Teaching

One day in early January 1993, I walked into a classroom at UC Berkeley to teach for the first time. My students, not much younger than I, slouched expectantly and didn’t return my nervous smile. Eucalyptus perfume wafted in through the open windows; somebody coughed. I turned right to the board and wrote my name and contact information slowly, very slowly, because I knew that when that was done I would have to put down the chalk, turn around, and begin — somehow.

Like most grad students, I had no training in teaching. Berkeley was particularly pure in its neglect: it deployed its hoards of graduate students to staff English 1A and 1B, the university’s introduction to writing and critical thinking, yet how this instruction was to be achieved was entirely our guess — and our prerogative. Many an undergraduate, I’m afraid, was subjected to rather arcane or downright inappropriate material in these courses. On that tender day in 1993, I believe the “Intoxication and Disordering of the Senses” syllabus that I distributed (after writing my name on the board) included far too many poems by Rimbaud, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano , William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, something by Joan Didion, I believe, doubtless De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Keats’s Lamia, and who knows what else. Intoxicated and disordered indeed; my assigned set of Berkeley undergrads (who could handle any extreme) hung on for dear life and made it work — somehow.

That crazy first syllabus, crafted on a Mac Classic and produced by a dot-matrix workhorse printer, has been lost in the mists of time. So much of what happens in a class is irretrievable. But California in the ’90s offered another heady inspiration for nascent teachers, a more lasting and documentable inspiration. Here, then, are some traces of classes I’ve created and taught down through the years that sought to leverage the web. The early courses were supplemented by home-posted, crude affairs. Later I would pour my efforts into web services run by institutions that would have no real strategy or intent to keep them alive (hello, dead links). More recently, considerations for student privacy have increasingly confined access to the increasingly interactive and creative web work of my students.

Nevertheless here are some traces — some more complete than others. I’m happy to keep adding to this list, because what I did not know before that first day of teaching in Berkeley — but what I almost immediately discovered — is that students keep teaching me how to teach.

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