How I Inadvertently (okay, a little advertently) Became the Goth Professor

Despite loving Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice, I never was a Goth kid. I think it was the make up requirement. It was probably also that I was too busy reading Anne of Green Gables. I liked Ally Sheedy's Allison Reynolds mostly because she hated people, not necessarily for the Goth. I loves The Craft, and Edward Scissorhands before I knew better. In college The Crow had just come out and I was working in technical theatre so I had the all black wardrobe and boots down by necessity. I remember saving money for Doc Martens and finding them uncomfortable. I ended up with a friend's pair of combat boots after she left the Marines. 

Maybe it was because I spent most of high school in a small, rural, ridiculously religious southern town. Maybe it was because I was already measuring WAY off the weird meter and didn't want to give bullies anymore fodder. Whatever it was, I was not a Goth kid. The all black wardrobe after college was part of the job, but after only a few years I had moved into teaching and needed all new clothes.

I was assigned a mentor at my first teaching job who essentially told me they had no help for me but there was a box of tissues in their classroom if I needed it. This teacher wore essentially the same thing every day- a long sleeve v-neck t-shirt, sneakers, slacks. She wore her long hair up in a bun. I honestly do not remember what I wore those first years teaching. I was in an abusive relationship where everything was controlled, things thrown out, clothes and hair dictated, so I admit to not really remembering, and I really don't have any pictures of that time.

I do remember what I wore once I moved home to teach in the high school I graduated from. First, I got the job while down visiting, and had only tank tops and shorts wo immediately went to K-mart to buy clothes for a week of work. I flew home to Brooklyn, packed my apartment, arranged movers, and flew back to be at work Monday.

When I first started I wore cardigans and skirts and colors and make up because this was a school where women accessorized and reapplied lipstick after lunch. I knew this place from attending it, some of my old teachers were still there, one telling me to call them by their first name, the other mispronouncing my name each one of the nine years I was there. I knew I didn't fit, but I knew I needed the job and therefore needed to fake it. 

I tried. Really hard. I dressed appropriately for chaperoning prom. I remember one year being inspired by CJ on The West Wing and going full on suit and make up and kitten heels. It was all just one cosplay after another and none of them really fit. 

IN my last years of teaching high school here, I had a Twitter handle and was presenting at conferences, very into branding my academics and wore a button down shirt, often a vest, and a tie. Because I was @TieGirl. I was very clever.

I think part of the reason that I liked the ties and button down shirts was because it was an easy uniform. It always seemed to me that dressing professionally as a woman was a minefield that I either failed at or felt so extremely uncomfortable doing. 

I kept up the ties until my last year at UNM. By then I was having panic attacks that made me feel like I was having a heart attack, breaking out into a sweat, and feeling like I had to pass out. The restrictive clothing made it worse. This was also when I moved back to high school teaching. Albuquerque is a pretty chill place and teachers wore a lot of jeans. I tended to wear slacks, a mostly casual top, sneakers.

This was pretty normal for me.

No one seemed to really care, and reflecting how I felt about my teaching, I got to a place where I felt really comfortable, all the way around.

Moving into a tenure track job all my old insecurities about the minefield of how to dress professionally resurfaced. Except the first event I showed up to it got dialed up to 11. 3" heels, color coordinated suit outfits, perfectly accessorized. I immediately felt like I had made a mistake. I couldn't pull that off. It made me nauseated just to think about it. I immediately thought I was going to fail. 

I didn't have long to worry about this because I only did a single whole semester before the pandemic hit and everything changed. By the end of spring I was on Blackboard for all my classes, and mostly, no one saw me. So t-shirts and gym shorts or sweats. My only real concern was my hair because at this point it'd been short for a few years and short hair with no shower is impossible to hide. But somehow the comfort of tees and sweats made those first few months okay. AT LEAST I wasn't worrying about falling below expectations of professional dress ON TOP OF a global pandemic.

By the time we were back that fall I admit clothing wasn't high on my concerns. By spring I started to think I needed to find a combination that would not be disappointing to everyone and anyone evaluating me and didn't make me crawl out of my skin. I was still having panic attacks so that was a consideration. I had a brief thought that I could fake being fashionable by dressing all in one color. I picked shades of grey. Don't ask me. It didn't feel good, but it seemed simpler to my overtaxed brain.

