A dark confession

Or possibly not that dark, since I've seen other bloggers write stuff that suggests some of you, too, suffer from the problem I'm about to reveal.

I regularly choose books for my classes that I haven't already read.

In fact, I regularly choose books for my classes that I haven't even seen.

Choosing books is a strange and difficult, yet exciting task. It's exciting because there's that opportunity to change things that didn't work last time you taught a class, or (especially if it's a new class), to think about new ways to bring texts together in fascinating and thought-provoking ways, to see what's been published since you last looked, and to ponder all the possibilities out there holding the promise that, if you choose correctly, you may actually yet design the perfect class.

But it's a difficult task, made so by three factors: the conditions of the job; the conditions of the profession; and the conditions of the institution in question.

The conditions of the institution: this might be put more simply as your audience, and includes what you might call the most material factors. How much money can you expect students to spend on books? How many pages can you expect them to read? It's no good assigning the latest specialized study from Oxford University Press if it's 600 pages long and costs $75. I feel pretty lucky in my current gig - the students here apparently don't care much about cost (by and large they're not paying themselves) - and I can get away with assigning quite a bit of reading - say 6-7 books between 150-300 pp or so each. (There are plenty of schools still where a history survey entails a textbook and that's it.) Also, at what level can you expect your students to read? That 600 pager is probably going to go straight over their heads because it's not written for them, it's written for bigwigs in the field. These are relatively straightforward things to consider, but they do complicate how you choose your books.

The conditions of the profession: my field (history) has been tending in the last 20 years or so (total random guess about time) toward narrower and narrower studies. Partly this is due to increased expectations for tenure (resulting from the abysmal job market, because even the smallest most teaching-oriented school is likely to hire someone with research experience and interests, meaning that the expectations for tenure go up), and the resulting near-necessity of publishing one's dissertation, which is not usually something of broad vision and scope (no disrespect to dissertations, they're just not usually like that). Beyond this, writing broad, synthetic overviews or other kinds of work most suitable for assigning in undergraduate courses is not valued in terms of tenure reviews or post-tenure reviews. Prestige tends to come from highly specialized research and engaging with other scholars in your subfield. Some scholars do manage to tackle important questions in studies based on rigorous individual research in such a fashion that undergraduate students will be able to read and learn from such books. But in general, the kind of work that gets you "ahead' in the historical profession is not always going to be appropriate to assign in an undergradute course. This means that even in really interesting and important areas of study, there can be volumes printed and nothing appropriate to assign to undergrads. (Case in point: I am teaching a class on women in Early Modern Europe next semester. I would really really really like to find a nice, accessible, relatively short book addressing the question of women and witchcraft in Europe as a whole. But the only accessible, short works I'm aware of are so popularized that they're just not very good history. There has certainly been TONS of writing on witches/the witch craze. But when you combine the direction of historical publishing with the audience for the work, the stuff I've found is either a) too specialized b) too long or c) too expensive for me to assign in an undergraduate survey.)

Finally, the conditions of the job: this is embarrassing to admit, given that I am a college professor and all, but I feel like I NEVER have time to read anything I don't absolutely, positively, HAVE to read. In fact, reading books at all has become weird and complicated since graduating from college. One of grad school's most important lessons, it seemed to me (and I think The Cranky Professor says something like this on his homepage), was to learn how to get the information you needed out of a book without actually reading the whole thing. I had grad school friends and peers who found this whole approach very disconcerting ("we went to grad school because we like reading books!") but I took to it like a ginger cat to black trousers. I became excellent at gutting a book - read the intro, read the conclusion, look at the table of contents, skim the first and last paragraphs of each chapter, look for pertinent headings or tables or charts, hey presto, you're done. This skill was the only thing that got me through my prelims, and I was damn good at it.

