Thoughts on teaching

I used to blog more often. In September, I tried to write something every day. In October, I did what I could. I'm predicting I won't be writing a whole lot in November, unless it's musicology papers and short stories and course syllabi.

My course description for next winter is done, and now I'm working on the syllabus. I got pushed into it as a girl wrote me today, inquiring about course requirements and if I could send her the syllabus. Needless to say, I have no syllabus handy, but I couldn't tell her I'm working on it, from scratch. So I emailed her some requirements from a friend's existing syllabus, the one that I believe I'll model mine after.

Now that I've got the ball rolling, I'm selecting textbooks or anthologies of fiction and poetry. Here are a few I like:

Prose
1. The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories by Tobias Wolff
2. The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction : Fifty North American American Stories Since 1970 by Michael Martone
3. The Contemporary American Short Story by B. Minh Nguyen and Porter Shreve

Poetry
1. A Book of Luminous Things : An International Anthology of Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz
2. The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems by Frances Mayes
3. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Eavan Boland and Mark Strand

I think I've said this before, but one of the greatest perks of being an instructor is access to examination copies. When you love what you're teaching - in my case, writing - you want to use books you love, and to be able to get your hands on those books for free (in fact, some publishes heap them into your arms) is just wonderful.

With some luck, I might be able to keep teaching (and getting free books). It depends on how my teaching goes this semester. I've been learning a lot from my freshman composition course and I'm starting to really enjoy the art of rhetoric. Although I was particularly pleased when I got placed out of freshman writing back in 1997, I now regret not formally learning the specific forms of non-fiction writing that I now teach. My students are a nice bunch, very nice if I were to compare them to my friend Irene's class. I actually think I'll miss them. Someone once observed that through the years, your students are always young; you're the one who ages.

The semester is drawing to a close. Just five and a half more weeks. However, the semester couldn't be complete without my first in-class observation. I invited KT, who is in charge of the teaching program for MFA-ers, to sit in and observe my class. Terribly nervous, of course, but he was good enough to sit and write his notes out of my line of vision. Later, we met and discussed how I fared. Turns out I did better than I'd imagined. Too, he told me not to worry about my being tiny and Asian and foreign. There's no mistaking who's in charge of the classroom, even if I'm the smallest person inside, he added.

Of course, all this is very pleasing to my ears. I'm not sure I make a perfect intstructor, but I'm trying. It's a little heartwarming to think I've moved from Changkat Changi to Michigan in my brief teaching career. I was 19 when I taught secondary 4s in Singapore - and I loved my students then, although I started out being terrified of them. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned this, but last July, just after our wedding and before we flew off to Michigan, LK and I were at a bank opening our first joint account when I noticed our money was being counted by a familiar girl. Sarina was a student in my form class in 1997, the prettiest one actually. She was bright, witty, rather bewildering, and favored blue contact lenses. When I saw her again, she'd put on a little more weight and looked a little older than her 23 years, but I was so pleased she had a job that she liked. She looked happy, and she still remembered me.

Posted by Monoceros at November 4, 2004 11:43 PM