But by year three, and here we finally get to the heart of our story, I was really feeling the extra weight I'd put on during the pandemic and was having hot flashes all the time. I was uncomfortable and a sweaty mess all the time. I was so nervous about LOOKING like the sweaty mess teacher that I started wearing linen and all black. I figured the linen would be cooler and the black would hide any sweaty mess. I made sure the pants were drawstring to deal with fluxuating weight, converted all my socks, shoes, to black, and ended up with a bunch of different black tops, mostly t-shirts.

I ended up with a lot of duds before I found stuff that worked. I didn't feel comfortable going out to a store, and I have sensory issues, so I returned a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff also got returned because it was too tight, didn't fit. I worried a lot about not fitting, but honestly, I was so exhausted by everything else that I'd start to worry, spiral for a bit, then run out of energy to care.

I spent a lot of time and too much money trying to make every part of clothing least likely to make me break out into a hot sweaty mess.

I am just not a person who pulls off polish. Mainly because I don't care. One of the effects of the pandemic was that I stopped cosplaying the feminine stuff I'd been doing because it was expected. So I stopped wearing earrings, make up, doing anything with my hair. I was down to essentially a buzz cut, despite random attempts to grow my hair out.

I spent that third year both relieved I'd found something I could teach in all day on my feet, walking around a classroom all the time like a shark AND worried that I was proving I didn't belong here on a daily basis.

But this year, between prepping and submitting my tenure portfolio, I figured that the die was cast and I should at least be comfortable.

I would like to think that I was hitting that Eileen Fisher aesthetic.

In truth I think it's much more like Korean street fashion.

My closet looks like it belongs to two different people. I volunteer as a Guardian ad Litem, so I do home visits,  where I try to look non-threatening and testify in court, so suits. I just bought linen jackets to go with my linen pants, and just bought  some feminine tops, so court outfit done. I wear jeans but also have colored linen pants. And I have bright colored tops. Then the other half is this all black void of work clothes.

I admit that one of the things that makes me happiest about my work wardrobe is the neutrality of it all. I kinda hate the feminine cosplay I still do for court and Guardian work.

I still have hot flashes after doing nothing. I still teach in classrooms with little climate control. I still have panic attacks. But I thought the last couple of weeks, *maybe* if I kept to linen tops and pants I could try some other colors. I DO own a lot of Hawaiian shirts which I love and thought maybe I could start wearing some of the Guardian clothes to work. So last week I tried it.

And it freaked my students OUT. I got compliments, they told me they liked the outfits, but also that it threw them BIG TIME.

Last year on one of my evals a student put that I was the same all the time, all semester, always acted the same.

I thought of this again last week because a student made the comment that the REASON why my change in clothes freaked them out was because I was dependable. I always was the same. I wore black, sneakers, was always there. They counted on that.

This made me think of all the ways that our students interpret us. 

Years ago Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote a tweet thread that resonated with me, in a lot of different ways since then. She was talking about how professors put a weight on students when they share personal information. So if a professor shares personal details about their life with a class or a student, they then have to carry that information. The professor has put a weight on them. 

I've thought a lot about this. I think about how commenting on liking a movie can make students who DON'T like that movie feel like there's no room for them in that class. Or if you show a preference for one thing you're dividing the class into favorites. 

I am very aware of the burden and weight *I* have to carry when people in positions of power above me share things I don't want or need to know (in some cases should NOT know), and how that affects me.

I used to think that I HAD to share personal details in order to "soften" myself to people (a critique I've received my entire life). And certainly I tell students that I don't have an attendance policy because I thought it was unfair my art professor failed me freshman year because of absences even though I had an A. And certainly students in my feminist horror themed composition class can tell I like horror movies. I share with students things that help me when writing, they know I have attention issues, easily distracted by touch screens and glitter. Most of my students know I'm queer.

But I've worked hard the last few years to both not put a burden on students AND to draw boundaries that keep my sanity.

And I suppose that the all black outfit has become, other than a practical and simple answer to real, daily, problems, my idea of a blank canvas. Yes- I am the heavily tattooed teacher with a crew cut who dresses in all black. I'm easy to identify on campus. But it is also the same thing. Every day. Every day it's black pants. Every day it's a black top. Every day I put on my black backpack and walk to my office. Every day I don't do anything to my hair. I don't wear make up. I don't wear any jewelry other than my watch. Every day I wear sneakers, or my All Birds boots, depending on weather, but even those are black, dark grey. 

I imagine this makes for a constant to my students.

This, in addition to how I teach, creates a touchstone, for my students.

