Posts by George David Clark
May 22, 2012, 09:07 AM ET
On Not Squandering the Summer
When I began
attending the department’s monthly professional-development
seminars at the outset of my doctoral program, the job search
seemed a long way off. To be honest, it still seemed distant this
time last year when all my attention was focused on exams and my
dissertation. I knew I would be on the market in the fall, but,
until the MLA released the Job Information List (JIL) in
mid-September, I figured I could put off the labor of preparing my
application materials. After all, I kept my CV up-to-date and I had
drafted a statement of teaching philosophy as part of that
professional-development series. 
I couldn't have been more wrong. When
the list appeared I found that several of the jobs I was interested
in wanted their applications completed by the second week in
October. Predictably, the teaching statement I wrote two years
before no longer fit me, and then there were requests...
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April 26, 2012, 12:36 PM ET
Tailoring Our Teaching
When I teach creative-writing courses
one of my go-to assignments requires students to construct a long,
grammatically correct sentence in the service of whatever story or
poem they're working on. Paired with a week of close syntactic
study, the goal of this assignment is to show students how a
thought's shape can itself be dramatically productive, and also to
challenge them to be creative and ambitious in how they connect and
modify phrases. At my previous institution, "the long sentence" had
to contain only 50 words, but, generally, more than half of the
class needed to revise their work in order to receive credit. These
past two semesters (at an elite liberal-arts university) I gave the
same assignment, but asked for a sentence of at least 100 words.
Here, more than three quarters of my students managed the technical
requirement on their first try. My point is not simply that the...
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April 18, 2012, 01:55 PM ET
The End of the Affair
You might expect
a successful job candidate to relish the opportunity to turn down
one offer in favor of another. After collecting rejection letters
for the last couple of months it could feel empowering to finally
be the one saying "no". That wasn't my experience. To be honest, it
was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever had to make. Even
after the conversation was over I found it difficult to celebrate
the job I accepted because I felt so bad about the one I declined.
In a very real sense I had developed a
relationship with Attractive U. I started pursuing the school back
in October with my the job letter (a chaste but sincere love note),
and for the next five months I took every opportunity to tell the
search committee how fetching I found their department, what a good
match I thought we would make. They flirted back by giving me an
interview and then inviting me to visit the...
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January 26, 2012, 11:20 AM ET
Fear No Eval
A confession: this fall, compiling application dossiers in evidence
of my teaching effectiveness, I read my students' evaluations for
the first time in over two years. It's not that I've avoided
feedback; during that period I've had my teaching regularly
reviewed by graduate faculty and peers whose notes have been
greatly appreciated. Nor is it that I am particularly thin-skinned
in the face of criticism. Rather, I think I began avoiding student
evaluations after my first semesters as a teacher because they
simply baffled me and I felt I was spending altogether too much of
my teaching energy worried about how I was being graded. What
exactly did it mean when one student simply wrote, "Did not learn a
thing. Terrible.," and then, in the standardized portion of the
form, checked that he or she agreed that the instructor "stimulated
student learning"? This particular evaluation came from a...
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