Teaching Statement

Elaine Yee

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

During my graduate school years, I have had the opportunity to teach one class at Duke; one class at TROSA (Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers), Durham; and serve as a teaching assistant in five classes in the Duke University English Department (Literary Theory, American Movies, Faulkner, 19th Century Problems, and Renaissance Women Writers). This last spring, I completed Duke’s Preparing Future Fac-ulty program, with an apprenticeship at North Carolina Central University, working closely with Professor Michele Ware. This past May, I taught an 8-week course on femi-nism and women writers at TROSA (Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers). Previously, I have taught English at Beijing Normal University, tutored athletes and learning-disabled students in composition at the University of Arizona’s renowned Strategic Alternative Learning Techniques Center, and instructed high school students in SAT Math and English at Kaplan. My interest and talent in teaching stem directly from my experience in these diverse classrooms.

This teaching statement will elaborate some of what I have learned from these ex-periences as well as articulate what I seek to improve in my teaching, with particular at-tention to the possibility of working with students at BASIS Tucson.

My first self-designed course took place in Fall 2006, English 26, a non-majors class surveying English and American literature, called “Companionate Love.” The class began with Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, included James Joyce, and concluded with the contemporary authors Sherman Alexie, Gish Jen, and Bret Easton Ellis. Students in the class nominated me for the English department’s Stephen J. Horne Graduate Teaching Award.

All was not always rosy, however: a firestorm ensued when one of the male stu-dents made the derogatory reference of “keg troll” about women at Duke as compared to the prostitute, Gerty McDowell, in the “Nausicaa” chapter of Ulysses. The eight women in the class were outraged. The three male students were puzzled, defensive, and scared. The women students’ outrage stemmed from the pejorative pairing of “hardworking, compassionate, and accomplished” Duke undergraduates with a “vain, ignorant, and self-centered” character who sold herself. Obviously, in addition to gender conflict, there was also class conflict: the women students did not see that their sense of agency was a luxury problem, obscuring the material conditions of poverty, restricted access to education-based mobility, and religious discrimination--even, and especially, at the university level--affecting Irish-Catholic women in particular. The student who made the comment did not understand that he was conflating and flattening the very different conditions of women who sleep with men who are drunk when the women are sober, with the depicted condition of a woman who sleeps with men who pay her, with which money she buys food for her slowly starving brother, sick mother, and unemployed and alcoholic father.

In two ways, I was “successful” in ameliorating the controversy such that the stu-dents would continue to speak freely with each other in class. First, the student who made the “keg troll” comment rewrote his analysis at my behest to a) be more clearly rea-

soned--e.g., demonstrating a connection between fictional and real women from different socioeconomic backgrounds; and b) retracting his use of an offensive term. This solution emerged from a face-to-face sitdown with the student, in which I frankly explained that as an emerging scientist, he would compromise his chances by establishing a felt reputa-tion as a woman-hater. I walked him through a sentence by sentence analysis of his com-mentary, showing him errors in logic and places where his working assumptions (women are the same everywhere) could be empirically challenged. Additionally, I suggested, but did not demand, that he formally apologize in the next class meeting. He did so, and the students started to relax.

What I would do differently the next time discomforting realities clash with ideal-ism is to disentangle the student’s argument from his perspective. (I know this is flatly contradictory to the New Historical and Cultural Studies approaches I subscribe to, but I find that teaching is often, if not always, a holding together of opposite and contradictory concepts.) The argument could be improved, but the perspective, which some women are deserving of scorn, needs to be directly and aggressively challenged. If he is going to continue in this kind of belief, he is at least going to leave my class aware that he must be able to defend his opinion.

