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Friday
Now that I’ve recovered from a severe case of the flu, I return to my Friday memoir writing. My good fortune, after receiving my PhD from Emory in 1981, was finding a position at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in St. Mary’s City. Despite its name, St. Mary’s is neither a women’s nor a Catholic school but the state’s liberal arts college, set up with the vision of offering a small liberal arts college experience to students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford one. As such, it spoke to my own deepest ideals.
My first year at St. Mary’s (1981-82) was a tremendously exciting time. The school had hired 17 new faculty, many in the arts and humanities, and many of us had small children. We had potluck gatherings and talked incessantly about literature, critical theory, child rearing, and the state of the college. (Our first year our president resigned for having an affair with—wait for it—the Dean of Academic Affairs!) Finances were tight as Julia wasn’t working and I was being paid an Instructor’s salary ($14,500, even though I was an Assistant Professor) so that, to save on gas, we had to apportion out our trips to town. But because of our community of like-minded souls and an exciting intellectual environment, it was a happy time.
One of the great joys of having children is getting to revisit one’s favorite childhood books, and I began sharing old classics, along with new arrivals, as soon as I could. Like my parents, we chose not to have a television so that we could focus on reading, and every night when they were old enough, Justin, Darien, and Toby got a chapter each, along with a poem. I read them the Pooh books, Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, The Jungle Books, the Narnia books, Gulliver’s Travels, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the Alice books, many of E. Nesbit’s novels, Miss Masham’s Repose, Charlotte’s Web, The Secret Garden, The Princess and Curdie books, The Rescuers and all the sequels, and (among the new arrivals) Lloyd Alexander’s Taran books, Brian Jacques’s Redwall series, The Rats of N.I.M.H., and on and on. As a result, the boys have grown up to be voracious readers, and Toby, after reading Redwall to his kids, has just asked us to send him the Taran books.
Meanwhile, I was learning what every new teacher learns, which is that we were the exceptions in the courses we took, not the rule—which in my case meant that my students did not enter my classes with my own level of enthusiasm. I also came to my teaching with what I came to call a F.O.G.S. mentality, which is Fresh Outta Graduate School. I still can’t believe how much I asked of my students that first year. In a satire class I had them read Alexander’s Pope’s very challenging poem Epistle to Arbuthnot. I also assigned a novel a week in a Victorian literature class and had them grapple with George Lukacs’s daunting Theory of the Novel in a senior seminar. Imagine being assigned the following:
The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality….[T]he novel form is, like no other, an expression of this transcendental homelessness.
Somehow the students survived while I adjusted my teaching to reach the students I had, not the students I imagined having.
Like all colleges, St. Mary’s had its ups and its downs in the 36 years I spent there, but I never lost faith in its mission, and always I was determined to provide each student with an educational experience tailored to his or her personal needs. To truly make this change, however, a more profound shift was needed on my part.
In my past memoir writing I’ve talked about how many of the essays I was assigned in college felt unreal (or “reified,” to use Lukacs’s term for forms empty of meaningful content). I knew that some of the essays I was receiving, even while they might appear perfectly competent, seemed no more than an empty exercise akin to jumping through hoops. I remember one essay, for instance, where a student analyzed the name symbolism in Death of a Salesman (Willie Loman as “low man”). The student didn’t care, nor did I. So how could I teach in a way that would elicit explorations where something seemed at stake.
When I received a Fulbright to teach at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Yugoslavia for my sabbatical year, I set as one of my goals figuring out how to get meaningful essays. While I knew that, for myself, it was important to figure out whether and how the literature I loved could make the world a better place, my students weren’t as keyed into historical developments as I had been (the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War protests). I realized I had to find ways to apply the literature we were reading to their personal concerns.
I’ll save the story of Yugoslavia and the friendships I developed there for a future post. I’ll just note here that the reduced teaching responsibilities and absence of committee responsibilities give me an immense amount of extra time to focus on teacher development. I also had time to read, and I plunged into the English Department’s impressive library, including novels by Margaret Drabble, Sarah Maitland, Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot), Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony), Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon), John Updike (Rabbit Is Rich), Louise Erdrich (Tracks), Gloria Naylor (Women of Brewster Place), Patrick White, Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), and others.
What is noteworthy about a number of these works—especially those by Drabble, Maitland, and Barnes—is that they were non-political melodramas. As such, they expanded my own emotional range. This would prove invaluable for when I returned to the States and started thinking about other things my students could get out of the works they were reading.
Essentially, I shifted to a much more psychological approach to teaching. For instance, in my Intro to Lit classes I would ask my students to describe memorable reading experience of a poem, story, or play that they could remember—between three and five—and figure out who they at the time that explained why they had the experience that they did. This showed them that literature had played a deeper role in their lives than they perhaps realized. For the rest of the course, I encouraged them to view each work as potentially having a similar impact. Their final essay was to be on the work that moved the needle the most.
In my book I describe the assignment and also give numerous examples of students reporting on life-changing reading experiences. I can confidently say that I addressed the reification issue satisfactorily.
