What do we “need to know” from your lectures?/What should we write down?/Can you simplify your slides or give us bullet points?

Professional literature scholars relish in complexity in our own work, but we differ on whether undergraduates can or should be expected to do the same. For my part, I insist that undergraduates can and should do so — click here for fuller explanations and tips for how to do that.

In my classes, you’ll see that many students do not take notes at all, or take very few notes, directing their attention instead on the participants in our ongoing conversation. That’s because my classes only rarely require you to memorize and repeat back items—rather, I measure your achievement by how thoroughly and deeply you can think through, apply, tease apart, pull together, and evaluate the full complexity of course texts and materials. Some students do find that notetaking still provides a useful tool to help them organize and retain that complexity — that’s fine, but it means that every student will interact with notetaking in a very different way.

In some of my classes, I do require students to commit to memory only a few basic, straightforward bullet-point items — usually a set of dates and/or terms, and perhaps a few schematic statements, along with paradigms and sets of skills involved in understanding early language or in accessing and using resources. You may be required to memorize those basic points — with full understanding of what you’re memorizing — and sometimes to repeat back to me on a quiz or test. In all of my classes, any material that you have to memorize will be very clearly identified as such — and will be presented clearly and plainly on lecture slides and/or handouts. You can add them to your notes, too, but you don’t have to do so, because I will provide clearly visible lists elsewhere.

From there, crucially, I attach to those basic items a range of ever-deepening complications and contexts, which cannot be summarized without being evacuated of their primary significance.  My hope is that the initial “basic points” will serve as mnemonic prompts to which students can attach deeper and more complex points of understanding.

Beyond those basic, memorizable sets (which, again, will be clearly identified, if your class has them), you’re responsible for exploring the complexity of class material in ways that demonstrate your ability to engage with contradiction, ambiguity, aesthetics, history, and meaning without reducing their complexity. While I may ask you to repeat back simplified dates, terms, or language skills/paradigms, I will never offer reductive summaries of course texts or major interpretive concepts; if tests or quizzes ask you to engage with texts or major concepts, they will do so by measuring the complexity and permanence of your engagement. Any further evaluation I do from there will not measure the completeness or comprehensiveness of your understanding of those ideas, but rather your ability to continually think through, discuss, and complicate, to express your own opinions and cut your own innovative paths through the material’s intricacy.

To that end, I generally use cumulative slides in my classes — that is, slides in which content from past and future classes remains visible alongside whatever we’re discussing in the present — most often made and shared online through Prezi (check your course website for a link and email me if you can’t find it!) I use Prezi slides’ cumulative/spatial structure to represent that deepening complexity in visual terms. So if you’re in my courses and looking for “the basics,” or what to memorize, look to the “highest” visible layer of the Prezi slides — usually the dates or terms/ideas around which my courses are organized. That is all that I will ask you to be able to repeat back to me in simple terms.

The visual arrangement of the slides is often quite complex. Many other professors choose to use slides in order to offer students brief summaries and simplifications of course material, so that students can easily commit those “basics” to memory, in order to reproduce them on tests or quizzes. Which is fine, but it is not at all how my classes work.

I believe that the discipline of literary studies must, in order to even exist, be founded on the persistently complex thinking through of multivalent ideas, and thus on a relentless resistance to summarized “basics.” On that point, I follow the example of Cleanth Brooks, who famously wrote about “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (click here to read it): that is, that since literature is literature because it expresses its ideas in ambiguous, playful, complex ways, then to summarize the gist of a work of literature is to completely empty it of everything that makes it literary. So do not expect gists or sum-ups or tidily memorizable throughlines in my classes: the full intricacy of course texts, and the cultural threads woven through them, is what you “need to know” — not what you need to memorize or repeat back, but what you need to know.