Thanksgiving for Teaching

Bad as this last year has been, with the twin plagues of coronavirus and toxic politics, plus having to conduct my classes remotely, teaching has proved a surprising pleasure and source of joy during these dark times. Working to bring light and warmth to my classes, along with intellectual rigor, I try to make my courses count by being meaningful. You might think that’s hard, teaching seventeenth-century English prose and poetry in the twenty-first century, but the classes are going well. They’ve been such a gift for me. My students tell me my remote classroom feels like a safe, comfortable space; and sometimes they even have fun. Nothing could make me more grateful.

The fact that I’ve enjoyed teaching for many decades is something to be thankful for. Having meaningful work, and a salary, is challenging for many during these times and not something I take for granted. Sometimes, when I think of all those years and approximately more than 5,000 students, “at my back I … hear/ Time’s wing’d chariot hurrying near” (Marvell, “To his Coy Mistress”). But when I’m teaching, that anxiety disappears. I think I’m teaching better than ever, and certainly differently in these days that have forced all of us to change.  

I’ve been making an effort to put joy back into learning, both for my students’ sake and mine. With the constant emphasis on tests, performance, and competition from grade school on, so many people lose the sense that learning can bring pleasure, excitement, and yes, fun. I told my class the other day, “have fun with this assignment. There is no right answer. Discover something.” I asked them simply to look up a text on Early English Books Online (EEBO) that had been published in the seventeenth century; it could be something we were reading, or it could just be something they found while browsing. My students were to describe in detail what they saw, what they thought about as they looked at the images, and think about how an old printed book differs from what (and how) they read today—in modern books and anthologies, on the internet, even books on ereaders like a Kindle. My students loved the assignment! Some nostalgically longed for the day when books had been rare, precious things you could hold, mark up and pass on to others. Some thought about what is lost in our modern experience—the personal, the individualized printed book, the material, leather-bound book or the flimsy brown pamphlet that had been held by others. One male student told me, “I decided to fall down a rabbit-hole of YouTube videos about the craft and preservation of old books. I really loved this assignment.” Another student was drawn into Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, having suffered herself from a feeling of pensiveness. Yet another came across a seventeenth-century volume about the book of Revelations’ prophecies of Apocalypse, and it made him think of the current state of America. As I read their short papers, I came to the realization that they weren’t the only ones learning in the class!

Perhaps more than ever before, my students have also been learning that the past is not just past, that writings from the past can connect in complex ways with our present. Although I always tweak my courses year after year, this time I decided to rethink and restructure my course, “Seventeenth-century English Prose and Poetry,” adding the subtitle, “In Our Plague Year.” I asked: how would that literature sound like in our present moment, given our experiences of isolation and anxiety, the enormous and growing numbers of deaths from a plague where no one is safe, and what’s creeping towards a civil war in our socially and politically divided country? As I tell my students, every time you read a book it “means” something different because you are in a different place, you are reading it in a different time, not just historically speaking, but personally. Really good literary texts (ones that absorb you) take on different meanings when you read them at different times in your life. Why not apply that idea to my teaching and teach my course differently? How does John Donne’s poem, “The Good-Morrow,” celebrating how love makes, “one room an everywhere,” sound now? Or Katherine Philips’ celebration of female friendship when read in a women’s liberal arts college? Or Ben Jonson’s, “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” when he describes an idealized imaginary evening eating and talking with a friend, in a time of deprivation and even danger? What if just before our November 3rd election we read about the English Civil War, with its concern with liberties, calls for social, political, economic changes and a king who insisted he was above the law?

The best way to begin our course during the time of Covid-19 would be by reading selections from Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a series of meditations for twenty-three days, written when he came close to dying from the plague in December 1623. He charts the course of his illness, his experience and his attempt to make sense of sickness as he confronted mortality. What could be more relevant? My students, surprised, said, “this is me, this is us!” There’s his horrible isolation and solitude, the fear of dying, the sense of living in a world where the “center” is “decay,” and then his recognition in Meditation 17 that we are all connected (even if only by our mortality and vulnerability): “no man is an island, entire to himself.” After a week and a half on the Devotions, my students felt they owned it, that Donne was one of them. They had connected, intellectually and emotionally, through close, immersive reading, to what had first seemed an alien, ancient text. They were now ready for his poetry.

Thinking and writing helped Donne survive, gave him a sense of control in an uncontrollable world, gave him a sense of purpose. He serves as a model for my students, a model for all of us to make something positive out of our supposedly “unprecedented” situation.

I find myself happiest reading, thinking, writing and teaching. It makes you present, focused and maybe is a way to deal with trauma. Right now, teaching, especially, gives me a sense of purpose. Sure, it takes more time than ever, if I’m going to make the remote experience as meaningful, intimate, and personal as possible. I want my students to have a sense of accomplishment in what they do, to create their own topics for term papers, which will matter to them and help them move forward.

I meet my students individually outside of class, on Zoom or my cell. In fact, I “see” more students than I did when I had face-to-face office hours. All of this is often exhausting. But having lost my husband almost a year ago to a horrible, protracted neurological disease, I’m grateful for a renewed, meaningful purpose for my life. 

Young people are our future, so we better give them our best and give them hope.