But then I started teaching full time. And you can't gut a book when you're teaching it, because invariably whatever section you felt didn't need a close reading is the section about which some kind soul in class will put their hand up and say, "I didn't really get what they meant about the fish?" And you're standing there in front of everyone, frantically thinking, the fish, the fish, what on earth did the book say about fish? And most of the time the student really hasn't understood and it's not really about fish, it's actually about bicycles, but if you didn't read the section to begin with you're not in a very good position to explain that. And there's the temptation to stand there and say, "Oh, the fish, yes, well, that's not really relevant to what we're studying in this class, so I wouldn't worry about it," but then one of the savvier students will stick their hand up and say, "But what about the bicycles?"

At which point you say, "So, about your midterm next week..."

Anyway, the point I really mean to make here is that I don't find it possible to gut-read the books I assign for class. I have to read the whole thing, carefully, unless I've already taught it four or five times (which is still relatively rare for me). And sadly, since I have a brain that seems very good at dumping unnecessary information at the end of the semester (unnecessary = anything I don't need to know for the following semester), if I teach a class every other year, even when I re-assign the same book, I have to read it again because I don't remember a word of what it said.

(I guess this is where better class plans etc. come in. But that's another post.)

So, what with teaching three classes a semester (and I know that load could be oh-so-much worse), and grading all those pedagogically sound assignments I give, my reading is limited to books assigned for class, and whatever I need to read for whatever research I have going on at that point. (Brief digression: when I was in grad school I didn't understand how people found it hard to keep up on the reading in their field; I was much more concerned with pulling together enough archival/primary source material to support any remotely interesting or original research. Now I've been to the archives enough to have plenty of that material lying around, but keeping up with current publishing suddenly seems much more difficult. How dare anyone write anything on my subject since I finished my dissertation! And now that I can't gut-read books that I teach, I've really fallen out of the habit in general, and tend to read EVERYTHING with as much attention as if I were going to teach it...which is very sloooooowly.)

So when it comes time to choose new books for a class, I rarely have time actually to read them. I've worked out a calculus for choosing books without reading them: I check out length. I check out tables of contents (assuming they're on Amazon). I look for reviews. And I google "book title" + "syllabus" to see if anyone else out there is using the book too. If I have time, I order exam copies or ILL books, but usually that just means I can look at the physical presentation of the book and read the TOC more easily than on Amazon - it doesn't usually mean read any more of it than I would otherwise.

Result: I regularly assign books I haven't read. Sometimes those books succeed, sometimes they fail miserably. So far it's never really resulted in disaster - so there's one book in the semester that everyone hates; oh, well; we have spend one day having a bitch session and figuring out what's wrong with it; we move on. I can live with it.

But it does leave me wondering what it would be like to teach a class in which I knew the contents of ALL the readings before I started teaching it!

Comments

[michelle]

I know that people do this a lot but I'm still relieved to see you post it (and with emphasis!) because I am somewhat petrified about all the texts I'm teaching and am consequently drawing up all these insane schedules for trying to read before the semester begins.

I also have to decide which novels or novellas I'm assigning in addition to the anthology and I've considered (1) my personal attraction to the book; (2) price; and (3) length. I've been all over the "look inside the book" stuff on Amazon and have come up with this crazy grid of statistics for all these books and still cannot decide. I feel incredibly lucky to be given so much freedom and overwhelmed with making the right decision and not assigning something they'll hate, etc.

I also tend to not read anything that I don't have to. This has been, in the past, due to the comprehensive exam list and the fact that anytime i could choose something to read, I felt obligated to choose something off that daunting list since it was clear I'd never get around to reading even half of it anyway. Now that's behind me but anything new I read will be the texts for next semester in hopes of staying one step ahead.

[ianqui]

No problem. I regularly do that too, at least in my graduate seminars. I do it because I use these seminars as an opportunity to read articles that I've been interested in reading but don't really need to read. In fact, I make up seminar topics based on papers that I'd like to read, or a field I'd like to explore a little more. I think the students understand that that's the way it works, so I don't feel bad about it. As long as you read the book before the class! And it's good for students to be exposed to bad books or articles too, because they should know what not to do.

