Dear Friends,
People who earn PhDs in English don’t automatically know how to teach writing. It might be argued that the cerebral, erudite mastery of abstruse rhetorical flourishes that fill doctoral dissertations nudge their authors away from the sort of clear, thoughtful, and audience-centric writing that best serves a college upperclassman or new employee.
At UC Davis, I learned how to communicate effectively with the most distinguished and poetic professors of the previous generation—a skill of questionable marketability outside elite English programs like the one I attended.
Fortunately, my self-funded PhD program required me to work, allowing me to teach writing and introductory literature classes throughout the 1990s. Teaching such skills required me to learn about rhetoric and composition, composition theory, and writing across the curriculum. My years of teaching writing prepared me for this work just as my PhD in English prepared me to analyze and discuss literary texts.
Should I have earned a second PhD, the way that Stephen Strange, Reed Richards, and Bruce Banner did? Not a Marvel superhero, I chose to stick with just the one. In the real world, even our smartest and most ambitious scholars don’t earn multiple PhDs. They are too busy writing books in their fields of specialty.
This month of July, 2024, I got to wield my poetry PhD in a new kind of classroom, a class and workshop series that I am teaching at the University Retirement Community. Working with almost a dozen students ranging in ages from 20 to 40 years older than I am, I have returned my first love: conversations about poetry. I’ve been quoting poems that I’ve carried around in my head for decades, connecting comments made by class participants to the joy of a creative life, and lectured about literary topics without notes, a skill that I’ve learned from teaching all those writing classes. So far this summer we’ve been reading and discussing poems by Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Hayden. Next week we cover a former professor of mine, Robert Pinsky.
In 1989, I asked Pinsky what classes I should take when I start graduate school. He told me that I should focus not on the courses, but on the horses. Choose professors with a long track record of inspiring and enthusing students, without regard to the subjects they are teaching. I did this largely by auditing classes even after my classwork was done, taking multiple classes with Sandra Gilbert, Alan Williamson, and David Van Leer (RIP). In some of those classes, we’ve read and discussed texts by authors and professors whose works and personalities I got to know when I lived back east, including Seamus Heaney (RIP), Paul Muldoon, Roger Shattuck (RIP), Rosanna Warren, and Howard Zinn (RIP).
As for myself, I haven’t always taught the courses that my first and only PhD trained me for, but I’ve tried to be the professor whose lessons, lectures, and inspiring words continue to matter long after my students were launched just as my multiple degrees launched me.
When it comes to teaching, I agree with horse trainer Pat Parelli: “A horse doesn’t care how much you know until he knows how much you care.”
I hope you can join us on an especially warm evening for a pub quiz at Sudwerk in Davis. Bring your team to the beautiful outdoor patio where the misters are misting and where we have room for almost everyone. The jollity will be unfiltered. As Saint Augustine allegedly said, “Good times and crazy friends make the best memories.” Tonight some will want to play indoors. Understandable!
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on terrifying technologies, fronts, airports, southern states, concession stands, classical music, sluggers, tissues, famous streets, boxers, crime novelists, national heroes, co-authors, fabric dates, American idols, masks, decades of cars, shared atoms, board games, superhero actors, grateful friends, place names, evolutionary biology, ducks, philanthropy in action, emaciation, islands, birds, steamy actresses, captains, tornados, colonies, New York City, summoning whistles, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. Sometimes a question is substituted at the last minute because of the day’s news.
Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscriber Sophie! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the scintillating Mavens who carefully take note of casual adjectives and precise pronunciations, and others who support the Pub Quiz on Patreon (where I am also sometimes sharing drafts of poems). I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of supporters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
Best,
Dr. Andy
Three questions from a previous Pub Quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. Starting with the letter N, what company, according to its slogan, invites you to “See what’s next”?
- Technology Culture. If we were to say that the Jet Age started with The British de Havilland Comet, the first jet airliner to fly, the first in service, and the first to offer a regular transatlantic service, then in what decade did the Jet Age begin?
- Newspaper Headlines. Starting with the letter B, what powerful hurricane recently struck Jamaica before heading towards Texas? This hurricane shares a name with a British-born Kenyan author who is known for her memoir West with the Night.
P.S. The next Poetry Night will feature Carl Lynn Stevenson Grellas at the Natsoulas Gallery on July 18th at 7 PM. I hope you can join us that night!