I’m sitting on the train from New York City to Boston, writing my talk for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association which I don’t have to give for a couple of days yet so please don’t judge, and I’m watching the trees and snow fly away from me, backward. I sat down facing the wrong way, but it seems the appropriate orientation for a year-end post.
The past year of teaching, looking back, was a lesson in the value of being unprepared. I say this with some trepidation, for the obvious reasons—as academics, former good students all growed up, we are conditioned to do all our homework and the extra credit—but due to circumstances both beyond and entirely under my control, the last two semesters were My Year of Winging It. In the spring I took a course over from an instructor a few weeks into the semester, inserting myself into a preexisting syllabus and telling the story of American Literature since 1865 that it was designed to tell. So my winging it here was not completely improvised; like the actors hurrying to learn their lines just offstage and receiving prompts from the wings, I had a script, I just didn’t write it.
This past semester I taught a new course on the rock novel (which I’ve already written about here). In the past, I’d occasionally included a novel in a course that I hadn’t read prior to putting it on a syllabus. Once or twice I’d not read it until the semester had already started. This time out, for reasons practical and pedagogical, I hadn’t read most of the books on the syllabus prior to putting together the syllabus, and chose not to read them until teaching them—that is, I taught the novels blind, reading only the pages assigned to the students and reading them the night before. Continue reading “Winging It: On Teaching Novels Blind”