Faculty Spotlight:
Five Questions with Kathy Komar
Kathy Komar is Professor of Comparative Literature. She works on German, American, British, and French literature, particularly on the early 20th century. Professor Komar teaches courses ranging from the lower division undergraduate level to graduate level seminars. She is also Principal Investigator, with David Schaberg and Maite Zubiaurre, for the Mellon grant that created EPIC. I recently sat down with Professor Komar for an interview about her experiences and advice on teaching at UCLA, and what follows are some of the highlights from our conversation.
Do you have any tips for teaching a large lecture course?
Be flexible. [...] I run that course as though it's a big huge discussion section. So I'm actually in the main lecture, running it as a question-and-answer kind of format. I will deliver some information that I don't expect that they're going to have, like the context for particular texts, the cultural historical context, some biography of the author. Although now, they could probably look it up as fast as I can deliver, which is okay! So I give them that, but from then on, it really is question and answer. I'm trying desperately to get them involved and thinking about the texts, thinking on their feet, being willing to speak out loud as opposed to text messaging something. And it's kind of intimidating because that class can be 120 or 130 people. So it's hard for the undergrads to actually venture to do that. And then you have to walk a tightrope between hoping people will respond and not having the same person respond all the time. It's usually one enthusiastic person who likes to be heard and while that's good, it tends to dampen the discussion. But I run it particularly to be interactive. Now, that's not everybody’s style. I just discovered early on that I was a horrible lecturer. I tried lecturing. I tried writing out all my lectures and delivering them as though I were at a conference, and the students were bored. I was bored. So I thought okay, this is not the way I'm going to teach.
So took me a while to figure out that I have to have an ongoing conversation. I have to have interaction. And what I tell my TA’s is, find out what you're comfortable with. If you don't want to teach that way, if you feel you can give them more by delivering in a lecture format, that’s fine. Or, if you're much more tech savvy than I am, which almost all of my TA’s are and all of the undergraduates are, you could use a more interactive digital platform than I use. But I actually like to have them interact by speaking. And I do still actually write on the board. One student came up afterward and said, oh, you know, I remember stuff better that you write on the board! [...]
But mostly, I think those big lower division classes, it's a different aim than in my upper division or graduate courses. I really want them to begin to know that they can read really hard texts, that they can think about them coherently, that they can figure out what questions they want to ask, and then where to look for the answers to those questions. And then finally, in the one we do, since it's also composition—how to put that compellingly into an argument. But mostly, I want them to begin to think for themselves because lots of them are freshmen. And they've always had a parent, teacher, or somebody there telling them what to think, and some of them are really afraid of doing that. So I guess from my perspective, although I wouldn't necessarily advise everybody to do it this way, but what works best for me is to get them to interact and to get them to realize that if you never make a mistake, you have never ventured anything at all. And additionally, in literature—this is hard for some of the science kids—that there isn't a single correct answer. That they could take a position opposite to mine and if they can produce compelling evidence in their essay, they'll get a good grade on it. So that's in many ways disruptive, because the earliest parts of the class are always, “well, what are we supposed to know for the exam?” and I’m thinking, well, you can know whole bunches of different things in this course. So, I guess for me, especially for those big lecture classes—because we're not the kind of discipline where we just want to deliver information to them, and there are lots of disciplines on campus where that's crucial to do, but we happen not to be one of them—what I'm really interested in is giving them the tools to understand narrative, both spoken and written. And hopefully giving them some sense that they can do that. That there's no text they can't attack and come up with something coherent. And that they have to. I hope, of course, that this will carry over to their attitude towards political things and speeches, and that they're going to do a critical reading of those as well. We’re desperately in need of that.
In large lecture courses, what's one good strategy for engaging students or getting them to speak?
I try to ask questions that don't presuppose knowledge. This is easy because I grew up as a formalist and a structuralist, so very much text-oriented. So I will take what we're looking at in class and say, “okay, how would you interpret this word? Are there different ways you can interpret it, and if so, how would that change the way you read the rest of that line, or that poem?” And that will often generate it, because I'm not asking them basic cosmic questions, I'm asking them something very specific. And every once in a while, one of them will come up with something that stops me dead. I've done the same Dickinson poem for probably a decade, and I thought I had a pretty good reading going. And one kid, when we did that, raised their hand and said, “Well, what if you interpreted that this way? What if you read it to mean this, rather than this?” And I thought oh, 1) you could do that, and 2) it would be an entirely different poem than I've been teaching for the last several years! Yeah, and actually that's kind of wonderful, because they're coming at it from a very different perspective, which is good for them and me both, because that's a little gutsy to do. But also, that's why I said I learn more in those classes, both from the TA’s and the students, because they really don't know the canonical reading or how this is supposed to go. [...] They’re not yet beaten into submission either, intellectually, so they don’t know what they’re supposed to think yet.
What advice would you give to new TA’s?
Hang in there. It will get easier. [Laughs] Actually this is literally true, because you begin to understand what your teaching style is, which makes it easier to be in the classroom. But also, what you need to prepare and don't need to prepare, and what you don't have time to prepare, and that there are lots of different ways to attack a particular discussion. But in the beginning, it just seems overwhelming and impossible, especially for the courses that we do, which are composition courses. Which means you're both trying to correct their grammar, punctuation, and thinking, at the same time that you're trying to deliver a fairly complicated body of literature. So that's really hard, but it does in fact—well I should ask, it does get easier, right? Yes, because you begin to figure out what you’re doing, what you're good at, what works for you in class.
