By Katie Little
As part of our ongoing collection—voices of the pandemic—Katie Little offers her reflections teaching in this new reality. Note how her experiences point to the ways librarians have been some of the unsung heroes of this pandemic.
We will publish a cluster of these contributions in the Fall 2021 issue of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, and we will use this Newsletter to share others’ short contributions. For other examples of meditations on our changing conditions, see this Newsletter’s previous Post2019 contributions, particularly those by Candace Barrington (22 June 2020), Elizabeth Allen (28 June 2020), and Andrew Richmond (1 December 2020).
During the summer of 2020, overwhelmed by news of the pandemic, I changed the title of the undergraduate Chaucer class I teach every year to reflect the new reality. Fall 2020 would be “Chaucer: Literature at (What Feels Like) the End of the World.” I thought I would use this opportunity to do something I had wanted to do for a while: put Chaucer’s work in direct conversation with other authors, both medieval and modern. And so, I planned on teaching a selection from William Langland’s Piers Plowman in translation: the Prologue, which I’ve taught fairly frequently at the undergraduate level, and the rest of the first dream in Passus 1-4, including the Meed episode, which I haven’t taught much at all.
As I prepared my course materials for my new, hybrid remote/online version of this course, I tried to ensure that all the readings could be accessed digitally. I realized that I did not have a pdf of the Meed episode from Piers, nor could I easily make one. I did not have access to a scanner, and campus, including the library, was closed. Although I had planned to include links to the original Middle English versions available online, I knew, from past experience, that my students needed an up-to-date and accessible translation provided to them. I made a request through my campus library, explaining why I needed the excerpt and would it be possible for someone to make me a pdf, please. I promptly received the requested file. Because the scan was done in the library, with one of those Bookeye machines, which take the picture from above, I could see a neat finger holding down the book on every single page of the scan.
When my class read the excerpt from Langland in mid-October, we were well into the semester, and the students had already experienced a series of outbreaks of the Coronavirus on campus and a temporary (2-week) shift to remote, when they were told to stay in their rooms. Some of them had already had COVID-19 themselves. It was also about two weeks before the Presidential Election. Let’s just say that everyone was distracted by the world outside our medieval texts and our Zoom meetings.
Luckily, we had been meeting regularly, and I had developed a strategy for preserving some focus during Zoom sessions: asking a question that all students could answer, giving them a few minutes to jot down a response, and then calling on everyone, somewhat at random, telling them they could say “Pass,” if they didn’t want to speak. This approach takes time, since there are 24 students in the class, and I don’t do it every class for that reason. But I do it often enough because I don’t know of any other way to generate the feeling that we are all trying to see and hear each other, a feeling that is easily generated in an in-person classroom and made very difficult over Zoom. My prompt for our Langland discussion was the following:
What is wrong?
What is a behavior/attitude/feeling that needs to be changed in order for people to be able to work together TODAY?
How would you write about it?
No one said, “pass.” Everyone had a response to the first question, and the responses ranged widely both in content and in the tone in which they were delivered. We heard, among other things, that “people should wear masks!;” “people feel resentful after seeing Instagram and social media;” “people think too much about money;” and “there is too much political division,” statements made with verve, melancholy, frustration, and relieved concord. The range of answers to “the how” were more focused: an essay or a documentary, each of which would combine personal anecdotes with data.
Then, we turned to the opening of Piers Plowman, at how Langland’s dreamer looks at the world around him, as it appears in his dream, and is, quite simply, very worried. This worry then takes shape in the Meed episode; it becomes real and moves through the world. Meed was thus an embodiment of some of the problems that the students had already recognized in their own world—money and the lack of agreement about what “it” [the problem] is exactly. We didn’t have time to discuss much, and because we’d only read such a small portion of the text, we were left hanging—what would happen next, to the world, to the dreamer?
In referring students to the passages about Meed, to the pdf that I was screen-sharing, I mentioned the difficulty of acquiring the excerpt and the kindness of the librarian whose finger we could see on the page. If only we could hold the book ourselves; if only we could meet together. But for now, we would have to be content with the representation of touch and not the touch itself, with virtual meetings, with wondering, like Langland, what will happen next?