Class Observation of Dr. Gubernat

Logistics:
Class Title: Intermediate/ Advanced Poetry Workshop
Class Instructor: Susan Gubernat from CSU Eastbay Hayward Campus
Date Observed: 3/8/2010
What is the size of the class? 12 students
What is the make up of the class? (grads/u/gs? Women, age etc)
The class was comprised of all undergrad students and exactly half were male and half were female. Most were typical college-aged, but two were older.
How is the class physically arranged? The students moved their own desks into a rather sloppy circle. It really needed to be widened since not everyone could see each other while talking. The professor sat in the circle with the students.
What is the social atmosphere of the class? Everyone was really friendly. They introduced themselves to me before the professor get there and told me a few tid-bits about what to expect. You could tell the students were familiar with each other and liked to joke around and be playful.
What time did the class start? It was set to start at 4:00PM, but the teacher was very friendly and chatted with her students 10-15 minutes into class time.

Substance:
What were the activities of the class? She told the students who I was and where I came from, and after chatting and settling in, the professor passed out the syllabus for the upcoming weeks. She discussed the syllabus in detail and explained all assignments. She then did a talk on how fun it is to be published and showed the class a website which lists various magazines that are interested in poetry submissions. She then instructed the class to pass around their work, which I am told is always an extreme ordeal and nobody ever has all of the poems that they should. We workshopped 6 poems, a lot for such a short time period.
Were goals stated for the activities? The week had a theme of elegiac poetry, so she had people recall what that was before the poems were read.
How were the activities conducted (non evaluative): Professor Gubernat lead all of the discussions and asked many questions throughout the workshop.
Was text used (published or peer?): The class text, _13 Ways of Looking at Poetry_ by Wendy Bishop was referenced throughout the class since the assignments are based on the book.
Lecturing? Discussion? Exercises? In-class writing? The class was purely discussion with the professor occasionally throwing terms into the discussion and then asking the students to tell her the answer or explain how the device works in poetry, ect.
How many students participated? All students but one participated; she didn’t speak at all through-out the class. The others, of course, spoke in varying degrees of frequency.
Describe interactions among peers and with professor? The professor was extremely relaxed with her students. They would often interrupt her, or make off-topic jokes and she seemed completely fine with it. It was, at times, a very harsh environment because the professor would ask for the “good” aspects of a workshopped piece and people would ignore her and go straight into the bad aspects without her re-directing them back to her original question.

Outcome:
What was the atmosphere of the class? It was very playful. It didn’t help that it started raining really hard so class was interrupted by people going to look at it and also the lights were on very poorly timed timers which would shut the lights off every 15 minutes.
Were the students involved? I would say that most were. Some students completely dominated the conversation.
Did the substance of the class have impact? Well, I liked that she would sprinkle in definitions and terms as she looked at examples in the poetry, but overall I was very surprised this was considered an intermediate/advanced class. The professor does not have the students write on the workshopped poem and turn it into the author, thus the students who do not speak out of shyness will never get their ideas heard. The fact that the professor completely moderated the discussion made it feel forced and contrived with little creativity brought forth in ideas due to the pointed nature of her questioning.
How did the professor engage the students? How did the students engage each other? As I said before, this area was extremely lax. People would interrupt both the professor and each other with frequency even though the professor called on students with their hands up (probably an attempt to combat the interruptions). As I said before, it was a rather harsh environment for criticism in that both the professor and students would treat their suggestions as the law. People would say “you really need to take out the third stanza and swap it with the fifth,” instead of just making the suggestion. In addition, I noticed that all of the poems looked pretty similar in form and the one student who wrote prose instead of lyric was told that the prose was ineffectual in his piece and he should change it.
Your general impression of the effectiveness of the class? I personally found it to be rather ineffective. I really liked that she was trying to get her students to publish. I also liked that her book and lesson plan has the students do a new form with every poem instead of directing content. I really think it is better for both the workshop and the poet to have people write on a poem and then hand it back to the author. This keeps the students on track as they are expected to make comments and it allows for the more shy students to participate. The silliness of discussion and frequent interruption made the class flow feel very stilted. I was also very surprised that 6 poems were workshopped in a less than two hour period. It seemed rather rushed and ineffectual.
Did you talk to the professor and what did you learn? Yes, after class I had a few questions about the details of her class operation that I missed in discussion. She asked me what I thought of her class and I explained that I liked that she was so interested in teaching forms because I was not all that experienced in forms due to never having to write the experimental ones. I also asked why she did not have the students write on the poems and turn them into the author and she said it was because this was the first time the students were reading the poem and thus they would have less to say. She asked me to E-mail her with other concerns or thoughts about the class, and I did (in a very nice and watered-down way of course).