It would probably be my best advice, aside from that, to have a pretty good idea when you walk in class what it is you're going to do. And I’ve had TA’s do that in all different kinds of ways. Some have a sort of outline for the discussion, what they want to do. Others post questions digitally and have students respond to them in advance, so they've got a jump start on the discussion. Others have students comment on one another's questions before the discussion starts. So, there are lots of different ways to do that and all of my TA’s have been better technologically than I am, so they're much more efficient at doing that. But also you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. There are lots of resources out there, which are put out there for us to “steal” from one another, basically, and literally from one another. I mean, I sat in a TA’s class who had this really great discussion of a particular image that ran across a couple texts. I thought, I'm going to use that next time I teach! So there's lots of collaboration both among the people that you're literally teaching with, but also there’s lots of online stuff for for explaining grammar, and giving them exercises, and doing peer review. So you don't have to reinvent everything every time. And I would definitely ask your colleagues. Because the best resources I think for TA-ing are the other TA’s, either who have done it for a while or who haven't, because then at least, you know, you're all struggling in the same way, so it doesn't seem so desperate if everybody is. And the last thing is to remember that, you know more than the students do. Even if you're teaching way out of your field.
What teaching practices have you learned from your TA’s or graduate students?
I've learned a lot of different things from the TA’s, ranging from particular readings of the kind I was talking about earlier, where the TA had just a great reading of an image that I hadn't even noticed ran across the books. And that's nice, but also a lot of the techniques that they use in discussion classes. I was really skeptical of peer editing at first, I thought oh, they're not going to do that seriously. But in fact, they do. I was pleasantly surprised at how serious our undergraduates were. So group work of that kind I hadn't really thought through. Not so much for my lower division classes, but sometimes for the other undergraduate classes that I do, I have them do group reports or set up discussions with a comment from groups. But also lots of technological things that I don't necessarily use, because every time I've tried to use technology it didn’t work! Either I didn't have the right connector, or my thumb drive didn't fit, whatever they were doing. I suppose I do have this troglodytic belief that actually physically writing—actually there are psychological studies that have borne this out, that even a student who is taking notes on their computer, if they do it with a stylus, they remember it better than if they type it. Who knows what connections there are in the brain, and whether they’ll change because everybody's learning differently. But a lot of the technological kinds of things that the TA’s have used to generate discussions, to correct material, to suggest that students look at other kinds of things, which are now, on the one hand, accessible, which is good. They don't have to buy necessarily a reference work in order to get at the information they need. On the other hand, it makes it more and more likely that they'll never set foot in a library. And I do think libraries are one of those important places to learn to love and I don't know if that's happening any longer. And now we have computers in the library. So maybe they will be in there. [...]
So there are all sorts of things I've learned from my from my undergraduates and TA’s both, but I actually have learned lots of techniques, in addition to some really good close readings that I hadn't thought of before. Because in many cases their field is closer to the book that I'm doing, which is great when they give guest lectures in our course. For a while, I was doing a novel by a Japanese woman that was originally in Japanese, and I had a TA in my class whose field was Japanese. So he told them about the language, and the fact that women speaking to one another have a different language than women speaking to men, and I'm thinking “really?!” When you teach Comp Lit, you're always giving them the view that you can give them. I think it's important to expose people to things, even though I can't give them the complete or necessarily best view, but I'm giving them some indication of how things look in another culture, how people think in another culture. But it's great when you have TA’s. I’ve learned all sorts of things from my TA’s.
What is one of your hidden talents?
Oh God, I don’t know if I have a hidden talent. It's a really interesting question. I don't know if it's a talent or a deficit on my part, but my normal speech pattern, as you can tell right now, is extremely colloquial and I tend to teach that way. It can get very colloquial, in fact. On the one hand, that creates an equality with the students, in a funny way, rhetorical equality. On the other hand, and this is the deficit part, I then have to announce to them that I don't write essays the way I speak. So don't give me colloquial language on your paper! I will often give them something that I've written which is rhetorically obnoxious, right, very high rhetorical level and they will go, “oh.” So it's great in the classroom. I will say things like “you guys,” and the only problem with that was a woman said to me, “what do you mean ‘you guys’?” and I thought, oh, for me, that's a non-gendered term, she’s going, “well, it’s not for me,” which was actually a good discussion on gendered terms there, for a minute.
I don't know if that's a talent or just a habit I developed early on, probably by resisting the Ivy League. When I went to Princeton, I was the only person not from the East Coast in my graduate class and I sounded very—I hadn't gone to a prep school. I went to the University of Chicago, which you think would be okay, but in Chicago, people tended not to say much unless they really had something to say, and then they would say it in a whole range of rhetorical patterns. On the East Coast, there was an established rhetoric where you could speak for some time and say very little, but it sounded really good. I suppose my speech pattern was a resistance to that. Not that I didn't have some brilliant colleagues in graduate school, I did. But there were also a few who had the rhetorical pattern down, and I was sitting there thinking, so say something!
But that's a teaching tool, and I'm hoping it's more positive than negative, but I actually don't know. Students will come to my office hours more readily because of that, and I enjoy talking to students at my office hours. And this year's been good, the last couple of years, actually. It used to be for while, students only came in to complain about their grades, because otherwise they were going to talk to the TA’s. But the last few years they were coming in groups to say, “we don’t understand what you mean about this in this text,” and I'm thinking, okay, this is fun. So I don't know whether that's a hidden talent or a hidden vice. I suspect it may work both ways.
|
