Closing out British and American Literature: Beowulf to Milton (Fall 2022)

Submitted my final grades for my ENGL 373A: Brit Lit I (Beowulf to Milton) class on Friday. This was, hands down, the most fun I've ever had teaching. Partly it was just teaching something semi-within my research area. Partly it was teaching upper-division students in the major. Another part was just having a great bunch of students.

Some vital stats for the course:

• 43,000 words of lesson plans created, plus D2L shell
• 6 PowerPoints created
• 150 quiz questions created
• 10 possible short essay questions created for mid-term and final
• 81% average grade in the class overall

I checked for comparison, and my Monsters course only has 25,000 words of lesson plans. That's almost a direct result of studying for this course -- I'm not a medievalist or Early Modern scholar, so there was truly a prodigious amount of pre-course research involved. To help prep those lesson plans, I created an additional "historical notes" document that's another 13,000 words.

Overall, ENGL 373A was a massive learning experience for me. Even for texts I've taught frequently before, such as Beowulf, I studied more secondary research than ever before, just to make sure my information was up to snuff. I studied Chaucer and Milton in-depth for the first time ever, trying to understand just why they mattered to English literary history -- something that always previously eluded me. 

I even managed to incorporate my experiences taking a grad course in Early American literature. One unusual thing about ENGL 373A, which I've not seen elsewhere, is how it emphasizes British and American literature. From reading the syllabi from other UA instructors who've taught this course, I know I'm the first one to ever include an American component, and I had my grad school training to thank. Thus I managed to incorporate de las Casas (good for pairing with Edmund Spenser and his colonialist practices), Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom (great for pairing with Milton), and some Anne Bradstreet.

You know what else was weird? How much I kept thinking about the Brit Lit I course taken during my sophomore year at Lycoming College. I was just 19 years old, the teacher wasn't good, and I did awful in the class overall -- a C+. I couldn't make heads or tails of Beowulf, and I disliked the other readings immensely. The lone exception was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which remains my all-time favorite medieval text. Nonetheless, that long-ago Brit Lit I course from before I dropped out of Lycoming ended up thoroughly shaping my ENGL 373A syllabus. Beowulf, Gawain, Doctor Faustus, and Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" and "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" all made an appearance in my class. Funny how some things stay with you.

Final remark: my last class period of this semester was particularly noteworthy, too. One of the students with an Honors contract did some research on Old English food, and she made some quasi-historical bread for the class. She also churned her own butter and gave us a quick presentation on Anglo-Saxon food. That, btw, offered a great segue: "Okay, now that you've all enjoyed gluttony, let's go back to Sin and Book II of Paradise Lost." Afterwards my "Satan's Playlist" closing out out last class ended up being a big hit.

For that last class period, too, I requested reflections on writing in the English department. Partly I was curious to see how my expectations stacked up with other courses in the department, but also how they stacked up against the students' expectations. Here's some more notable responses, which I record for posterity:

• “Looking towards grad school applications, the rest of the upper-division English courses haven’t done very well to prepare us for longer writing samples, or the amount of writing that will presumably be required in most graduate level programs.”
• Comment: I made this remark earlier this semester to some other faculty on the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, but got voted down for what I was proposing.
• “this course provided me with the best feedback I have ever received on my writing pieces.”
• “Not only were assignments graded the quickest that I have ever experienced in my four years, but suggestions were made alongside praise which helped me understand what I was doing well and where I could still improve.”
• “Your feedback is probably the most thorough feedback I have received on any of my college essays thus far.”
• Comment: these last four comments were exactly what I was hoping to hear. Given that these reflections weren't mandatory (i.e,, they were bonus), there may be some self-selection bias, but overall this component of the class must have gone really well.
• “It’s a bit much to have the final essays and the two written essays for the final so close together.”
• Comment: fair enough! About two weeks separated the two, although that's not really unusual.
• “In many English courses, though, we wrote none [essays]. … they made up for it with discussions, blog postings, and other written assignments.”
• “There seems to be a wide range of writing components in the English department.”
• Comment: these last two comments jive with what I know about the department.
• “I absolutely loved the creative project we did with the alliterative meter.”
• “Overall, though, it was not my worst essay experience, I wasn’t fueled by spite or hatred, so a solid 6/10.”
• Comment: Well, this is something!