[Ancarett]

This coming semester I know all my required books well -- the undergraduate courses are repeats and the two books I've changed in one class are both books that I had consulted while teaching the previous session. Of course, I think I still could benefit by a thorough re-reading of the longer of those, but, oh well.

That said, I do order books that I have yet to read -- though I'm pretty savvy at calling up or emailing the publisher's rep now and saying "Hey, I'm considering adopting XYZ text from your publisher for a class with an anticipated enrollment of 80 students and I need an exam copy. Can you help arrange that?" Usually the exam copy arrives in the next week or two with an eager follow-up.

[Jane]

I'm in a similar situation with one of my undergrad courses this term: for some odd reason, there has been NO textbook written on this subject matter. At all. So I'm going through the exercise of picking out appropriate journal articles for undergrads that are not too narrowly focused, but of course not too many journals in my field are publishing survey pieces at all. What a nightmare!

As far as course textbooks go, I am pretty good about ordering review copies, but I find that I rarely do more than skim the table of contents and maybe look at some of the chapter exercises. Mainly to confirm that the book fits how I want to present the material. And I try to read the chapters before class; however, I am guilty of skimming the chapter 5 minutes before class at least once last term! So you are definitely not alone in putting off reading for class.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Can I just say, YES! I know this feeling well. In fact, I'm starting to teach a book I haven't read tomorrow. Fortunately, tomorrow is syllabus day and the next day I'm doing background, and the next day, I think I'm going to do a John Keegan Napoleonic Wars thing, and after that, they see a film while I'm at the AHA, so I have time this week to get next week together ... I just have to get the first three weeks assignments posted on Blackboard. But if it makes you feel better, ALL of what you've said makes sense and is familiar.

[Sharon]

You just made me feel so much better...

On the witchcraft readings, it's really not that easy to find *any* particularly recent surveys that cover Europe rather than individual countries, let alone on women. (The best thing I can think of would be the chapter on witchcraft in Merry Wiesner's _Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe_?) I think there's an additional factor with a subject that gets so much published: every year the idea of trying to synthesise all of that writing gets more and more intimidating - the huge online witchcraft bibliography (http://www.hist.unt.edu/web_resources/witchcraft_bib.pdf) has over 300 pages and includes works in I don't know how many languages...

[terminaldegree]

True confession: I have never read the book before teaching the class. Ever. In my six years of adjuncting, I've never had the luxury of reading the book before the class even starts (unless, of course, I'm teaching a class I've taught before), let alone choosing it. This is because some administrator usually chooses the texts, and at the last minute, he or she realizes that they are going to need to open another section of the class. This is where I come in, often with less than a week to prepare for the entire term (in one case, I had a weekend's notice). I feel lucky if I can stay a week ahead of the students.

So I certainly share your frustration. The fact is that we simply don't have time to read everything we assign. Here's how I've learned to cope: I usually assign 1-2 students the job of review at the beginning of each class session. (They summarize the previous class meeting and the reading assignment for the day in about 5 minutes max. This means that at least 2 people will have actually read the material for the day, and that I won't be doing so much lecturing.) I also do a lot of "note card" questions, in which each student writes down the top 3 things from the reading, and I draw cards at random (without sharing the student's identity) and ask everyone for input.

What I find really frustrating is that the students tend to blame ME if the book sucks, and the course evals used to reflect this. So I have learned to share with them that 1. I didn't choose the book; 2. I'm teaching it for the first time; and 2. I invite their criticism (pro/con) of the materials. I assure them that regardless of the specific book we use, I am very familiar with the subject material (bwahahaha!). I "save face" by disclosing this, and they tend to be more tolerant when I can't remember the part about the fish (or the bicycle).

Yep, what you said rings true, at least for me.

The flip side is (are?) those senior faculty members who have been teaching the samed damned books (and re-photocopying the samed damned syllabi) since 1960. I once took a class from a prof who actually used his FATHER'S syllabus (ca. 1943, and this was in the early '90s). I'd rather have a prof using new, fresh materials any day, even if they're not entirely familiar with the texts.

