22 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
22 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: 'The Interface'
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date: '2019-01-08T08:36:36-05:00'
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permalink: /the-interface/
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tags:
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- pondering
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- teaching
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---
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Yesterday afternoon, I taught my first new class in almost nine years.
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Seriously, *nine years*. At the end of the Spring 2010 semester, I went on sabbatical, and then I joined the staff of the MLA. And while I did teach here at MSU last spring, it was a very different experience; I co-organized a proseminar that brought in a lot of colleagues from around campus to help guide a group of graduate students in thinking about the potential role of digital technologies in their research.
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This semester, it’s just me and my students, with [my syllabus](https://machines.kfitz.info/ss19/) — the first new syllabus I’ve put together in almost nine years! — to guide us.
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I’m pleased with the syllabus, and excited by the students, and looking forward to seeing where it all leads us. But it’s funny to arrive at this point in my career feeling like a novice again.
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Not least in thinking about how to structure our in-class engagements. We meet once a week for three hours — a format I never felt terribly good at, even when I was teaching consistently. It’s an enormous stretch of time, one that has to be broken up into smaller chunks in order to keep us present and invested and on-task. But at the same time, with the book-a-week structure of the semester, it’s important to ensure that we give each text the full range of attention it requires.
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If you have strategies for ways to structure sessions of three-hour seminars, I’d be most grateful to hear them. In the meantime, I’m pondering ways of maintaining the excitement of the semester-long narrative within the close-up work of each week’s conversation…
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