[C]are about students. And I mean really care. Talk to them like human beings. Give them your best. Be well prepared for and coherent in class. Write letters of recommendation for them. If you do all of that, you're standing head and shoulders above most tenured professors, at least most of the ones I know. Students are your clients, your bread and butter. Many tenured literature professors may say, "How can you claim to care about students if you're teaching eight classes or so a semester?" Well, surgeons and lawyers achieve excellence in their professions by doing a lot of work in their field. It's the same thing for English teachers. You get better at what you do a lot of. ....BTW, did you read the NY Times piece on the humanities? Here is an excerpt from that one:
[R]emember that literary studies is ultimately a derivative and service-oriented discipline. Fiction writers and poets perform the real work. Always have, always will. Literary studies is not similar to computer science or physics, where people teaching in their subject areas actually "do" the content. Occasionally, of course, people in English departments produce scholarly works approaching the status of art itself. I can think of three or four people in the humanities in the last 40 years who produced that kind of work: Paul Fussell, William Gass, Russell Jacoby, and James Kincaid. Those stylists are the true descendants of people like H.L. Mencken, who realized that criticism can be art. But that's four out of hundreds of thousands of people. Most of the rest of the work is taxonomy and politically driven commentary — pretty derivative stuff. The work of literary studies is teaching writing skills and other people's books. If you really want to innovate, don't read continental philosophy for hours on end and produce incomprehensible articles. Fire up the word processor and create your own fictional vision of the world. ....
“Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.
With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. Technology executives, researchers and business leaders argue that producing enough trained engineers and scientists is essential to America’s economic vitality, national defense and health care. Some of the staunchest humanities advocates, however, admit that they have failed to make their case effectively.
This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, “what it means to be a human being.
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