's hard to feel caught up enough if I teach it every other year, and less than that wouldn't be worth the time to try to get caught up.  And she gave me the look that an English Ed person who thinks they can teach everything in any literature because they've taught high school gives those of us who've specialized in lit, and asked what I meant.  And I said, well, I keep up in Shakespeare and early modern, and I try to keep reasonably up on critical theory, and about composition stuffs, and Chaucer added to that was a lot.  And she gave me a look like I'm an incompetent, and said maybe, and then it turned out that I got the Chaucer, so that made me happy.

Back to the fake medievalist problem.  Every time I prep CT (and at this point, I'd have a ton more work to do to prep Troilus and Criseyde, which I've never taught), I try to read a book or two, and a few critical essays to get a feel for things.  Yesterday, I finished Paul Strohm's Chaucer's Tale, which I found very readable and a pleasure, except for two small issues; more on those in a moment.

At several points within the text, Strohm mentions The Romance of the Rose, and then points out that Chaucer translated it but that the text is lost.  And my brain went, but it's in my Riverside!  How could it be lost.  It's right there.

Except, my Riverside isn't right here, it's being rebound!  (In buckram, which is a fun word to say!)

So then I checked Wikipedia, and it talked a bit about problems of the text, and that most scholars think that there are at least three poets represented in the Middle English translation, and while one of them may be Chaucer, the others probably aren't.  This isn't something new, either, but an old controversy, dating from the late 19th century, based primarily on linguistic sorts of evidence.

And once again, I was reminded that I'm very much a fake medievalist, because I don't remember ever reading anything about it.

To be fair, I've only ever taken one class where we read the Romaunt (that's the Middle English translation), an undergraduate course I took before I was even thinking about enrolling in a PhD program, where we read Chaucer's translation of Boethius, along with a modern translation, the Romaunt, and Troilus and Criseyde, too.  (It's the course I bought my Riverside for, even, so that's old!)  So maybe the professor talked about it, or maybe I was supposed to read the introduction, but I don't remember it coming up, nor would I likely have understood the import at that stage of my studies.  (Honestly, I had a hard time with Boethius!)  (And that's the only course I've ever read T&C for, too; no wonder I wouldn't feel confident teaching it.)

So, yes, I'm a fake medievalist.  What else should I read in the next several weeks to help me do a decent job with CT in spite of my only playing a medievalist on TV?


A bit about Strohm's book.  It's so readable and fun, and really gives a sense that I might understand medieval London a bit. 

I have two critiques, though.  The first is that I wanted Strohm to be just a bit more chronological, to remind me of dates just a tad more, so that I wouldn't have to flip back and try to remember that this happened in October 1386, and that other happened in July 1386.  It seemed like 1386 is a mess, and the way he told the story didn't clarify the mess for me as much as I might wish. 

The second is that the book pretty much stops at 1386.  I think that's because scholars really don't have any idea where Chaucer was after that for a good long while.  But I don't remember Strohm telling the reader how he knows that Chaucer was in Kent.  There might be reason for him to be in Kent, but how do we know?  So I wanted more of that.  And then I wanted more on the move to Westminster, and on what Thomas Chaucer, his son, was up to in those years.  And more on the leadup to Henry IV's takeover.


Coincidentally, one of the books on CD I picked up at the local library recently (and am listening to as bedtime listening) is William Rosen's Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century.  (For someone who doesn't like spy thrillers or murder mysteries, the pickings are slim in the CD section.  I could get 20 books on CD about cat murders, or abc murders, but hardly any other fiction.  So I often listen to history and biography and such, which is interesting and good stuff!) 

So I've been up to my ears (see what I did there!) in the Edwards I and II, and a bit of III, and some Richard II.

New Assignment?

Like most instructors, I'm constantly trying to think of better assignments for various courses.  This time around, I'm thinking about my junior level Canterbury Tales course.  I'm quite happy with the word paragraph assignment that Sisyphus (at Academic Cog) shared with me a while back.  That gets students writing regularly, focusing closely on the text, and makes up about 5-7 pages of writing for the semester. 

But I'm looking for a longer assignment, one that will challenge students, but not be out of reach.  The thing is, they're learning Middle English in the course, and our library resources are limited, and I'm not a real medievalist, so I don't feel like asking them to do a full on research paper is right.  When I did, some while ago, they tended to either find one tiny idea and then look for critical essays to support that idea, or they'd find a critical essay and like that idea, and try to rework it.  In any case, they weren't really researching anything new.  (That contrasts with my senior seminar students, who can usual do something new because I tend to teach several less canonical texts, and they can find new things to think and argue about those texts.)

