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Faculty Interviews |
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Interview with Thad CurtzRecent Teaching History Recent and Current Areas of Interest My intellectual life and my life as a teacher at Evergreen
seem to be returning to my origins. In the time that I have
been here I have taught a lot of different things. I came
here trained in a sort of classical way. My first program
here was called Western Civilization and that is what I was
prepared to teach. My training was quite sophisticated and
unusually inter-disciplinary, but I was basically a literary
critic and cultural historian with a side interest in art
history. I had done a lot of work about period imagination,
about how you could think about all the social and cultural
productions of an era in a coherent and integrated way. As
a result of being here I have ended up teaching creative writing,
autobiography, mass communication, teacher education, developmental
psychology, computer science - a lot of things I wouldn't
have done otherwise. If I were at a regular college I would
be finishing my twenty-fifth year of teaching Introduction
to Chaucer and English composition - I don't know how people
do that. I have put a lot of time and energy into learning
how to do these new things, especially the mass communications
and the teacher education material. At this point, I don't
have any plans for any giant new intellectual expeditions;
I plan to teach closer to home in literature and art history
in the next years. I think I teach them in a more wide-ranging
and considerably more interesting way than I would if I hadn't
done all this other work. For example, this winter when I
taught psychoanalytic theory and its uses in interpreting
literature, I also used it to interpret a series of Oscar
the Grouch scenes from Sesame Street, Titanic, Michael Jackson's
Thriller music video, some cigarette and liquor advertising,
as well as doing a major piece of work on feminist views of
psychoanalytic theory and gender. All of these are things
that I started out doing as a result of the diversity of my
experience at Evergreen. Fundamentally, I don't think there's any difference between what one does doing art history, or anthropology, or clinical interviewing, or literary criticism. They are all about what it means to understand human action, and it doesn't make very much difference whether the action you are trying to understand is people moving their feet and arms in a particular way or putting words on a page. The theoretical and intellectual processes involved are basically the same. I have certain kinds of impulses about how to pay attention to things, habits of mind, which can be used in many different contexts to make meaning and understand what's going on. As far as looking at literature in particular is concerned, I always pay attention to what happens in a work. By what happens, I don't mean the plot or the events, but what happens to the voice on the page talking to you; its talking happens in time, whether we're looking at a poem, or someone telling a story, or an ethnography by some anthropologist. I always ask what sort of voice it is, and what it seems to be feeling, and who it seems to be addressing, and what happens as we go along from the beginning to the end? In a certain way, I'm not terribly interested in what a poem or a story "means"; I'm more interested in them as displayed experiences, the experiences of the voices on the page. The fundamental point of literature in the end is the widening of your experience. Knowing more about how the text works is of no interest except as a kind of abstract intellectual game, unless the text moves you in some deeper and more significant way than it did when you started. So I would like to have people cry or roll on the floor laughing as a result of reading books. The point of doing interpretation is to understand things, see things, and feel things, that you hadn't before. One thing I've done more lately is incorporating performance activities into teaching literature. This started with teaching storytelling in Children's Literature and Psychology and as part of teaching stuff about orality and literacy. The point of paying hard attention to the language is to make it come alive, and performing it is one way to try to do that. My work in computers is mostly a sideline. My father was a computer scientist and thought his children ought to have a trade, so he taught me to program on a machine that took up the entire basement of a building at the University of Michigan when I was seventeen. I did freelance programming in the summers in college and later took it up with my children. There are some topics in computer science I am intellectually interested in. For example, I am interested in autonomous robotics for some of the same reasons I am interested in developmental psychology, they're both about cognitive structures and how to model them. My interests in the Net are much closer to my interests in mass communications, media, and the presentation of self and patterns of social interaction. Lately the most interesting thing I have been doing with computers has been using digitized images in teaching of art history, especially some exercises asking students to manipulate scanned images of paintings in Photoshop to see what they might look like if they were painted differently. Are there particular authors/artists/thinkers whose work you interested and which you often ask students to examine? I became a literary critic as opposed to a philosopher or
lawyer because I thought that if you were a literary critic
you would never run out of new books to read, and I'm happy
that's turned out to be true for me. Also, you can see from
what I said about interpretation that in a certain way I think
you can learn how to do it looking at almost any text or activity.
