Thoughtful Grading and Secret Sin

It’s the end of the semester, and that means grading. For many of us in higher ed, this is only a continuation of the grading madness that inevitably seems to engulf the second half of the semester.

My back is aching, my wrists are tired, and my thighs are scorched from too much laptop-on-lap time, yet I have to admit I’m enjoying reading my students’ paper drafts in my American literature class.

I will be the first to voice my concern about rising class sizes
and the detriment they pose to student learning, but grading can also be a conversation.

The course is a survey, which I’ve written about before, and it’s my first time teaching an American literature course. I’ve been in my “BritLit” pigeon-hole for so long, and then suddenly I found myself discussing pilgrims and Puritans, conquistadors and Christians, revolution and social rebellion.

I found myself enjoying the course quite a bit. I still find American literature overwhelmingly earnest, moralistic, and overly didactic, but these qualities also provided excellent fodder for class discussions. The course covered the earliest texts of the Americas up to the Civil War/1865 which meant that, like many survey courses, it contained a little bit of everything.

As we wended our way to the close of the semester, I wondered how my students would approach the final paper, which charged them with choosing two texts by two different authors and discussing them together while also using outside sources. My students had struggled with the first paper of the semester, the first of two shorter response papers. There was significant improvement on the 2^nd response paper, but the final paper requires the students to analyze texts in conversation with one another and to make more complex arguments about them.

I was both pleased and surprised, however, when we discussed the thematic and stylistic connections between authors in class. Students put together texts in innovative and compelling ways—and these connections showed up in their paper drafts as well.

One student put Emily Dickinson’s poetry in conversation with Benjamin Franklin’s essay “To Those Who Would Remove to America” in order to make an argument about how these two very different authors approach the pursuit of happiness. Another student discussed Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s short story “The Two Offers” in order to make an argument about how these authors understand the self. A third student discussed the individual versus society using Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

In many ways, these would not be combinations that I would have put together at first glance. I was less surprised, for example, when students wrote about slavery in Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons” and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, or death and horror in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Just when I thought I’d read all the unusual papers, I picked up another unusual combination: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” as works that both explore characters who wish to escape reality.

It’s possible these combinations seem so unusual to me because I don’t normally study American literature, but regardless I was excited to note the different connections students made between texts. Maybe the execution wasn’t stellar, maybe they still need to flesh out the ideas or add in more quotations—these papers are still in the draft stage. Nevertheless, I already feel like I have learned a lot from reading these papers and from seeing my students’ improvement. While commenting on drafts before students turn in the final draft can be time-consuming, it does mean that paper-writing becomes a conversation between students and instructors.

When I think back, I realize that I never got as much feedback on papers in college as I give now to my students. Of course, I wish my classes were smaller so the burden of putting comments on papers wasn’t so heavy, but I can’t deny that this process leads to better communication of requirements, better student understanding of the writing process, and, ultimately, better quality papers.

Along the way, I also get to witness the transformation of ideas through writing and re-writing. I might even, sometimes, read something in a student paper that sparks my imagination, as when one of my students wrote that Bartleby perpetrates a type of “metaphysical crime” when he refuses to leave the office and just “hangs around.” The student further suggests that it is because Bartleby’s intentions are opaque that his behavior incites the social unrest.

It's hard to miss the irony of Melville's classic
short story when I sit down to grade stacks
of student papers.

This idea reminded me of our class discussions about “Bartleby” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”, and how the behavior of Bartleby and the minister, with his refusal to explain the veil, provoke social unrest—merely by seeming to be so different than the rest of the people who surround them. Both Bartleby and the Hawthorne’s minister challenge social expectations by being unlike others—and by having veiled intentions. Others project their own insecurities, shames, and fears onto them, hating these “different” characters because they remind them of their own inadequacies, their own “secret sins,” to use Hawthorne’s term.

