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Late Spring To-Do List
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Thursday, May 18, 2006 Course design and the writing process
This fall I'll be teaching three courses, all of which I've already taught some version of. (The schedule was set up long before I even interviewed with DRU, with the intention that, whoever the department wound up hiring, they'd be able to slide into these classes with ease): Period Survey, Author Survey, and a composition seminar. The comp class will require the most revision, since I'm adapting the course that I taught at INRU two years ago, parts of which were designed to take advantage of the fact that 2004 was a presidential-election year. However, I'm switching some texts around in my other courses and generally trying to learn from my teaching experiences these past few semesters.
And it occurs to me that my approach to course design, or at any rate lesson planning, is weirdly similar to my approach to writing. As I've discussed, I'm a drafter. I write draft after draft after draft, usually into the double digits, of everything I write. I used to find this exasperating about myself--why can't I just call it done? Why can't I be faster at this?--but I've come to accept and often even to enjoy my own rhythms; in a way, it takes the pressure off to know that, okay, I'm going to have to be writing nearly every day for a month rather than screaming through a project in a week and a half--but on any given day I don't have to produce something brilliant, or even produce that much. I just have to plug away (at least until the end, when I do get truly crazy and obsessive). I think I've now come to have a similar attitude toward teaching, born more of necessity than of nature. Teaching a 3/4 load this year was a shock, especially since each semester involved two new preps and I was on the market and I was still finishing my dissertation in the fall. So after the first few weeks of overpreparing, I learned the value of "prepared enough." I'd do the readings, type up any handouts or quizzes the night before, and then do all my lesson planning on the train into campus, scratching out big themes, lines of questioning, and important passages on a legal pad. To my surprise, this worked really well in the classroom, although I did always feel that I was perched on the edge of total disaster and might tumble into it at any moment. In my period survey this spring, in the interests of time, I mostly just adapted or outright repeated what I'd done in the same class in the fall--sometimes using the exact same handwritten notes. I didn't love the straight repetition (one feels rather like a jukebox spitting out the same old tune), but I liked it when I had the time to think through a slightly different classroom strategy or to build on what I'd noticed from the previous semester. I also started occasionally scratching notes in the margins of my lesson plans as I was teaching, indicating things that worked well; things that needed more time; things to be scrapped. Now that the term is over and I'm looking ahead to the fall, when I'll be teaching two of these same classes all over again, I'm also in the process of typing up my lesson plans based on these handwritten ones. My intention is to create a Word file for every text I teach, which I'll adapt and add to each year. Any given semester, I'll print out the document and then mark it up by hand: yes to this, this, and that part; skip that bit; try something else here. We'll see how it plays out in practice, but I really like this as a way of thinking about teaching a given text or a given course: as a process with many stages and many drafts, and always with the potential for one more round of revisions. And when I teach two brand-new classes in Spring 2007? Yeah, I'll put plenty of time into designing the syllabi and doing background reading--but the actual lesson plans will, I expect, be scratched out on legal pads the night before. 9 Comments:
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