- Creating courses that met the official requirements, as dictated by the department and the University, but that reflected troublemaking values and fostered undisciplined practices.
- Constructing reading lists that attempted to prioritize inexpensive materials and focused on unsettling students’ common-sense assumptions.
- Training students how to use and mostly enjoy, but occasionally despise, blogs and twitter.
- Developing assignments with detailed instructions that were intended to provide guidance while encouraging creative experimentation, but were sometimes excessive, causing students to feel overwhelmed and resentful.
- Introducing students to the virtue of troublemaking and the importance of cultivating a feminist curiosity, which was liberating, but also confusing, occasionally disheartening, and exhausting.
- Avoiding giving lengthly lectures or writing on the board because I strongly disliked both.
- Uttering repeatedly “this just made my brain melt” or “this is a chewy bagel” during almost every theory class.
- Assigning topics and readings that were unfamiliar to me in order to learn with students and to experience uncertainty with them.
- Asking too many questions, which, due to their number and level of complexity, confused and irritated some students.
- Distributing way too many handouts, which killed a lot of trees.
- Being unable to keep some students from derailing our conversations as they worked to avoid engaging with the difficult ideas that we were encountering in readings and discussion.
- Trying, but usually failing, at discussing even half of what was brought up in the assigned readings, and making students more confused about what the authors were arguing at the end of our discussions than those students were when we started.
- Using the university’s official blogging platform and then failing to fully archive or migrate content before the university stopped using the platform and deactivated course blogs. Succeeding in recovering most of the content, but in a limited way.
- Ending the course with more questions than answers.
- Leaving the academy, cutting ties with my former department, and stopping formal teaching, perhaps never to start again.
Return to Teaching Experience: An Inventory