Moments of Relief and Types of Fun

The ending of the first week of school, especially heading into a three-day weekend, feels like the completing an especially arduous workout. It's the same high feeling I get after finishing a long paper or article revision. A task that gobbles up time and energy and worry, a job that becomes the overriding focus for a week or more, suddenly gets done! The syllabus is done because it has to be done. The course happens, ready or not. And lo, it's fine! Hurrah!

I'm in the honeymoon moment between completing the syllabus/first week and the first load of real work and grading. Vacation time! 

The illusion this moment cast dissipates once I start thinking of next week's workload. Oh, yeah. I have to do this all again next week! New priorities emerge--I'm preaching at my church on the 26th, so I need a sermon!--that form their own stress-times and energy drains. Hopefully these too will result in some sweet if illusionary release. 

I use a trick sometimes when I run a long distance (for me "long" means, like, 4 miles): I keep imagining crossing my finish line. How good it will feel to get to stop running! Similarly, How good it will feel to finish this [syllabus, paper, class, etc.]. 

I suspect the trick only works because the activity itself stimulates or feeds my soul even as it demands psychic and physical energy. If I hated running, actually despised every second of it, then the eventually the ending would lose its motivating power. If class planning or writing provoked nothing but stress, I would (I hope) eventually recognize that the relief doesn't justify all that suffering.

I read once about a taxonomy of different kinds of fun, a typology that circulates in some extreme recreation circles (e.g., ultra-marathons, tough mudder events). Type 1 fun means that you enjoy an activity during and after the activity. Event and memory equally give pleasure. Type 2 fun consists of activities that feel miserable in the moment but acquire a glow of "glad I did that" afterward. The 5Ks I have run (and the 4-miles I run sometimes) feel bad and often require me to do the imagine-the-end trick. But I cheer that I did them and would willingly do them again. Solid type-2 experience. 

Type 3 fun--well, I've read different accounts. The link I gave insists that type 3 has no fun at all, in memory or afterward. Yet other sources have suggested that type 3 does qualify as fun, that it doesn't equate to "bad experience." 

Perhaps the difference between type 3 fun and "awful" involves regret. We all have experiences that we would never repeat and never even wish on others: a serious injury or illness, the death of a family member or friend, the consequences of a poor decision, or a destructive calamity. I don't think these fall into even a type-3 fun box. We already have boxes like "tragedy" or "disaster" to cover that type of experience.

Yet I can imagine ordeals or seasons of life that, while tough to endure and even painful to remember, nevertheless end up in the realm of "worthwhile" and "not regretful." I mean, something that causes you to say, "I don't want to experience that ever again, but I don't regret doing it that one time." 

Truthfully, I struggle to think of something quite like that for me... Grade school, maybe? I hated it. I would hate to be transported into my younger self to re-experience it. But neither would I want that experience excised from my memory.

The learning curve of gaining a skill sometimes feels like a type-3 experience--or several of them in succession. You suck at something, sometimes for a long time, before you gain competence and expertise. The learning often contains very little fun, and the memory of those early attempts makes you wince. In Elden Ring, you die a thousand times before you "git gud"--and then you die 1,000 more times. You make peace with dying, adopting a zenlike attitude that turns type 3 slogs into type 2 journeys with relief (defeating a hard boss, for instance). I stopped playing Elden Ring long before I got good at anything except riding the mount (Torrent) around and enjoying the scenery. I respect my best friend, who burned his way through the type 3/type 2 phases of countless bosses before cheering at his well-earned victory. What I would experience as type-3 or even regretful instances he sees as just another mile on the marathon.

I suspect we all have different boundaries about when an experience works as Type 3 or just regretful. 

More tomorrow.

Course Shenanigans

 There's shenanigans afoot at my university. We noticed this semester that our gen-ed offering, our freshman-level intro class, is having trouble attracting students. Usually this class is one of our most reliable engines for student contact hours. Most degree programs require students to take an arts credit. Theatre has historically been a fun option for them. I have gripes about our standard 100:1 student:instructor ratio, but I have faith in the basic integrity of the course. My colleague handles the super-large section; her superpower is crafting a high-quality course even at that scale.

But this semester? Low, low enrollment. Nothing about the course has changed. We poked into sites like ratemyprofessor to see if there was some groundswell of resentment at the course. Nope.

The only big factor we can detect is a different arts credit, an intro course offered in a different department unrelated to my college. This course is 100% online and asynchronous. It has over 1,500 students with a single instructor. The scuttlebutt (which I can't confirm) is that the whole course has only one TA assigned to it.