I had a conversation not too long ago with our honors guy, about a student's potential project, and he had an idea of asking a student to find a critical essay and then read everything the paper cited, and then write a paper talking about the critical conversation represented in the original essay.  Now that seemed like a great idea, and I started thinking about it in case the student wants to do a project, and then I thought maybe that would work for the longer project for the course.  So yesterday, I started looking at crucial essays written in the past ten years about the various tales, and I realized that it's probably unrealistic to expect my students to do that sort of project.  For one thing, most of the critical essays cite 40 or so other texts, many of them medieval, some Latin, and many very theoretical (Derrida, for example).  They looked like really interesting essays, but my students just aren't strong enough readers of criticism to work with them very well.

I'm thinking of using one of them, though, to work with students on reading critical essays, and then building an assignment from there.  In the past, I've given students a list of topics and had them do basic lit reviews, and I think I might go with that.

I'd love to hear about what sorts of assignments people give for lit students to help them build towards real research skills.

Looking for Brilliance, CT Edition

I'm teaching "Sir Thopas" for the first time in either a long time, or a really long time, I think.  Long enough, or poorly enough, that I can't find my usual folder of notes, so I've been spending time today prepping, reading up, and so on.

It seems like there's a lot to pack into 50 minutes from a very short text, no?

So, what would you absolutely want to include?  What should I just not dare forget?

How do I get across to my students who haven't read tons of romances how absolutely brilliant this is?

And soon, I'll be teaching the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale," and I'm in the same boat, except it's a lot longer.

Suggestions?

(I think I end up cutting stuff from the CT class for time; but I put these in this time, and especially the CYT seems really important to me, or at least it did when I made up the syllabus.  Not being a real medievalist, I sometimes wonder if I've made the best choices in what to teach over the semester; maybe I'll try to go faster over the KT next time?  It seems like I take a good long time trying to get them to read and get the language and such, and it seems necessary.  Would any real medievalist be up for sharing their CT calendar/syllabus, please?)

I'm at that point in the spring and the semester when it feels like I should be desperate, but somehow I'm not.  I'm reasonably caught up on grading, and while spring seems especially slow, I'm less cranky about it than a lot of folks I know.  But I'm sort of plugging away at work and life, and doing some birding more than most springs, but I don't have much to write about that's really exciting.

I did see my first ever Yellow-rumped Warbler in my yard (I've seen them elsewhere, just not in my yard), at my suet feeder.  I'm guessing it was hungry and that was better than nothing.  I saw it for a short bit the other day, long enough that using my binoculars (pretty much always at the ready next to this window) to identifying a relatively common, distinct bird was good, not long enough to dig out the camera and take a picture.  But I haven't seen it since.

I also saw the first Brown-headed Cowbird of the year in the yard this morning.  So I do think spring is on the way.

But there's not much else to say about it that isn't complaining about the cold.

All stressed out and no place to go

Pretty much says it all.

I hate the darkness at mid-afternoon.

We started talking about the "Friar's Tale" today; I spent a good chunk of time this weekend rereading the tale and making a handout to set up comparisons/contrasts:

Games and quitting

The Arch-deacon and the "Yeman's" boss
The Summoner and the Fiend at work
The Carter, the Widow, and the Summoner

Prayers ending tales: the Friar, the Prioress, the Nun's Priest

And a question about where the pilgrims are on their journey, and where we are

It was good work for me, because it got me thinking a lot more structurally about how the tale works; I'd never quite figured out why the heck we get that long description of the Arch-deacon, a character who doesn't really have a place in the tale at all. But then (I know, I'm slow), I started thinking about the Yeman complaining about his (unnamed) boss, and I think putting the two bosses in parallel makes a lot of sense of the long Arch-deacon's description. At any rate, it made better sense this time for me, and so I hope I can help my students make sense of it.

I think one difference between my reading and my students, is that I trust Chaucer enough to think he has a damned good reason for doing what he does, and that he's describing stuff because there's a point to it, so I go looking for the point and try to figure it out. My students just figure it's just there to make them struggle, and so they just try to get through.

I don't know that I trust many authors, but I trust Chaucer. Isn't that an odd concept? I trust Shakespeare's theatricality, too. But sometimes I just don't get how a scene works, even working within my trust. For example, the Macduff/Malcolm scene just seems overwrought and way too long. And I keep figuring, Shakespeare must be doing something theatrical here, and I'm not seeing it, but I still don't see it.

Question of the day: if you were sent to an empty library for a long stay, would you take a collected Chaucer or a collected Shakespeare, and why?