I am always going to tell them to go home if they are sick. 

I am always going to tell them to not worry about class and focus on family.

I am always going to tell them that I don't care about the absence, or tardy, or missing work, as long as they are okay, because I care about them.

I am always going to stop what I'm doing when a student brings me their laptop or notebook or gestures for me to come to them.

I'm always going to be happy to see my students when they come to my office.

My students know that they can count on my class to give them grace and space. Flexibility. This doesn't always mean they're successful in my class, but it often means they can be successful in a lot of other things.

I know that all of this is reflective of my privilege. I feel the pressure to dress as a fancy, feminine presenting professor, but I make the choice not to. I may suffer for this. But honestly, with everything going on, I'm too tired, too scraped thin to care. My choice of clothing for work means that I don't worry or even think about what I'm wearing to work. It means I am comfortable being on my feet all day. It means I'm comfortable walking around my classroom, crouching down to listen, to help. I have fewer hot flashes, and even when I'm hot or the room is hot, I don't worry about how I look.

If a side effect of all this is an inadvertent continuation of my approach to teaching, that's just a nice surprise.

A Look at a Special Topics in British Literature Module and class

I thought I'd share how I designed and taught a module in my Special Topics in British Literature class.

This course can be retaken for credit as the theme/topic/focus changes each time it is offered. The idea was this would allow professors to offer the most engaging work that refleted the most current readings and scholarship.

I chose monsters as a theme.

I divided the class into four modules (You can find the complete syllabus here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LD_IVHZEbMi47C2FCrWBJ7tzTxd6yLjXGue9sZ-hNn0/edit). In the first module we used Guthlac as foundational text. For the second module I wanted to focus on analysis and responding to scholarship. Originally I had a list of articles, pieces, I planned on having the students respond to. But I realized as we worked through the first module that scholarship without context was not going to work. So I redesigned these weeks.

Instead I chose a major British work and chose a single scene in each work taht we would focus on. For each work the students got that excerpt of that scene for them to read and annotate in preparation for class, an in-class viewing of that scene from an adaptation, and articles/scholarship about that scene or the work as a whole that they also read before class. 

My idea was that the close reading focus would allow students to have a manageable section to focus on, a known lens through which to view it (monsters), and a model/example of analysis in the  scholarship. I wanted to do several things through this. The first was walk students through how to operate in a seminar. We only meet once a week for 3 hours, so the set up is ideal. But most had never taken a seminar, so a lot of the groundwork was laid in the first module. I prepped packets of historical context, notes, the text to close read, then scholarship that we went over in class so they learned by doing in class. Then in this module they have packets that are similar but less material that they are expected to read before class.

They also got a worksheet on how to prepare for seminar, and we went over and reviewed these steps, what it looked like.

The three texts I chose were:

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• The scene where the Green Knight appears
• We also read excerpts from Norton of Le Morte d'Arthur so they'd see "Old Arthur"
• Frankenstein
• We focused on the creation scene
• We watched the correlating scene in the 1994 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by Kenneth Branaugh
• We read Tracy Cox’s “Frankenstein and Its Cinematic Translations” chapter from Critical Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1998)
• Dracula
• We focus on the opening scene when Jonathan Harker arrives
• We will watch the correlating scene from 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula
• They will read Ahmet Anil Aygun's "The Genealogy of Bram Stoker's Dracula An Evolutionary Literary Analysis of The Vampire as a Meme"
• We will look a presentation of Vampire Memes I put together

At the beginning of class I fill our board with notes. I do this for all my upper level classes. I like to provide a road map for students. I don't always cover all of it in our discussion, but it's there if/when I make reference. The students also often take pictures of it so they have it.

Here is a picture of the board notes for Sir Gawain.

This class was our first in the module and while we used the entrance of the Green Knight as a focus, reading it in the original, in translation, the movie scene, we also read excerpts from Malory, and they had a timeline and notes on Arthurian texts in general. Even thought they had these packets before class to prep we still mostly looked at the close readings together, me asking guiding questions, them looking in text to answer. Once of the reasons why I like The Green Knight is that I think it reflects a lot about Arthurian tales- Morgan, older Arthur, pride of knights, corruption of round table, who is a hero, has honor? I think the movie while based on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also makes a great way to talk about themes more broadly as represented by multiple text.