[terminaldegree]

Oops, I obviously can't count as high as 3 yet. :)

[Rudbeckia Hirta]

I've once taught a course that I'd never even TAKEN (for another department!) from a book that I'd never even heard of. I was about one week ahead of the students all semester.

[harvestbird]

I appreciate your honesty, NK. As far as prescribing something I haven't read (or a film I haven't seen), I rationalise by saying to myself, "it's a journey we'll take together". And there is (I still maintain) an advantage in coming to teaching materials, erm, fresh, in that you're less likely to have to negotiate so carefully the differences between your understanding of the text and the students'.

Your comment "reading books at all has become weird and complicated since graduating from college" is also true for me ... a fairly bitter irony for a literature PhD, but true nonetheless.

[Mel]

I do this too. And I was just thinking today about writing a post about the whole issue of having no time to just read in my field... so we're on the same page, NK.

[Laura]

I did that all the time too. I'm teaching in the fall and we have about 5 books on the list so far and I haven't read any of them. Maybe they'll get read before fall and maybe they won't.

I always tried to read all the books in grad school. I wish some kind soul had told me your strategy. I just felt like I was in grad school and I should read every word. For my orals, I did for the most part, though I traded The Faerie Queene for Gravity's Rainbow with another colleague. I told him everything he needed to know about FQ and he told me all about GR.

After passing the orals, I made a resolution to read at least one book for pleasure every month. I really didn't like reading in my spare time since I had to do so much of it for work. It's the one resolution I've kept and I'm so glad.

By the way, I'd be interested in seeing your reading list when you're finished. Women in early modern europe is a big interest of mine.

[Prof Goose]

Oh yeah. I've done this (in fact, you just inspired a post on this over at my house). I find that I do it a lot more with the 100 and 300 level courses, which I just improvise and hope (fish? what fish?) about each time around. For grad seminars, I use a "great works" approach that rather precludes the problem...other than the peppering I do with the most recent literature on the topic that I will usually check into.

*sigh* I remember skimming though. Skimming was so cool! *sigh heavier*

[Scrivener]

I try to always have at least one book on my syllabus that I haven't read before, at least for my composition classes. You're so right that it's hard to get much reading done outside of class prep, so I've learned, like ianqui, that if I want to read a book or some articles or to explore a newish subject area, I've got to teach it.

I've moved beyond any sense of guit over this--I really feel no need ot justify or rationalize about it at all, and I tell my students at the beginning of the term and again as we work through the book that I am reading it with them. I don't read ahead at all either, so I am in the same position as they are. I find it easier and more enjoyable to model good reading with them when I'm not an expert on the text--I do a lot of asking them to make predictions about where the text is headed and we talk about how to make sense of a difficult book while we are reading it, rather than waiting until the end to begin to think about what it means, which is what so many of my freshman have, sadly, been trained to do. And some of the best classes have been times when I've made predictions in class with them and they've turned out to be wrong. The first time I taught Going After Cacciato it was selected as a shared text by committee, and I read it with my students. In the opening chapter there's a discussion of an "AWOL bag" that is confusing but seems packed with potential meaning, and I made a big deal out of expecting that image to return, but it pretty much didn't. We had some good discussions about what to do with moments like that one that I think ultimately helped some of my students make sense of what it means to interpret literature.

This spring is the first semester in a long time that I will have read every major text on my syllabus, and I'm kind of annoyed by that fact and wishing I could rearrange the syllabus to add a novel I haven't read, but I don't think it'll happen. I also agree that it can be helpful for them to read an unsuccessful book or article at times too.

And I completely agree with you that I can't gut-read a book you're teaching, and I need to re-read it each time too. But that's where teaching a book because it's one I want to read or know better comes in--the need to read it closely so I can teach it is what allows me to actually read it (as opposed to all those other books that I want to read but aren't on my syllabus so they just sit there on the shelf), and I'm always happy to be able to actually read it instead of simply skimming the TOC or the index and reading the two grafs that are directly useful for me.

