Customer Satisfaction Surveys--aka course evaluations

Yesterday when I went to the English Department, a plain manila envelope with only my name written in the corner was waiting in my mailbox. As a non-tenured faculty member, I am still required to conduct course evaluations in at least two classes per year. I am apparently an anomaly among my colleagues because I don't mind receiving this feedback; it's usually an ego boost anyway, with the exception of one or two students in each class that I've offended or irritated somehow.

This semester I was in love with my American Literature II class. They were always eager to read, to talk, and to do their best work on every assignment. Sure, seven of the eighteen students in the class had been in a previous class with me, which gave me a sense of comfort from day one. The remaining students kept up with the veterans easily and impressively. Out of three pages of written comments, I received only one slightly negative piece of feedback from this class: one student wanted a more detailed outline of each literary period's major traits. I appreciate and will remember that comment in my next survey course.

Most of the time, I can put any negative comments into proper perspective, thanks largely to my memory of a wonderful friend and office mate at Southern Illinois, who said to me, "I figure the semester isn't a success unless I've pissed off at least one student." According to her advice, I've had an extremely successful career. This semester, I received absolutely scathing feedback from one student in my Tuesday evening class, but on my accompanying essays for my tenure application in the fall, I'm sure I'll be able to state a good case. This particular student missed at least five times before she stopped attending altogether, and she wasn't really present at one meeting: she was high as a kite and seemed downright dangerous as the clock moved in slow motion toward 8:45.

Still, I feel like I should have done something more for this student, as if she's a child I left behind. My usual behavior is to pursue any lost lambs and bring them back into the fold, but in cases like this one, I can approach the experience objectively and realize that if I had excused her behavior and let her catch up after her many absences, it would not have been fair to the other students--all of them diligent and rarely absent. What's more, her reasons for missing class never seemed legitimate--no one can have that many car accidents, flat tires, and dead family members in less than three months.

To take my mind off the evaluations, I dove back into my preparation for my Short Story Cycle course. I'm preparing a course bibliography (so far seven pages!), as usual, but this time I've ordered about 25 articles and books through interlibrary loan throughout the summer and submitted PDFs of each one to the library so that the electronic versions can be available to the students. Maybe I'm doing too much work for the students, but I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't LOVE doing research like this scholarly marathon has required.

Cycles, but not related to motorcycles or menstruation

Short story cycle: a collection of loosely connected stories. A composite novel. A novel in stories. Vignettes. Pastiche.

Those definitions will form the basis of my upcoming course called "He Said, She Said": Gender and Genre in the American Short Story Cycle. The genre shouldn't be a foreign one to students; after all, their retro music interests have included concept albums like Pink Floyd's The Wall and serial television shows like Law & Order. Each song, each episode is independent, but all together the individual pieces form a larger narrative with recognizable shared elements. Movies with sequels don't seem as relevant because they are more like books in a series, maybe because the separate movies are not short and aren't produced quickly enough for close comparison. Obviously, I'm still working out the definition of the genre.

I find it curious that in French linguistics the terms "gender" and "genre" are synonymous, and I'd like to explore with my students the possible reasons for the relationship between the two words as they mean "kind" or "type."

I'm hoping that narrative theory will help us parse out the distinctions between the short story cycle and short story collections and between genre and gender. How do we know we're reading a short story, apart from its length? Can a short story cycle include novellas? Do male and female writers, especially those writing in close chronology and about similar subjects, treat the cycle differently? Why have multicultural authors so eagerly grasped the short story cycle in the past 20-30 years? Whatever happens, I don't want to essentialize gender or ethnicity, but I still think sexual and cultural identity issues are relevant somehow.

What has been most difficult is choosing the reading selections. I initially had a list of about twenty books, but that number is not realistic for the students or for me. In my original list, I included titles by Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, but I gradually eliminated them as I conceptualized the course. As I read the James selection, it felt like swimming in a pool of maple syrup, a sensation that doesn't bode well for students; as for Hemingway and Faulkner, I'm hoping the students will have already read these big names. Maybe I'll regret these omissions. In the order of their appearance in the course calendar, here is the list of texts I've finalized with the bookstore:

Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 1993.
Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 1919.
Carver, Cathedral, 1983.
Erdrich, Love Medicine, 1984.
Jewett, Country of Pointed Firs, 1910.
Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, 1982.
Norman, Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories, 1977.
O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 1990.
O’Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge, 1963.
Toomer, Cane, 1923.
Welty, The Golden Apples, 1949.
Wilkinson, Water Street, 2005.


In this blog forum I'm hoping to work through some ideas and welcome any input.