I opened with giving a mini-lecture, more explicitly walking through the timeline of texts, the board notes. Then we looked at the manuscript information, then the original, transation. After we'd focused on lines, diction, descriptions, we watched the scene. I asked more guided questions here too after first asking what they thought. I asked how they saw certain things from the texts, asked them to think back over certain aspects.

Since this was our first we connected the scholarly chapter to what we were talking about, but did not focus on it as much.

Here is a picture of the board notes for Frankenstein.

Sometimes I do the board notes first as visual notes. Most often I construct the visual board notes based on my notes and prep for class.

I have started each class asking what they already knew about the topic before prepping for the week. I like to do this to see what preconceived notions they have but also so that they can clearly identify for themselves what they thought/knew versus what the text says. Then we compare that to the adaptation. For Frankenstein this was a perfect fit because Cox explicitly says people's understanding of the Creature comes from popular culture and not the text.

I model, explain this to students, but I ask them to first read and annotate the text, then go through and make their notes for class. I encourage them during this second look to organize, look for themes, etc.

Each week after class I scan my notes/packet and upload for them so they have access to it. Many say they cannot read cursive, so that's been an obstacle to accessibility.

I opened our discussion of the text by asking how they did with it. They said having the shorter bit to focus on helped, as did knowing they were looking at it through the lens of monsters.

After asking students what their preconceived notions of Frankenstein were, I always open discussion with "what did you think?" I like to build in space for them to talk about what they liked, didn't, were confused by, and then use this as a way into "what do you want to talk about? What lines struck you? What did you notice?" This is where their notes, their line choices, come in. I tell them when they're prepping for class to specifically think of things they want to talk about in class.

Sometimes this works great, sometimes not, so I always make sure I have close readings for us to look at.

When students ask questions I try to direct them back to the group- "well what do you all think?" Sometimes I fill in the blanks depending on the question, or provide some context. I also encourage students during these discussions to add to their notes. Their seecond assignment asks them to analyze one of the texts we've covered, so I also encourage them as they read, as we talk, to identify things they might want to base their paper on. This analysis assignment is designed for them really just to use what we've done in class. The only outside work is that they need at least two secondary sources and the packets for Frankenstein and Dracula only have one, but I feel confident they won't have a problem finding the second.

After a while, the students don't need me to prompt them, they're connecting one line/scene to another, and referencing what each said in class. They stay grounded in the text- "On page 32 where he says..." As the conversation winds down, I make sure I build in wait time, giving them a chance to process, gather their thoughts. When I think we're about done I ask "Is there anything you wanted to cover that we haven't talked about?" This lets them think about this, go back over their notes and check, or ask something they hadn't originally marked but came up as a result of the conversation.

Because their analysis assignment is grounded in close reading, in addition to them demonstrating it in discussion I also wanted them to have some practice physically doing it so I prepared a worksheet for them. I chose close reading lines from the section/scene we focused on.

We did the first one as a group, I wrote the title on the board and I wrote things down as they called out.

We did not do all the lines on the worksheet, but we did a couple more so that they understood and feltt comfortable doing it. They also then have these if they want to use any of these lines for their paper.

All this was about half of class, so we took our break.

When we came back I put on the scene from Kenneth Branaugh's Frankenstein that we had read. It was about twenty minutes and I ask them to think of the lines we worked on and discussed, the themes and big ideas they came up with, and take notes on those.

I like that the students have access the previous class (and scans available) to the texts, but that they go into the movie scene blind.

After we finished the scene we did something similar as we had with the texts- what did you think, what did you want to talk about. I take detailed notes on the scenes as part of my class prep, points to make, connections. I used this a lot last week with The Green Knight. This week the students really didn't need any prompting. But again, they will have access to all my notes in case they want to go back and look at something or supplement their own.

Once we had exhausted this we turned to what Cox said, although several times the students brought up what the chapter said as part of our discussion.

I made sure to tell them repeatedly throughout the class how proud I was of their prep, their engagement, how on point it was. How good. I ended class by reminding them to be thinking of their text choice for the paper.

I'm looking forward to finishing this module next week and seeing how the students build on these first two weeks with Dracula. 

The module after this focuses on Macbeth, and we watch the 2010 Patrick Stewart adaptation first, then the week after dive into the text, so I think the work we've done in this module is a great preparation for that. Their assignment for that module is another close reading but they're expanding to talk about how it shows a bigger theme or topic.

Their final assignment is to give a presentation based on a 16 week syllabus THEY have created for British Literature, talking about what works they included and why. What sources, articles, blogs they'd assign, why. What themes they'd focus on.