I couldn’t help but connect this discussion in class to what has been happening in Ferguson, MO. Ferguson has been in my classroom conversations all semester, as I discussed the representation of African Americans on screen in my Writing 1 class; as students researched police brutality in my Writing 2 class; and as we discussed the history of slavery, abolitionism, and the fraught nature of personal narrative and the American Dream in my American literature course.

As with many controversial news stories, the events in Ferguson are subject to interpretation; each day we see the war of different perspectives on what happened there. Ferguson is our black veil, it is our Bartleby who won’t leave the office….we each project onto it our own secret sins, our own explanation of why it happened and what it means. But like the minister’s veil, which covers his face even in the grave, sending posthumous shudders through the remaining citizens, there will never be a simple explanation to the events in Ferguson.

How do we interpret the many images, headlines, news clips and
sound-bites coming out of Ferguson, related protests around the US,
or any other news story, for that matter?

And so, it’s the end of the semester, and though I’m tired in body, I feel energized in mind. It’s moments like these that I see clearly why we who research should also teach; the intellectual interactions we have with our students allow us to see things anew, to consider new angles, to question the usual juxtapositions that we rely on for interpreting the world around us—and our research.

18thC Pedagogy: Surveying the Survey Course

This semester I have my first ever chance to teach an American literature survey course, beginnings to 1865. While I have read a fair amount of these texts in the past, many of them are new to me. Prior to the course, which is a sophomore-level survey, I had never read any of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation or Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. I ended up enjoying both of them, as well as the beautiful poetry of Anne Bradstreet, the haughty rants of Cotton Mather, the polite and loving letters of the Adamses, as well as the irony and wit of Benjamin Franklin.

 The transatlantic approach to literature is a growing trend in literary studies, especially in eighteenth-century studies. Looking at traditional literary anthologies, however, you’d rarely know it. When I taught eighteenth-century women poets, Roger Lonsdale’s anthology did not contain Phillis Wheatley. Conversely, there is no mention of Aphra Behn in American lit anthologies. Yet really, these should be rather obvious inclusions.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is possibly one of the few works featured in both British and American literature anthologies. Otherwise, these different literatures are quite compartmentalized.

Also of note is how easily the Norton anthology (which I have to use for the American Literature survey) includes texts that were originally written in Spanish until it is no longer useful or “necessary” to do so. The anthology introduction explains that there were many languages spoken in the early American colonies—yet the anthology itself contains few other translated texts once the English show up.

These issues are miniscule when we consider that global literary and transnational approaches to literature and culture rarely make it into the undergraduate classroom. A colleague of mine who teaches African and Asian history as well as courses on Islamic Civilization has pointed out how consistently “World Literature” or “World History” are ghettoized in college curricula. Students in the US rarely have to consider other (Other?) civilizations and world developmental narratives outside the Western one, to our detriment.

On a smaller scale, I always noted, as the daughter of Polish immigrants, that Eastern European history rarely made an appearance in my high school European history classes. It was as if Poland never existed, despite that nation’s dominance on the continent during the 17^th century. Omissions such as these are merely symptoms of larger issues relating to colonial histories that are often at the forefront of our class discussions in the American literature survey.

While preparing lessons for the course has been, in many ways, challenging because it is not “my” area of study, I not only enjoy this opportunity, but I welcome the challenges it brings with it. If nothing else, it has made me more aware of the missing pieces of the puzzle when we teach “British” literature courses.

In English departments, we often consider “survey” courses to be the steady foundation of further literary study. At many universities, students must take a certain amount of sophomore level surveys to get their BA in English or before they can take upper-level courses in literature. I wonder, however, how useful the traditional survey is. Perhaps it would be better to come up with sophomore surveys dedicated to the idea of “surveying” the many different literatures of a smaller time period or, rather than sticking to time period, surveying the development of a literary theme across time and space? Such flexible approaches to foundational literary study may actually encourage greater critical thinking skills in our students while engaging them in ways that the usual chronological approach may not.