I love teaching. I believe a student ideally emerges from my class both culturally and functionally literate, which for me means that she is knowledgeable about “facts” and “methods” of literary significance, but also, that she is thoroughly acquainted with the so-cial, economic, and political forces at work in a text’s milieu. Moreover, I work to propel students toward their own opinionated literary and cultural interpretations--by lecture, agenda-driven seminar discussion, online Blackboard postings, written assignments/feed-back, and office hours---through their own existing schematics and values. For instance, telling a first-generation college student from poor, rural North Carolina that his negative view of the protagonist’s suicide in Chopin’s The Awakening is puzzling because based in his belief that women should like leisure, is indeed consummate with middle-class femi-nism, but not sensitive to class-based expectations or pedagogically strategic. Rather, it would be helpful to the student should he be made aware of, say, The Yellow Wallpaper’s depiction of women as psychologically and emotionally trapped by the leisure he prizes--perhaps because the women in his life do not have it--and believes is worth wishing for. Similarly, I have used the movie, Pretty Woman, to illustrate the concept of the “homoso-cial” in American life. When a student asks a question I cannot answer, I respond with “I don’t know” and say that “I’ll get back to you.”

I have some skill in learning from students--I position myself to listen closely to the emotional riffs emanating from their conversation--I require students to answer a short questionnaire at the beginning of the semester so that I might know a little better how they are being hailed by the texts and politics we engage.

I want to become better at learning from other teachers. A PFF conversation with Dean of Humanities and Professor of English, Garry Walton, of Meredith College last spring was quite unnerving, as I found myself admitting aloud that I had almost no pur-chase on utilizing technology in the classroom (other than Blackboard posting). Instead of being made to feel delinquent and inadequate, I found myself being mentored--Dean Walton described to me the methods by which he married online student forums to class discussion; feedback banks with student revisions; and Powerpoint presentations with tra-ditional Shakespeare lecture format. Besides learning concrete methods and relationships

between methods in different media, I also “got” first hand the explanatory power that lies in an earnest and strategic mentorship. That is to say, getting into the solution rather than fixing on a problematic contradiction--my inattention to new technology, even as I strove to “be a good teacher”--helped me to feel at ease and begin to ask necessary ques-tions. Being comfortable enough to ask about what I do not already know helped to open a conversation where I learned to discern the limits of my knowledge, so as to better be-gin to remedy those gaps.

I learned a lot from studying the detailed and prescriptive teaching materials my colleague, Phillip Steer, provided for his half of the workshop we ran together for rising English 26 instructors. I learned more from those materials and how he talked about us-ing them--sometimes successfully, sometimes not--when I facilitated a once a week “Feminism and Women’s Literature” discussion at TROSA (8 weeks total). I learned that my practice of taking for granted an internalization of what I have heard called “deco-rum” is a liability in teaching a class whose common interest is curiosity (and in this case, recovery and being all women) but whose exposure to academic culture is varied and spotty. All five of the women had GED’s or equivalent. But while they were all respectful of each other, punctual, and respectful in demeanor to me, only one of the five could be said to have met the following expectations: completing more than half of the reading as-signed each week; composing a paragraph-length meditation on the reading they had done; completing a written report to be presented at the end of the course; and asking me questions before assignments became due. Even though the “girls” and I negotiated the readings together, I realize now that I was not realistic about their lives in assigning 50 pages a week reading for students whose primary occupation is work, not school, and whose emotional energy is not reserved solely for the difficult, exhausting, and often un-familiar work of literary engagement. I would definitely not assign a novel to beginners again. The feminist and self-empowering lessons of The Awakening can be had through reading “Desiree’s Baby” and “The Yellow Wallpaper;” at the rate of one short story a meeting. The foundational essay “A Room of One’s Own” is better excerpted as a chap-ter, and discussed at the sentence level. Minute attention teaches close reading and re-wards the student who has tried to read but has not finished all of it.

Lest I am seen to be unrealistically glorifying my teaching skills, I must discuss my weaknesses as well. I have often made too many mistakes at the board. These have come from insufficient preparation. This disrupts the learning experience and confuses students. I have learned two principal lessons from these experiences: first, that I must go over every concept I wish to illustrate in class in detail before class begins; second, and even more important, is that if a concept is within 0ne of the students' reach, it is often best to leave it to her to explicate to the rest of the class. There is little to be learned from watching me doing long, boring and complex philosophical-historical genealogies on the board when the majority of students are perfectly capable of referring back to a handout which I would now provide as a support to the lectures. I have found that one or two sim-ple examples often suffice, and that once they understand the concept/argument, students are happy to write away. On the other hand, if I find that I have over-estimated students' abilities, lecture will be interrupted while we discuss the problems at the board.