None of what you say in this post strikes me as anything approaching a "dark confession," except for maybe the fact that you don't get to read as much as you want to now that you teach--and that's one we all share, I think. I think this is at least one kind of good teaching. So be proud of teaching books you've only just read for the first time.

[profgrrrrl]

I was feeling triumphant today because I took the book I've selected for this semester out of the packaging. I've never opened it before. Class starts in a week. Should be interesting. :)

[cindy]

Hee. As I cleaned up the bedroom today, I piled up the texts I'll be teaching this spring--two of them new to me--and thought, "I really should look at those."

This is a great post, NK. Especially the part about the fish. I thought I was the ONLY one that happened to!

[Claire]

I had to teach something where I hadn't read a single book on the reading list. That was terrifying. I did read them in the end but even one reading doesn't feel like enough to teach properly.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

What a great bunch of comments! Thanks to everyone for telling me about your own experiences.

Like a bunch of you, I do try to assign things that I want to read and wouldn't get a chance to otherwise (this is very helpful in, say, my women's history classes, less helpful in my Crusades class, which is entirely unrelated to my own research) - I do feel like if I teach a book, I really know it inside and out (at least for a little while!).

Scrivener's point about intentionally reading along with the students is interesting - it's a good point, but there are always times with a new book where I think, "Now, if I wasn't reading this the night before we're discussing it, I could have set up a much clearer discussion of X or I could have prepared ahead of time for activity Y." But that presumes that if I were familiar with the book I would be more on the ball than I am now - a big presumption!

People's points about sharing the students' freshness, so to speak, are also really good - it *is* true that when I know a book inside and out I tend to underestimate the amount of work it's going to be for students to read it, and to assume that they'll get much more out of it on the first go-round than they actually can.

Michelle, I think picking books on personal attraction is as good a method as any - you're the one who has to teach them.

And terminaldegree, I've stepped in to teach someone else's class once, and yes, that's so frustrating; I at least have the luxury of complaining about choosing books! And if they don't work out, the students *can* blame me. ;-) I have a colleague here who stepped into someone else's class (teaching as a sabbatical replacement) and she hated the syllabus so much, and it so didn't work, that halfway through she just tore it up and developed a new one. But that is definitely not always an option.

Laura's comments about orals made me laugh b/c I traded "women in medieval Europe" for "the Crusades and Reconquista" in just the same way...of course, it's easier to gut-read for history, I think, in that our orals are largely on historical scholarship, and not on primary source materials/original texts (history being rather anti-theory, there weren't even usually Great Works of Theory to absorb). I can't imagine how you would gut-read a novel, poem, or even something like Foucault. I wonder what kinds of disciplinary differences there are? I think history students would be less impressed by reading through a text together in the way Scrivener describes, because the prof is supposed to know all the material already like an encyclopedia. (At least, that's the sense I have.) Students don't think they're going to learn how to read, they think they're going to learn facts (I do try to disabuse them of this, but it's still hard). This may be just that I'm too insecure to let them know I don't know a reading...

Sharon, I'm using Wiesner as the textbook for the class! (Love that book.) But I wanted to supplement that with something on witchcraft - students have so many assumptions about women and witchcraft that I think it's a good opportunity to address it. Plus it's kind of pandering b/c witches are "fun." ;-) I'm assigning portions of Briggs, _Witches and Neighbors_, which I think is well done but potentially a little over the students' heads (it seems to assume knowledge of assumptions about witchcraft, if that makes any sense). This is also my secondary field so I always feel a little out of my depth.

Anyway, the syllabus will have to be done by January 11, so if anyone would like a copy, drop me an e-mail and I'll happily send it along.

Whew! Back to work now...

