The Campus Visit Pt. 3: The Teaching Demo

After lunch, I was led back to the building where the teaching demonstration was to be held. This teaching demonstration was supposed to be a topic of my choosing--something that showcased my abilities as a teacher and allowed me to interact with students. I was told that the students would be eager and willing to engage with me. So I prepared accordingly. I made a sample syllabus to contextualize the "lesson" and modified a lesson that I had used successfully before that started with a "quiz" and then discussed the answers. I had practiced the lesson in front of faculty from my own department, and the response was positive. There were to be about 18 people total--students and faculty.

I was brought into the building and led upstairs. It was a day of endless hills and staircases, and my feet were very, very sore by this point, as I was probably the only person wearing shoes that were intended to be stylish and not merely functional. I was tired, discouraged, overwhelmed. I was told that I could put my things (computer-bag purse that I had been lugging my laptop around in all day) in the male professor's office. I was told that I would be given a few moments to prepare by myself. So I ducked into the restroom briefly. When I rejoined the faculty member, she ushered me down the hall and said, "You can go in and get set up." Instead of the empty room I had anticipated, I walked straight in to the waiting faculty and students!

I'm not sure I mentioned that after lunch I felt that it was all over. I wanted to leave and not even go through with the teaching demo. I felt as though they were done with me, and I was certainly done with them. So now, as I walked to the front of the class and stood facing the screen/blackboard, I felt as though I wanted to cry. I felt like running away. This is not me. I don't react like this to stress. You'll have to trust me on this, I know. It wasn't stress, it was the futility of it all that I was reacting to. But I mustered my energy, set up my powerpoint, and waited. And waited. And waited. One professor was smiling at me. The remainder of the room was scowling, except the department head, who was settling herself and passing out more of the bright orange evaluation forms that I had seen at the meeting with the students. So I waited. And they looked at me expectantly. And it occurred to me--was no one going to introduce me? Did they think so little of me? Or were they so rude?? And still I waited. It seemed like forever. Until my one ally in the room said something to the department head, she seemed surprised and hastily rose, came halfway to the front of the room, said, "This is Dr. Literacy-chic" and returned to her seat. And so I began.

I said how pleased I was to be there. (That is, I lied.) I thanked the students for participating and said how exciting it must be to have a voice in this process. (Disingenuous of me? Maybe.) They scowled. This was going to be fun. Then I read the brief two paragraph introduction to the syllabus I prepared and told them a bit about what the "course" would look like. Then I began with my "quiz." They were to designate whether a given poem was for children or adults. Some were more well-known than others. The male professor I have mentioned seemed particularly grumpy and confused. None seemed to know what I was doing. When it came time for the "Answers," PowerPoint sabotaged me. My slide show was flawless when I presented it to faculty at my institution. However, I had modified things on their suggestion. Slight modifications, but enough for PowerPoint to revert from my custom animations to the default, which meant that my list of titles was revealed from right to left and bottom to top rather than left to right and top to bottom. Now, I admit, there was the "Why does this have to happen to me?" mixed with discouragement and a sense of futility. And I plodded on. My strength is the discussion of the poems--what elements of the poem do we associate with children and childhood? They stared at me. One or two students graced me with an occasional answer. And one or two professors played along, too. It was miserable. My worst classes that I've taught have not been so resistant. I should probably mention that the teaching demonstration was 40 minutes long. I kept looking at the clock, looking for the right time to end, plodding along stoically. At times, I was more successful than others. I gave up on the students, who were just clueless about how to answer open-ended questions. And I talked. Finally, I could legitimately end. I told how this would set up the next class, in which we would discuss how Blake positions the reader as a child in order to exploit our expectations of what childhood is and how it stands in relation to the adult world. And I asked for questions. By now, I had looks of pity from two faculty members and one student that I had met earlier. And then it happened.

One male student looked at the syllabus and raised his hand. What, he asked, would be my objective in such a course? (Feelings of affection and gratitude toward student) But oh my! what a question! The syllabus was intended to be an advanced course--perhaps a senior seminar--in which students used the texts (including theoretical texts and critical essays, but nothing too complex) as a jumping off point to think about a topic, in this case, representations of children and childhood. It is modeled off of graduate courses, which may or may not be a smart thing, but I do a kind of "Let's think about what fantasy is/does" in my intro to lit course, so why not? I explained that the objective was to theorize about children and childhood--to ask questions about representations and to see what answers we could discover. And then I went on. . .

Thinking very much of the feminist essays, I said that it is very easy to take an essay and say, "Here's this essay! And oh! look! here is a work of literature! And this work of literature is doing exactly what this essay talks about!" I said that. Word for word. And I gestured to the left to indicate the essay (no symbolic meaning) and to the right to indicate the text. And I said that it is less easy to ask the questions yourself and see what you discover. It was another shining moment. It was such a shining moment that the department head asked if it was a course I had actually taught, because she was going to ask what kinds of things people discovered. That was the only question, and people started to file out. But the student stayed behind, and he apologized for asking another question, but he was really interested in this syllabus (!). So I talked with him a bit about the rationale behind the selections, and he said that he had never before thought about how children are grouped together as a single entity--not even as young humans, but young creatures. And we understood one another. And that moment surpassed the Guinness of the night before.