Regarding the canon, I am for expansion--following cultural critic John Guillory, I definitely think that the canon debate has been strangely and unproductively positioned as a fight between old/established and new/marginal, rather than being viewed as a con-

versation. This is to say that being conversant with literature is to know that the work of Abraham Cahan is speaking to the work of the academically-approved William Dean Howells or culturally-approved Henry James. Reading The American Scene without read-ing Yekl, or reading The Rise of Silas Lapham without reading The Rise of David Levin-sky, is sad deficiency.

One of the criticisms I received on the last day of my English 26 class, which I set aside as time for the students to share breakfast while sharing their feedback on the class, was that I should include, instead of Titus Andronicus, a famous play like As You Like It. The reason, my student explained, was that she wanted to be able to “sound smart in a cocktail party.” Moreover, no one has read Titus, and that makes knowing it “irrelevant.” The second insight was from a white woman scientist, who heatedly pointed out my omission of African-American writers from the syllabus, and further suggested that my omission had to do with the common belief in the pathology of Black broken families. The third suggestion noted that while the discussions and readings were “enjoyable,” a “natural” fit among them was not self-evident. I took notes. I thanked the students, pass-ing out a letter celebrating highlights from the course, and composed myself to explain that 1) The point of education is to know what is excellent, not that which is popular; 2) I was afraid of teaching African American writers, being not an African-Americanist or African-American; 3) That I would ponder how to make the “connective tissue” linking our readings, more obvious. I went on to say that one of the things I had learned from them was how to say “be quiet, someone else needs to talk now.” And, silence can be ok.

These days, I would say, the cocktails student was more right than wrong. Given a timeline of scarcity, I could have taught them The Merchant of Venice instead--similarly important themes of foreigner status, women‘s power, and interracial sex--non canon top-ics on a familiar proving ground. I learned this lesson at TROSA, where on the fly I taught the students the theoretical concept of the “homosocial” through a scene from the hit movie, Pretty Woman.

Teaching at TROSA was the first time I had ever had an African-American or black woman student. I had tutored African-American male athletes at Arizona, but I was a fellow undergraduate at the time. The special circumstances of my being a woman of color in the Academy is, as bell hooks discusses in Class Matters--a specially tangled one of proffered class mobility that is predicated on silencing one’s past. Famously, Audre Lorde asserted that “the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.” I get that African-American women in particular negotiate a specially treacherous terrain to finding voice; drawing from my own research, I hope that despite the cautious privileges ac-corded to a “model minority,” my own experiences in making my “voice”--political and social commitments, pedagogical contradictions, and personal frailty--sound out can be a model for other women.

I also learned from this course that there is little I am completely expert about, but that I have expert skills in apprehending texts--therefore, we discussed Their Eyes Were Watching God--which was another hit because we had seen the movie adaptation. I again had to work on conceptual connectivity. My students loved the short story, Desiree’s Baby, and saw a natural connection to The Yellow-Wallpaper, but did not see right away how the two stories connected to the episode of “No-Name Woman” from The Woman Warrior.

Another weakness is that I have let (or seen, in the case of TA-ships) a few stu-

dents slip away. They have ended up underperforming and frustrated. Though I do try to be as approachable and open as possible, some students do not respond well and fade away during the course of the semester. I have given this problem much thought over the last few years, and have begun to approach struggling students on an individual basis, re-questing one-on-one meetings as soon as possible. In a number of cases, this has gen-uinely helped move students up the ladder. On the other hand, I am yet to perfect my ap-proach and some students have slipped through the net.

In summary, I am far from being a perfect teacher, but I am self-critical and at-tempt to constantly provide a better classroom experience than my students have been ac-customed to in their previous English/Literature classes. Being a good English teacher is all about communication - both in the language of literary analysis and in the way one ap-proaches students. My graduate school career has given me a great desire to continue to teach students and learn from them, and I hope to be able to continue to do this for as long as possible.