First Day. . .

As some of you know, today, Tuesday 19 January, is the first day of classes of my new semester.  I both love and hate the first day of classes.  I love the beginning of a new term, for the same reason that I love Mondays:  it's a chance to get organized and start over.  I thrive on the process of cleaning out, scheduling, organizing, setting goals and having this period of time (a week, a month, a semester, a year) in front of me to see them through.  It's like there's such possibility for success of all kinds.  And I love, love, love that feeling.  I love putting together syllabi (mine tend to be quite detailed) and seeing the entire fourteen weeks outlined there, on paper.  It's not about control, although I struggle with wanting control in many areas of my life.  It's more about planning and setting goals and believing that one can actually achieve them.  But it's also about doing what I can now to reduce stress later.  I plan out the reading and topic for exploration for each and every class period so that it's one less decision I have to make later.  And sure, I have to make changes as I go--I can be flexible.  But I like knowing where it is that I'm going and how I'm going to get there.

I do, also, hate the first day of classes.  As much as I love having a syllabus, a plan in place for my classes and my time and my life for the next few months, I absolutely HATE spending the first day of class going over the syllabus.  Rather than exploring this fascinating, potentially rewarding plan for the class, I end up droning on and on about policies:  how many absences students are allowed, the fact that I don't take late work.  All of it's there in writing, and I read through it, all of it.  I think it's important to do so, because I think that it's important that students be aware of my expectations and the requirements for success in the class.  But it's both boring and discouraging.  I find that I'm not overviewing all the fun things we'll be doing or the ways that they can succeed.  Rather, I'm emphasizing all the things they should avoid doing.  Partly, I always hope to scare off those who aren't willing to take the class seriously.  And I figure I should come across really mean at the start--it's easy to loosen up later.  If you've read Miss Nelson is Missing, and you should if you haven't, you'll know that being too nice is just a recipe for paper airplanes and spit wads.  So I start out like Miss Viola Swamp.  And although I think it's necessary, I sort of hate having to be that way, you know?  But basically, going over syllabi is just plain boring for everyone in the room, including me.

I guess I'm always glad when the first class meeting is over and I can think about the second and all the things I really love about teaching.

2009--The Year of Dante

So I've decided that 2009 shall be my year of Dante's Divine Comedy.  Or at least, January through May will be devoted to Dante.  Over the past couple of days, I've been reading various introductions and background-type essays.  But this morning, I sat down and read Canto I of the Inferno in a couple of different translantions (Sayers and the Hollanders) and then read all kinds of commentary and notes just on that first Canto.  And I've read Dante before, but I feel like for the first time I'm not just studying Dante but am really understanding Dante.  It's not that I'm just getting it intellectually; it's more that I feel like the whole thing is actually speaking to me, you know?, on many levels at once:  imaginative, emotional, spiritual.  And it seems to me, right now anyway, that that's the whole thing about Dante.  Yes, it's allegory, but it's more than "just" allegory.  It operates at the literal level, but it's operating at all these different levels of human experience all at the same time.  And none of these levels or meanings is exclusive of the others; rather, each informs the others and enriches the others.  I know that what I'm getting at is maybe obvious--it's what I've known intellectually about Dante all the time.  But I feel like for the first time I'm experiencing it, rather than just understanding how it's supposed to work.  And I marvel at the skill of it all.  I'm not just understanding, but I'm being moved, changed.

But really, what's motivated this particular look at Dante is that I'm teaching Dante next semester.  And as I've been reading about Dante and thinking about Dante and finally reading Dante's work, all I think, in reference to the course, is, "How are my students going to deal with this?  How are they going to respond?"  More specifically, I'm concerned that they might not respond at all, that they might just shut down.  Reading Dante is no easy task.  And I'm afraid that the room will be filled with apathetic students who don't really know how to work at this task.  The translators and commentators I've been exploring seem to agree that reading Dante requires participation and work on our part, and in my experience, many of my students just seem interested in a passive reading experience, if they are willing to read at all.

But really more significant, I think, that the necessity of our being active readers is that Dante's way of thinking about the world is simply so alien to so much of postmodernity.  Dorothy Sayers says, "We must also be prepared, while we are reading Dante, to accept the Christian and Catholic view of ourselves as responsible rational beings. . .The Divine Comedy is precisely the drama of the soul's choice."  This way of thinking about the self and the world seems to me to be so foreign to much of our culture.  In Dante's world, sin matters; it enslaves us in the present world and for all eternity.  As a culture, we can think in terms of sex addiction, but most of us don't really buy the idea that lust, one of the seven deadly sins, can destroy our soul.  I, for one, am willing accept Dante's general scheme of things; the choices we make do matter, and maybe what matters the most is how our inner selves are affected.  Sin and evil do exist.  But in a world where absolutes are eschewed and a notion of the soul is thought of as simply out dated, what place does Dante have?  And how can I convey to my students that these questions matter, or that at least to make sense of Dante, we have to suspend our disbelief?  I'm feeling so inadequate to the task at hand.

But Dante.  He's like my Beatrice, at least for the moment, a bright ray of light, leading the way to some sort of Truth.

So Over It

Ok, as I'm midway through the final week of the semester, I have to just say that I am so over it.  I'm ready to be done.  I'm tired of reading bad, incoherent essays.  I'm tired of acting supportive.  I'm just tired.  I'm feeling really kinda worthless these last few days, and it's like I have nothing left to give to my job.  And although I know it's totally normal for me to feel this way at the end of a semester, it still really sucks.  I mean, I don't have any semblence of patience or tolerance left--I guess that I'm just descending to short-tempered and snippy, with students particularly.  And while I hate feeling that way, there's also part of me that feels like saying to the students, "Hey, you deserve this.  You've turned in crap work all semester, and now it's catching up with you.  You have consistently ignored instructions on assignments and have refused to meet with me all the times I required individual conferences.  I had those conferences so that I could gently discuss the problems you've been having in class in time for you to change and somehow redeem your grade.  But you blew it off, and now it's too late."  I mean, that's life, right?  It's not so much that I hate to be the bad guy; it's more that I hate dealing with all the crap students can sometimes give when their grades turn out to be lower than they'd hoped.  And really, it always astounds me when a student has earned, say, Cs and Ds on every assignemnt and then acts shocked when he gets a D+ for his grade in the class.  That kills me.  Often, they send not just whiney but downright threatening e-mails:  "If we can't resolve this, I'll be forced to go to the dean."  And I always think, "Be my guest.  I'm over dealing with you, and the dean is not going to magically change your grade just because you think she should."  I guess that all the bad essays are bringing me down.  It's like once finals week rolls around, I'm the Grinch or something.