[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]
As always, my Honors Lit Seminar was an unadulterated joy to teach—a phenomenal group of students who were willing and able to dive into a large and challenging group of texts, including four longer readings and tons of shorter supplemental ones; individual work with our three papers as well as the Panel Presentations (four moments across the semester when a handful of students share their in-depth thoughts on a Unit and its texts as we’re concluding with them) that pushed my own thinking about our texts and topics; and collective class conversations that modeled the best of what a classroom can and should be. Can’t complain at all, and won’t try!
But I would say that this semester’s section of Honors presented one interesting challenge, something I have thought about every time I’ve taught this course but that felt a bit distinct and more fraught this time around. While our class focuses on America in the Gilded Age, just about every one of our texts and topics has complex and compelling legacies and parallels in our present moment. That’s obviously a positive in many ways, including making clear the stakes of doing this work and having these conversations. But in Fall 2025, those parallels were so apparent and so constant that I really struggled with the question of whether and how to make them a much more central part of our conversations than I usually do, or whether that would detract from our historical and analytical focal points.
I didn’t answer that question in the same way each time—that is, in some discussions I engaged the parallels more fully or centrally than in others—but I would say that across the semester I came up with a strategy that seemed to work well: allowing the majority of our discussion time and topics to focus on our texts and their historical and cultural contexts; but making sure to bring up the contemporary parallels in the final few minutes, both to allow me to note them and to see if folks had responses of their own to those connections. Since I give them the option of connecting to contemporary America in their final paper, as long as they bring in a text or two to help analyze our own moment alongside their analyses of the Gilded Age, I thought these brief and still analytical 21st century-focused discussions helped model that layer while making clear that it’s a secondary one to our main class focal points.
Next reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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