So in that way I don't believe that there's any necessary
body of work. But I do think there are things that everybody
ought to know something about if they are going to do work
in the humanities, like psychoanalytic theory or Marx, and
there are writers that I think are especially wonderful and
tend to teach repeatedly, like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
and Blake. Are there specific areas of interest or issues you want to work with students on in the current year? No, not really. The thing that persuades me to work with
students is their passionate interest in an issue I can help
with. Specific Skills, Competence, Techniques: If you ask, "What do you know, what's the source of
your disciplinary authority, what is it that people are paying
you to teach them?," I think the answer is that I know
a lot about all the ways that symbolic structures, especially
language, carry meaning. I spend a lot of my time trying to help people make genuine connections with very old things, with pieces of sedimented experience from five hundred or a thousand years ago. This is a way of traveling, of widening your experience, complicating your judgement, developing your sensibilities. These are all traditional sentiments in defense of a liberal education, and in some sense what I try to do as a teacher is just what teachers at good liberal arts colleges have always tried to do - though less stodgy and authoritarian than lots of them. I do think that an education like this is eminently practical and useful in the real world, by the way. It's all about what happens as people express themselves, negotiate, engage in political and social life. What are key qualities you look for in student work? What techniques do you use to assess their work? How do you help students assess their work? In some ways the object of all this education is to get students
to assess their own work; they won't have the luxury of paying
someone to do it for them after a few years. The only way
they will be able to keep improving is by being able to tell
how they are doing on their own. Typically when I am doing
contracts with students they write a piece every week; the
first thing I ask them to do at our conference is read their
work and the second thing I ask them is what they think of
it. Sometimes I ask students to write assessments of their
papers as they write them, or make students give each other
advice about drafts of their papers. Teaching Style: I want students to like me. I smile a lot, mostly because
I'm having a good time, but sometimes because I don't know
what else to do. I'm usually walking a complicated line between
the various impulses I have about education. One set of impulses
comes from having been a good student for years and years,
in that grade school way of having the right answer. The other
set of impulses is about the importance of freedom and student
autonomy and taking chances. I am always negotiating between
those two parts of myself, one of which is quite traditional
and scrupulous and the other one of which is more radical
educationally. What types of students tend to do well with you? It sounds a little vain, but I think most students do well
with me. I care a lot about being fair, and about trying to
make things work respectably for everybody. One of my deans
once pointed out, correctly, that saying someone is "smart"
is my favorite way to praise a student in an evaluation, and
I like good students, but I care a lot more about whether
students are trying to learn something than how "good"
they are. I think people who are trying to learn do fine with
me. What types of students have a hard time with you? Once in a while, my lectures are over some students' heads
in places. I don't do a lot about trying to make students
who are not very engaged work harder. I don't like to feel
parental, or to threaten students, or to have students who
are only doing the work because someone is making them do
it. I am better than I used to be about telling them early
and fairly often that I don't think they are doing much. I
don't think students like that have a hard time with me, particularly,
but they probably would do more work with somebody who put
more energy than I do into nagging and checking up. What do your student evaluations say about the way you come across to students? I'm good at explaining things, and I'm very good at interpretation
- at pointing out things they hadn't seen before. They like
the fact that I think books matter and should matter to them.
They like that I take what students say and write seriously,
even if they haven't thought about it that carefully before
they say it. They like my being willing to be silly from time
to time - the spontaneous chicken imitation I did in the middle
of a lecture on B. F. Skinner and behaviorism a couple of
years ago was a big hit. They like my efforts to connect the
material to life and to my own life. My student evaluations are on the net now and students can take a look at them if they want to.
I do three types of contracts. The first is the kind of contract
you are supposed to do - with students who are ready to do
advanced work, and have a particular thing to do that they
can't do in the regular curriculum. These are the contracts
that I generally feel best about when they are over. The second
kind is with students who badly need to learn something that
they don't have much preparation for, but can't find a place
to study it in our curriculum at the time they need to. I
sometimes do contracts like these, but I almost always have
mixed feelings about them. The students very rarely learn
as much about the subject as they would in a class, although
sometimes they learn a lot about how to work well on their
own. In the third kind of contract, once in a while, I just
agree to give a student space to pursue some passion by signing
the contract, and meeting with them once a week and describing
what they did at the end. I hold an administrative umbrella
over their head while they do what they really want to. I
don't do those very often, and typically I either feel quite
good about the results or pretty dissatisfied about how little
I think the student learned; they are usually happy, though.
What information do you want to see when a person comes to look for a contract? I want to see their portfolio - at a minimum, their faculty evaluations, their self evaluations and a relevant sample of their work. I want to see a statement of what they want to do in the contract and a plan for how they are going to spend their time. How are they going to spend forty hours per week working on this project? I am perfectly willing to negotiate about changing the details later on. I expect a piece of weekly writing for the conference. I don't do contracts with people who can't come here to talk to me, although I am beginning to try to do writing contracts with people who have a remote electronic mail connection.
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