Two days into the term, I'm bluntly reminded what the hardest part of teaching is: class planning. Some people are nervous about speaking in front of people, but not me. I'm more comfortable addressing a group than I am conversing one-on-one, where the interaction is unscripted and more fluid. Conducting the class is easy; assembling it is painful.
The problem isn't a lack of ideas. I have plenty of ideas. The difficulty is in separating the gold (or at least the shinier brass) from the dross, and choosing how to fashion it. Like many other activities, teaching is very much a matter of deciding what to leave out.
Continuity drives a lot of the sorting process. I want to build on what the class has done before, using an assortment of blueprints. Sometimes I want the new building to fit snugly and squarely with the old, its lines extending seamlessly from what came before. Other times, I want the addition to meet the existing edifice at strange angles, in hopes of provoking some fertile confusion. I may occasionally set the structure up to topple, so that students may concoct a richer aggregate of understanding out of the ruins.
Sometimes I just want to make it through my 75 minutes.
I still have work to do on tomorrow's lesson, though I plan to spend some time examining this quote from Jonathan Franzen: The paradox of literature's elitism is that it's purely self-selecting. Anyone who can read is free to be a part of it.
There is a lot of anxiety about reading out there, particularly about reading books deemed "serious." I've seen it among some students in the past. Are ideas like Franzen's likely to allay or aggravate this fear?
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