There's no practical way to assess students' performance in this course except through a massive use of automated and easily cheated exams. 

A student familiar with the class raved about it. It's apparently on several "best class at LSU" lists--not because the class teaches good things but because it's easy. It's as close to a zero-effort way to get through three credits of required coursework as you can find. 

I feel so tired and outraged and tired and disappointed . . . and tired . . . thinking about this class. 

On the one hand, I have to wonder what the professor in charge--whom I do not know--must think or feel about this. Surely they can't be under any illusions about the quality of this course or its reputation. But the alternative is that the course was specifically designed to be a high-enrollment easy A. I hate classes like that. They cheapen every other class--especially other gen ed courses, especially arts gen ed courses. They reinforce the already strong sense among students and populace that higher ed (and especially higher ed in the arts) is basically a scam, a series of meaningless, frustrating hoops to jump through in order to get the degree (which is in turn seen and assessed purely in terms of a key to a well-paying career). Universities are just money-hungry, goes this line of thinking. Look at increasing tuition! Student loan debt! The cost of textbooks! And why? Just so graduates can feel superior for having endured this expensive battery of meaningless busywork.

It angers me that there's a class that, intentionally or not, seems perfectly designed to reinforce that narrative. I don't know the professor's story. I don't know their mindset here. But from the outside it's hard for me not to imagine they (and their department) have kind of sold their soul.

And on another level, I'm disappointed that students for the most part see this as a good thing. Why not take this easy course? I'm busy and stressed out with my real classes (or my real life). I don't want to have to look at some pictures or listen to some music or go to some long-ass boring play just to declare myself more educated. If I can get this hoop out of the way easily (and with a little cheating), why not? 

Now--reality check--when I was an undergrad, yeah, I'll admit there were a few times I bypassed a harder course to take, for instance, the non-honors option of a gen ed. But I never cheated, nor would I have been OK with a course in which cheating was widely seen as the legitimate path through the class. I do think I did invest time and effort and curiosity even in courses that I didn't think of as integral to my main studies. I don't think--perhaps I'm rose-coloring things--that I looked at any class as an utter waste of time. I took them, in other words, in some degree of good faith.

It's disappointing to me on a deep level that so many students--inspired, I know, by an overwhelming flood of pressures and perverse incentives--are just willing to take classes basically in bad faith. And it's worse when those classes seemed designed in accordance with these bad-faith expectations. 

Why has no one stopped this clearly broken course? I asked. The answer, it seems, is that no one really cares. Enrollment is enrollment. The scam continues. 

Surely I'm being ungenerous here. Certainly there's a lot I don't know. But, well, it's depressing times.  

More tomorrow.

Gen Ed Intro Class Blues

 Every semester, our department offers a few "general education" classes, courses that students beyond the theatre major can take to fulfill one of their gen ed credits, in this case fine/performing arts. We offer these classes, on the on hand, we want students from every major to have some exposure to and perhaps participation in the fine and performing arts. It's part of the ideal of a liberal arts education, where you broaden yourself by partaking of studies in subjects you likely won't pursue a career in.

I taught our main course in that vein--Intro to Theatre--many times, mostly in my early career days. It's the class we hand to graduate teaching assistants and junior/adjunct faculty. That's too bad, really. I heard the a speaker from (oh, what was it) the National Science Foundation once reflect that gen-ed "intro" classes were misnamed. "We call it 'Intro to Biology' or 'Intro to Geology,'" he said (I paraphrase), "But in fact we should realize that these are probably the last courses in the sciences that students will ever take." The same applies to every gen-ed course: English, History, Sociology, Economics--and of course Theatre. This is our one chance to catch them.

It's odd, then, that large state universities like mine seem to do their best to make gen-ed credits as awful as possible. Each section is huge--a hundred or more people in a large auditorium. See, historically, the coin of the realm in the interdepartmental (and intercollegiate) scramble for resources is SCHs (Student Contact Hours). The more butts in seats per class, the better. Most arts courses for majors are necessarily small: a studio for clarinet or cello, a small acting class, an intimate study in advanced ceramics techniques. We'd be hopelessly underfunded, then, but for our super-big gen ed courses. These we have relied on to make up for our small numbers. Thus Intro to Theatre has often been in the top-ten highest enrollment classes at the university. We've had as many as 1,000 students in the fall semester across 5-6 sections of Intro. That's many times as many majors as we have.

