goals for today

From today until the end of winter break, I need to make much better use of my time. I have a class (that I’m teaching) to prepare for – finalizing the syllabus, creating activities and discussion questions for each text, and preparing their major writing assignments. This preparation won’t be as difficult as it is time-consuming. I have several ideas already for how to make connections between the texts, and after a quarter of being hyper-aware of teaching while reflecting on past experiences in the classroom, I think I will be able to pull together some plans that will work.

Other than preparing for the class, I promised myself that I would get ahead on some of the readings for my own winter courses. Despite the accusations, this isn’t over-achievement at play. I would genuinely help myself out by familiarizing myself with what’s going on in the class and getting even two or three texts read beforehand.

My goal is to be more forward-thinking – planning well, diving in, resisting the urge to just “do it later.” Procrastination has always been an embarrassing flaw in my work ethic. I know it won’t change all at once, so I might as well jump in to change what happens today.

Today I plan on reading Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street, the first text I have assigned in my class. Taking a lot of notes and highlighting passages that could be used to jump-start discussion has been the mode so far while reading Ethan Frome and Sula.

A major challenge while going through these texts is what to privilege and why. After being a literature major for three years, feminist literary analysis has been a joy since previously, at least at Emerson, feminist analysis is too specific, divisive, and not a “real,” true-to-the-author’s-intents sort of lens through which you understand the text. The actual lack of specificity in such analysis can make for unproductive conversations about symbols and metaphors that seem to have no context, resistant to being anchored in political biases and specific traditions of creating knowledge. If feminist analysis is appropriate, it is because certain texts have called for it, delineating them as “women’s fiction.” Toni Morrison, Edith Wharton, Sandra Cisneros, Kate Chopin…it’s sort of incestuous, no? Feminist analysis is allowed where it is most non-threatening, where writers have written texts calling for a feminist look. At least in my experience in literature classes, feminist analysis to re-read Tolstoy, Hemingway, Joyce, was pretty much regarded as an interesting experiment but short of a valid way of understanding texts.

So here I am, about to teach a course on U.S. Women Writers, where feminist literary analysis is the chief method. This is beyond exciting, of course. Some brief reflections on my experience in literature classes puts my course in perspective…

Besides reading Cisneros, I need to re-work my syllabus and browse through some of the books for my own winter courses…