And if you chose Chaucer, which would you read (or reread) last, Boece or the Astrolab thing?

And if you chose Shakespeare, what would you read last?

(I will confess, I've never read Chaucer's Boece nor the Astrolab thing; this is just part of the reason I'll never be a real medievalist!)

Layers

I started rereading The Canterbury Tales yesterday. I'm teaching Chaucer again for the first time in four+ years, so I have some serious rereading to do. I'm also rereading some criticism, and reading some for the first time.

I know, all of you who don't get to call it "work" when you read great literature are wondering how you can get in on this plush gig!

So, I'm reading along, through the worst sentence in the whole work (okay, there MAY be something worse in Sir Thopas, but you get my drift), which happens to be the first sentence. Let's just say, it's doing all this work, and wound up around itself in ways that aren't exactly inviting. Maybe some people know about Zephirus and his "sweete breeth," but I have to look it up. And the running of the Ram? At least I have a vague memory of the atrology stuff at this point, and don't look it up. (And how pathetic is it that scholars still study bits of astrology in order to read stuff? At least I'm not a Simon Forman fan!) The first sentence, by the way, is 18 lines long, so that by the time you get to "Thanne longen folk to goon on pigrimages," you're ready for a breath and a new start. Happily, that's when the sentence gets fun. (Well, except that the bit about nature pricking the birds in their "corages" is fun.)

It reminds me of the opening sentence of Paradise Lost. Get students through that (only 16 lines, because Milton was a whuss!), and you can get them through the whole 12 books!

So, as I said, I've started in, and I notice a handwritten note. It's miniscule, so I must have written it before I started wearing reading glasses. Oh the day! I've translated "holt and heeth" to "grove and field" in the margin, copying the gloss from below. (It's something you'd only do for the first lines, or your margins would be covered in re-glossings.)

And then I get to this, at line 16: "3 syl"
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende

And at line 22: "3 syl"
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage

And at line 27: "4 syl"
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

Yes, at some point in my past, I decided to note the number of syllables you'd use for the word "Canterbury" in order to make the verse come out "properly" decasyllabic. (Yeah, it LOOKS iambic pentameter to me, too, but real medievalist verse types will tell you that it's not; it's something something decasyllabic verse. Yet more evidence that I belong to the early modern period: I no longer remember what it's supposed to be called, but I'm pedantically anxious enough to worry about it.) Now, if you're like me, you did the finger count thing with the syllables, touching fingers in order as you say the lines. My students see me do this all the time in class, and seem to think it's funny that I can't count without using my fingers.

So, there's all sorts of assumptions there about the whole ten syllable thing, but I'm trying to remember if I should make the schwa sound at the end of the lines or drop it. (If I say it, it's basically feminine rhymes. But I seem to remember that Chaucer was already dropping lots of word ending schwa sounds.) And now I'm feeling truly inadequate.

My Chaucer is a Riverside Chaucer, printed back in 1987, and purchased not long after when I took my second Chaucer class, a class on Troilus and Criseyde. So we've been through nearly 20 years together, off and on.

The first layers of notes (in Troilus) are in thin black indelible ink pen, the kind I used after learning to take field notes in it as an undergrad. The alternative was pencil, which I switched to when I started grading and indelible was a disadvantage, and erasable vital. (Because how often have you written something on a student's paper that just wasn't worded right, and had to reword?)

There's an ink note referencing line 76, wondering why the knight's tunic is "besmotered" (a word I absolutely adore and would love to use in day to day conversation, as in "my goodness, [dog name,] you're all besmotered!")

Then there's a later pencil note about Saint Eligius being famous for refusing to take an oath (referencing line 20, where the Prioresse, we're told, swears her greatest oaths "but by Seinte Loy"). Where did I get that bit of information?

Later pencil notes actually cite some sources of information (Muscatine, for example); I think those come from once I started teaching Chaucer and needed to be able to explain where I was getting ideas.

My most recent layer of notes are in larger, more reading glasses friendly sizes, from the last time I taught Chaucer, probably.

You'll be glad to know that once again, the pilgrims decided to have a story contest on the way to Canterbury! Today, I begin the "Knight's Tale"! You may laugh, but I'm smiling as I type this and plan my reading for the day!

And inevitably, I'll pencil in a few more notes, in even bigger writing. Another class on Chaucer, another layer of notes. What could be better?

I'm also getting a book from the library. Chaser highly recommended David Treuer's The Hiawatha, so I couldn't resist asking my public library to borrow it from another public library in their consortium thing for me!