Not that I'm exactly pleased about this. We often stock these classes with our least experienced teachers. (That's not to say they're bad teachers, our grad TAs and adjunct/junior faculty, just that--on average--they're less experienced, less supported, and less paid than other faculty.) Oh, there are exceptions. One of our best professors heads up our fall super-section of Intro; she's assisted by a bevy of grad TAs. Other departments have professors who specialize in these large-scale courses. But I do have to tell prospective PhD students that they'll likely find themselves the instructor of record for a class of 100 non-majors as one of their first TA assignments. That's not an ideal pedagogical scenario, but that's been the way of things for a while.

This semester, though, we've had a lot of trouble getting even to 100 students per Intro section. We're not exactly sure what's going on; nothing about the class has changed recently. But one big factor appears to be another arts gen-ed class: Intro to Fine Arts. That class has one instructor and over 1,500 students. It's 100% web-based. Rumor is that there's only one TA assisting the professor (I don't know if that's true). 

An undergrad who's taken the course had nothing but praise. It's apparently famous as "best course at LSU"--not because it's a quality course but because it's so easy. Cheating is rampant, that the class is ridiculously simple. Thus it's beloved. Thus it's sucking up all the students who might otherwise be taking Intro to Music or Theatre or some other arts course.

More tomorrow.

And then there

First Day of Classes spring 2025

 As always, I finish class planning not so much because I've completed the task but because the first class happens. What I have is what they get, barring some modifications.

I'm . . . OK with my syllabi. Both feel like very new preps, even as I've taught an earlier version of script analysis for over a decade now. Things feel risky, but also a little exciting? A lot will depend upon my discipline in keeping up with daily grading (or weekly in the case of the PhD class). Low-stakes writing works best, in my experience, when I demonstrate early and often that what they write--the ideas and questions they express--matter. Otherwise, students get the sense that it's meaningless busywork.

So: discipline. I have been good at that at points in the past, so I know I can do it.

I came home, crashed, and then had another coffee--much later than I usually do. I have that just-completed-a-huge-task burst of energy. I did the dishes, took out the recycling, cleaned the cats' litter boxes, and even found the old, old version of our programs comprehensive exams.

Comp exams, for those who don't know, are the ordeal exercise that PhD programs put students through as they finish their coursework and transition to dissertation writing. It's the pivot between "PhD student" and "PhD candidate," aka "ABD (All But Dissertation). 

No matter where you go, they're a bundle of anxiety, stress, and exhaustion. Historically--in this program and in others (like my own PhD program)--comps or comp-equivalent exercises were used to prove that the student wields an encyclopedic knowledge of the field. As we came to question that expectation, we shifted to the more-defensible-but-still-questionable metaphor of a mental rolodex of names, events, texts, and theories that any Theatre PhD should have at their beck and call. "If you're at a conference," we'd tell students as an example, "and someone presents a paper on rasas, you as a PhD should be able to link that concept to Sanskrit theatre." 

As I explained to my seminar this morning, we as a program and as a field are stepping back from that image of what a PhD in Theatre is or should be. As I've written about here, the model of "encyclopedic knowledge of world theatre history, literature, and theory" is a mirage. There's just too much. We now tailor comp exams more to a student's history of study. Have they retained info about the studies they've engaged in while in the program? Can they take a meta-critical perspective about these studies--comparing, contrasting, evaluating, and synthesizing them? Can they demonstrate the ability to do the research necessary to discover, evaluate, and assimilate new information?

I shared with them the very first comp exam I helped to grade here at this institution. It was spring 2006. The comp exam at that time consisted of a list of 100 terms from (mainly) Western/European/North American theatre history, literature, and theory. It murdered students. I mean, of course it did! Looking at it now, there are a few (a handful) that even I could only guess at. I'm not sure what that kind of test does except for demoralize someone. 

I'm glad we stepped away from that model. I'll be happy when our new curriculum gets approved and we can step away from even our current model. 

But what if anything should replace it?

Class Prep Week: finished. nearly finished. I must be nearly finished.

 A short post this evening. I've finished my contemporary theatre grad syllabus!

I'm not super-happy about everything, but at this point it's like we say with dissertations: a good syllabus is a done syllabus. 

We'll see how it goes tomorrow.

Now on to the other two classes...

Class Prep: Mushbrain--but a plan!

 OK. I think I have a possible plan for the grad class. It's gonna be a combination reading/discussion group with a pedagogical focus. 

It meets twice a week--Mondays and Wednesdays. Most Mondays, I'll have them read a play paired with a critical piece (usually an article focusing on teaching that play and/or contextualizing/problematizing it). I have many, many more such pairings that could work than I have room for. I gotta cut down.

