| In my first honors class in 1994—a
course in Film and the Novel—were two students, Brandy James
and Angela Insenga, who now, a decade later, teach in my department.
Every day, then, I come to work and see in front of me reminders
of what it is to teach in the Honors College at West Georgia: when we teach these classes we get to watch truly extraordinary
young minds at the beginning stages of their development into
what they will become. Brandy and Angela happen to have become
English professors. Other Honors students I've taught have
become writers, doctors, chemists. But whatever these scholars
become, to teach them at the outset of their academic careers
and to see their minds at work on American literature—the subject
that I get to study with them—is to be honored myself.
There's that old public service ad on TV about a mind's being
a terrible thing to waste—obviously a true sentiment. But
teaching in the Honors College I get to see the reverse of
that idea played out—I get to see minds in use,
at work in ways that are, on the best days of class, almost
visible. We literature teachers firmly believe that
literature is alive, eternal. When I teach the American literature
Honors seminars, the students make that claim true—they make
The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby,
books I've read dozens of times, alive for me in ways I've
never considered before. They make the short stories of Ann
Beattie and the poems of David Bottoms, works by people I
actually know quite well as friends, ring true in ways the
people themselves can't. What more could a teacher ask for
than to be paid to spend time with young minds that make the
texts she cares most about more alive, richer and fuller than
she could have imagined? What a deal for a teacher.
On the student evaluations for my most recent English 2130
Honors course, one student wrote, “If it wouldn't hurt my
average, I would fail and take it again.” I loved that because
it lets me know that the exchange is at least even. We're
all getting something here that's worth doing more than once.
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