tried and tested

Term started two weeks ago. Eleven weeks to go and then it'll be over. You see where I am going with this.

There are good days. This Wednesday for instance. By some stroke of grace, one of the two modules I teach got its lowest enrolment since I started running it three years ago. It's the perfect size: 8 students. The small class means that I can teach it in the old-fashioned way, the way things used to be before university education was globalized (i.e. Americanized): I meet the students in my office where it's civilized and cosy, a change from the norm of gathering in faceless seminar rooms somewhere in the warren of the Arts faculty.

We spent an hour discussing two poems by Seamus Heaney, "Underground" and "An Artist". A number of interpretations for each poem were aired, most of them sensitive and shrewd, though the majority of the students looked awkward and abashed as they said what they thought. I talked about literary allusion, how they are like ghosts in a work they have been newly embedded in, how it's not possible to talk about literary allusion if one starts off by thinking the poet is showing off how much he or she knows.

There are not-so-good days. The lecture theatre is too cold, the students' faces show impatience, irritation. Some of them stare fixedly at their laptop screens. You wonder if they are surfing the web, or chatting with their friends in other lecture halls via MSN messenger. You feel like a mad person on a rock, shouting to the wind.