The Candid Teacher

I teach an introduction to poetry course to first year undergraduates in seminar groups of 14 and the name of the course is slightly misleading as the poems are often complex and the students need to learn how to discuss form as well as meaning so that they can complete their summative assignments confidently. This can be difficult for some of the students who have taken the course as it’s compulsory rather than because they feel enthusiastic about poetry. One method I’ve devised is to have fun with the poems by setting ‘spot the difference’ activities that I hoped would catch the students’ interest by showing the difficulties for Victorian women poets writing love poetry to men, seeing as they were writing in a tradition that had a predominantly ‘male gaze’ approach to the muse, developed over centuries. Each week there are about 10 set poems and a lecture, as well as the seminars, in which we do a close reading of one or two of the poems. I use Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Son...

There are some types of work that you can only learn on the job, and university teaching is one of them. Luckily we also have professional training now to help us prepare, but even so it’s the practical work that makes sense of all the pedagogical theory and brings it to life. It’s only in the lecture theatre or seminar room that you find out if you love or hate the job and if it’s for you. I thoroughly enjoyed training with others on the inSTIL course and hoped I’d enjoy the work at least as much. As it turned out, teaching is more pleasurable and fulfilling, more challenging but also with unexpected rewards. The inSTIL training helped overcome the difficulties right from the first day. Although I had my first class well prepared – a seminar on Shakespeare’s Sonnet ‘Why is my verse so barren of new pride’ – there was also an important lesson for me to learn and that was the importance of the staff room and talking with other teachers. I had two seminars to teach each week on the sa...