Yes, but you are not teaching English Literature.  Perhaps the above is
enough for teaching Creative Writing but it doesn't even begin to cover the
mental anguish of teaching English Liteature -- which begins with deciding
what period in which to specialize.  Here's a glimpse into my thoughts years
agone when I had to choose.

English Literature:

1.  Have the lesser poems of Anglo-Saxon bards been appreciated enough?
    Do enough young people know the word "kenning?"  Would it be
    nice to curl up by the fire in the long winter evenings we have
    here and study Old Icelandic?  Should I choose Anglo-Saxon?
    Perhaps with enough work I could write a pleasant little
    fairy story as I clench my pipe between tobacco-stained
    teeth and chafe in my tweeds.  Choice 1:  Anglo-Saxon Literature

2.  Ok.  So I stare at Durer prints long and long and ever since
    graduating high school have been prepared for life in the
    12th (the greatest of all) centuries.  I know it was really
    St. Don Bosco who invented basketball and can timor mortis
    conturbat me with the best of them.  Choice 2:  Medieval Literature

3. The Renais...  Hard to spell but good sex at last.  (Medieval sex
   is too much like what happened in the cloakroom of St. Cecilia's
   in 1962).  Marlowe's  mighty line (What's your sign?), probably
   worlds of sonnet sequences not yet completely explained.  The
   chance to entertain students with "jug, jug, jug, tereau tereau"
   or a birthday bash for Thomas Nashe.  Shakespeare and the chance
   to know where all those book titles came from.  I also suspect that
   Shakepeare specialists are deferred to in courts of law and
   gatherings of high school teachers taking a class for the summer.
   A chance for a dotage a bit more dashing than that expected of
   medievalists.  Expansive explanations of bawdy and the significance
   of nothing in Hamlet.  "The wild dog shall flesh his tooth in every
   innocent" and a glance at a widow now and then.  Choice 3:  Renais...
   Literature.

4. The (as they say) 17th century.  Donne undone with Mary.  The necessity
   of Eliot.  The laying on of sensibility.  Wit.  Perhaps I could
   specialize in Herrick and dream of cream and strawberries and
   niplets and Old Ben and a parsonage among the daffodils.  Or --
   the great tone poems of Sir Thomas Browne.

5. The 18th century -- Age of Pope or Age of Johnson.  A chance of an
   invite to the White House or of, at least, entertaining Canadian
   ladies on trains.  Belindas &c.  If Pope, a chance to dress
   in a periwig and spit vituperation in heroic couplets with the
   other fellows in the room hilariously dubbed "Gin Alley" at
   the 18th century scholars conference.  Automatic justification
   for plotting against the radical dismals in the MLA.  I am not
   stout enough to carry off a Johnson speciality but are we
   really satisfied that we know how many times Boswell had the
   clap and don't we need yet another fellow recounting the story
   of Johnson and the ghostly bishop by kicking the rock?  Also
   I am very good on Tom Jones and at sipping coffee and chatting
   about the great bubble and have a quite new exegesis of Robinson
   Crusoe ready.  Might have to read Clarissa.  Ah, my dear God.

6. The Romantics (we'll include Blake as is customary)  What was the
   sheath to which Byron refers?  Expertise on Thomas Lovell Beddoes
   already quite remarkable.  But... suicide a possibility, of
   course after mooning about the Protestant Cemetery in Rome
   after being betrayed by my mistress.  Also, am disturbed that
   Keats apparently wanted to eat everything.  Byron's letters
   etc very appealing but will have to deal with the awful Germans
   including Goethe whose last words "Give me your little paw" very
   off putting.  The Brontes -- must be dealt with and, in general,
   except (as I now concede) for the sensibilty of Thomas Love Peacock
   and a few others the period is like being stuck in a room
   full of Barrymores forever.  Good if confused sex, good if confused
   talk, overseen by nautical gentlemen.

7.  The Victorians.  The Kraken is sexy but except for Dickens the
    novels are wretched.

8.  Modernism -- I understand that there is a center for the study
    of Modernism.  Let them do it.

9.  More or less recent stuff.  Very poor show in Poetry.  Prose
    somewhat better but I don't understand why reading most of it
    is not conceived as similar to reading the novels of John
    O'Hara when your adenoids are misbehaving.
So I wanted a salary of 90,000 a year -- at least.  This was in 93.  I'd
require at least 3 times that now.

On 10/29/07, Anny Ballardini <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I am also a teacher, Kenneth. And I can consider myself lucky because I
> can
> do translations and teach evening adult courses to round the meager
> budget.
> I don't think I fit any prototype, and my colleagues are very different.
> It
> is a job but I like it, and that is why I still do it.
>
> On 10/29/07, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > M. Borges Accardi wrote:
> > > Pardon my posting here, but just saw this job announcement for
> creative
> > writing at Pueblo Col.? They're paying $25,000 for TWO semesters of
> teaching
> > and committee work?? Are they delusional? 12 units of teaching per
> semester
> > at $12,000 a semester??? I am aghast.
> > >
> >
> > Thank you.  I am now cured:-).
> >
> > ken
> >
> > ------------------
> > Kenneth Wolman                      rainermaria.typepad.com
> >
> > "I agree with the Chekhov character who, when in a crisis, he is
> > reminded that 'this, too, shall pass,' responds 'Nothing
> > passes.'"--Philip Roth
> >
>