yippee

Decisions are in, and it seems that both of the two awards for "best undergraduate essay in literary interpretation" are going to students I had last semester-- and for essays they wrote in my class. That's something, I think. Department chair even sent me an email saying "Way to go!" One of the winners complained on my course evaluation (I can pick her out because of her distinctive handwriting) that my expectations were "unreasonable"-- but look what happened! I'm very proud of the kind of work I was able to get out of these students. And I'm excited about the essays I'll get from my Shakespeare students on Monday, too.

In one of my MLA interviews this past January, I was asked about the experience of using travel writings in my early English literature survey-- the interviewers were surprised that students would "get into" that kind of reading, but they did, and it was such an exciting class. I think undergraduate students are sometimes terribly underestimated. They can in fact handle a good dose of new historicism in the classroom. They can use so-called non-literary texts to comment on a work of literature, and they can do it well, too. I'd never heard of new historicism before I got to graduate school, and I'd never really seen it in practice. I can still remember how excited I was by the first classes I took in grad school-- it was as if an entirely new world had been opened to me. And I also remember how much I resented never having been introduced to this way of looking at (and using) texts while I was an undergraduate. It seems I'm trying to give these students the education I wish I'd gotten. I don't tell them this, but maybe I should.