Most Wednesdays, there will be two presentations by students. Students will sign up for two of these presentations at the start of the semester. One will be a "keystone" presentation where they teach us a lesson on some especially influential or significant play, artist, movement, and/or event. Ideally, this will be one we've all heard of, perhaps from prior to 2000 (or at least prior to 2010). I'll have a suggested list, but they're welcome to do something different if they'd like. The other presentation for each Wednesday will be something else--a "hidden treasure" (I'll think of something else to call it). Here is where they can either suggest and have us all read a relatively recent play (last 20 years or so) that they think will become important--or argue for the recovery/recuperation of some artist/group/event that we (and most canon/class formations) overlook.

Additionally, each week, students will post a "sitrep" (Situation Report) on a blog they'll create just reflecting on their thoughts from the prior week.

The two big projects at midterm and finals will be some kind of annotated syllabus that they'll create--perhaps one for a general ed "contemporary dramatic lit" class and one for a special topics course of their own devising that generally deals with theatre/performance of the last seventy-five years.

The hard--hard hard hard--thing right now is, as always, what do I leave out? I have so much extra that i'm thinking of cutting down student reports in favor of just having more that I provide. I'm trying to take Jill Dolan's advice: assign less. I want the class to be rewarding, not a slog.

Perhaps I should do only one or the other rather than both on the Wednesdays?

Aaaand there's also the undergrad script analysis to get ready before Monday. But not right now. My brain=mush.

G'night!

Class Prep: Lots of Article Reading

 All day long has been me downloading scholarly articles onto my hard drive and into my brain in preparation for deciding what goes into my contemporary theatre seminar.

I've taught this seminar several times before, and I've never been exactly satisfied with it. It's technically a history seminar, but there's just no way to do justice to the last seventy-five years of global theatre history in fifteen weeks (fourteen, really, with holidays and whatnot). I looked over all my past attempts today. They stretch back to the aughts. I see I started with a doggedly chronological march through key eras. Then I shifted to a thematic focus. I shunted the march-through-history back to a "crash course" that took up the first few weeks. Students would absorb all that the standard theatre history texts had to say about the eras we studied. I'd give them a week or two to do that and then threaten them with some kind of test. The real test, of course, was me looking at their notes, seeing if they'd taken care to learn what they needed to.

I dislike that activity. It always felt necessary--Well, I can't have a history class without them knowing the basic history, right? You have to have a starting point to trouble, don't you?--but it caused such stress and tension for students. It's like their comp exams in miniature, even as it was supposed to help them prepare for said exams.

I'm trying to do away with that exercise this semester.

As I've mentioned previously, we're formally stepping back from the expectation of an encyclopedic knowledge of theatre history. This seminar--like all our era-based history seminars--is transitioning to a more modular, special-topics course. I've been approaching this course's planning as if it simply were one of those special topics courses. "What if you get a job at a college/university," I pitched, "and got assigned a course along the lines of 'modern drama' or 'contemporary theatre' or 'today's plays'? What do you teach?"

My aim was to attract students beyond just our PhD program. Currently there aren't enough PhD Theatre students in coursework to make a course work. (There's a general lull in applications to PhD programs in Theatre, but that's another topic.) I wanted to appeal to folk in English, Comp Lit, Womens/Gender/Queer studies and the like. As it happens, my class is half theatre grads (PhDs and--unexpected--MFAs) with a few outsiders thrown in. There's even an especially precocious undergrad there.

So: having promised a special topics course, how shall I deliver? I think I have a sufficient number of articles and plays to choose from. How do I arrange the course? What will their main assignments be? What do I want them to take from this course?

In my mind, I'm thinking that the main big deliverables from students in the semester will be teaching materials: perhaps an annotated syllabi--two or three, I haven't decided on; perhaps a portfolio of syllabus, teaching philosophy, and sample lesson; or perhaps a conference-length presentation/manifesto. I'll also try to do a lot of low-stakes writing throughout, perhaps via a weekly blog. The course is two days a week. I'd ideally like to do one day of case study--a play or playwright (or perhaps an event or topic) paired with an article (preferably about teaching said playwright/play/event/topic). The other day, after the first week or two, would involve students signing up to share (1) a keystone play/playwright/event--a play/playwright/event that influenced other work/artists; or (2) a hidden treasure item--an event/site/play/artist that they think could or should become a keystone. Maybe I should include an option of a hands-on lesson?

The other assignment will be weekly status reports (blogs) where they reflect on the topics given.

Different students are taking this class at different levels; some are pass/fail while others are fully enrolled. I'll have tiered expectations for each level.

Now: how do I structure the weeks? I have two days to decide!