Essay 1: Before the Semester Begins
by Professor Andrea Broomfield
A new column from English faculty on what goes on behind and in front of the scenes. This week’s first contributor is Andrea Broomfield, Professor of English
9:00 am Saturday morning, August 4th. After dropping my daughter off for her final day of the Heartland Chamber Orchestra Festival, I decide to make use of her rehearsal time by going to my GEB office to continue work on course prep. The summer has disappeared, and now I am staring into that fast-approaching tidal wave called In-service, when time is no more my own, and the frantic, last-minute coming together of four syllabi must be squeezed in around everything else—if I dare to procrastinate much longer.
“Do you teach in the summer?” I get that question countless times from fellow colleagues, friends, administrators, even the dental hygienist who cleans my teeth every July. “No,” I answer. “I do all of my writing, research, and course prep over the summer.” As a professor, I grow stale easily, and I feel burned out quickly. If I am not “re-inventing the wheel,” I sense my students thinking that the assignments are boring. It’s all in my head, most likely, but that’s bad enough. So, most mornings in the summer, for around two hours in my office and one hour in the Fitness Center, I am exploring, investigating, and finally creating new curriculum.
This summer, I devoted a lot of time to revamping my Composition II honors course and tweaking my newer course, Composition I, Food Focus. That means teaching new books, creating better essay assignments, and coming up with new in-class, hands-on materials. A lot of material comes, as it does for all of us professors, from voracious reading and engagement with new pedagogies, textbooks, relevant novels, reports and studies, and news sources. How many times, I think with some satisfaction, did I come across an article this summer courtesy of a Facebook link? I “like” countless journals, blogs, newspapers, and magazines, and so every day, I am reading chewy, absorbing articles from a variety of sources, everything from the London Times Literary Supplement to Wired. Inevitably, some of these articles touch on a subject in one of my upcoming courses.
I was thrilled a couple of weeks ago to come across an article from Quora that I knew would be great in a unit in Composition I, Food Focus: “What Is It Like to Be a Chef at an Expensive Restaurant?” This candid interview with Christian Lemp, former chef de partie at Jean Georges, was full of inside information on the pressures in that industry. Perfect score for me! It’s well-written, with Lemp offering substantive answers to a series of expert questions from a journalist. It’s just the right length for the students in my Food Focus class, many of whom are going to be entering that pressure-cooker world via our own Chef Apprenticeship program. If nothing else, this interview will generate an animated class discussion, and it might be a great piece for students to use as a model when they start their own investigative interviews. So, thank goodness for the Resources Tab under Angel, where I am constantly able to store new articles, polls, and blog posts for my classes.
All year long, but mainly in the summer, I become my students. I can’t do anything, it seems, without thinking from their viewpoints. Would that engage me as a student? What that assignment seem relevant, important, helpful? I mine conversations with friends and colleagues for useful material, along with the web, scholarly journals, and the books I interlibrary loan for my own research. It all boils down to my students and the four courses I am preparing to teach this fall.
The harder work comes when I must do the new reading myself before I can create essay and research assignments. Aside from the various materials that I find via my Facebook feed and our library’s databases, I must read the textbooks and novels that I ordered last spring for my fall classes. After two hours of work in my office on course prep, I head to the Fitness Center, praying that no one sees me dash over to the gym in my shorts and tee-shirt. After yoga stretches, I hop on a treadmill, set it at a leisurely 3.5 miles an hour, and read these longer, more difficult texts. On the treadmill I recently finished Nella Larson’s novel, Passing, devised the discussion questions and the reading assignments, and considered the other works that we will use in conjunction with Passing to contemplate the interrelationship between class, race, and history during the Harlem Renaissance.
After I have done my quota of reading and devising discussion questions, I ramp up the treadmill to 5.0, put my book aside, and as I work up a sweat, allow my mind to wonder. In the tortuous conclusion to my workout, if I am lucky, a couple of flashes of inspiration will hit me. The minute I get off that treadmill and gulp down some water, I write out those ideas.
But in my office this last Saturday, with In-service creeping ever-nearer, it’s time to stop my day-dreaming, reading, and the putting new materials under the Resources Tab. It’s time to commit.
Greeting me that Saturday morning was a friendly email from one of my new students, Zach. “Hi, Professor! Could you let me know what’s on our syllabus? See you soon.” I smile to myself. I love these new students. I am excited to see them all sitting there on the benches outside my various classrooms when I come forward to unlock the doors and, I pray, unleash their minds. But Zach does not know that I teach four different classes. It’s just him and me in his summertime view of academe. I write him back. “Hello Zach! Tell which of my classes you’re in, and I will let you know by Friday what’s on the syllabus. I’m looking forward to meeting you! Best regards, Dr. Broomfield.” I’m hoping as I press “Send” that by telling Zach that all syllabi will be uploaded by August 9th, I will be committed to getting those four classes finalized.
I know that if I can start In-service with the syllabi Xeroxed and all the essays and various assignments uploaded to Angel, I will be in better frame of mind to contend with the other responsibilities about to come my way.