[PZ Myers]

I do the same thing. I typically do a quick check of the text to make sure it covers the basic points I want to address, but sometimes I don't read the chapter until the night before my lecture...and even then it may just be a quick skim.

What I do do, though, is have multiple sources for each lecture. I might read through the relevant material in 3 or 4 textbooks beforehand (I so abuse publisher's habit of giving away free review copies...). I usually don't have the fish/bicycle problem because I've encountered the same issue from a couple of different perspectives, but if I do, I can usually switch the discussion to that interesting but tangentially related ice cream topic I'd read about somewhere.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

PZ, this is where I wonder how the disciplinary differences play out... I actually don't lecture that often (probably I do so more than I think I do, but each day is usually planned around discussion) and when I do assign a textbook (which I don't always) it's more for background and we don't discuss it much. So when students bring up the fish/bicycle, it's (usually) in discussion of primary sources or historical monographs, in which I have to know things like the specific language/imagery used, or the specific argument and what sources were used, which may have very little to do with my general knowledge of the topic at hand. My sense is that this is sort of different from the average science course, where if you're teaching (say) something about atmospheric pressure, it's much less important to know exactly how your textbook talks about atmospheric pressure, because if you're clear on how atmospheric pressure works it's all (at the intro level) pretty much the same thing. But if I'm teaching _Gilgamesh_ for the first time, no matter how much I know about ancient Mesopotamia (which is admittedly not very much), and I skip over the part where Gilgamesh meets the Noah-prototype and finds out about the flood, and a student then asks me something about that section, I'm kind of screwed. (I'm not saying this is harder/better than what you do by any means, it just seems kind of different. I think it's a little bit more like lab - if you don't know what happens when you combine one chemical with another, you're going to be kind of screwed if the first place you find out is when your students do it in lab. I know almost nothing about how teaching labs works, and I presume that a lot of lab stuff is going over things you've probably done a bunch of times, but I wonder if teaching a new text is more like setting up a new lab for you?) (Feel free to mock my utter lack of understanding of how science works, by the way...)

[bitchphd]

Am dying to read the comments on this but am doing drive-by blog reading as I am STILL ON VACATION, DAMNIT. Though I did a little work this afternoon.

Anyway, I usually skim to prepare for class. Then when the fish question comes up, I just toss it back at the students: "that's a good question. What did you guys m ake of that passage?" And then usually once they start talking about it, I'll remember. If necessary, I'll press them to actually "look at the text. What page # is that passage on?" (I know, I know, I'm a hypocrite) and then I'll say, "let's look at that for a moment" and skim it real quick.

Which is also what the students are doing, of course :P

[Anastasia]

I picked a textbook, sight unseen for my Death class, having never taught this or any other course on my own before. What, am I some kind of idiot?? That could have been very bad.

But I got lucky. It's a great book.

I skim to prepare if I've read the book before and/or know the issues. If it's a relatively unfamiliar topic, I usually read it carefully out of anxiety. That said, I've definitely pulled the whole "let's look at the passage together" thing, on questions I couldn't immediately asnwer. That usually works.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Dr. B and Anastasia, that is so totally what I do too (though I didn't mention it in the post): "So, what do the rest of you think?" and "What does the specific passage say - can you point that to us in the book?" It actually usually works out fine, but there's still part of me that thinks I should know it all ahead of time.

That's probably the part of me wrestling with how to fit in all the sources I want them to read this semester when chances are good it's overloading them. Sigh. I keep saying I'm going to less with more, but then I don't. Guess that's another post.

[Ralph Luker]

In my last full time position, one of my advisees was telling me about a course she was taking in another department. She said that, not only had the professor not read the books before the semester began, but that the students knew that the professor usually came to class without having read the readings that were officially assigned for the class hour, so the students had decided that it wasn't important that they do so either. "What on earth do you talk about in class," I asked. "Oh, whatever comes to mind," said my advisee. At that point, I threw my hands up in disgust.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Well, that sounds like a complete exercise in futility! ;-)