5 out of 100 Years

One of the Main Events at my campus interviews this year and last year has been the teaching demonstration. Now, the term "demonstration" is misleading, because it makes it seem like you're in a hermetically-sealed room teaching to a classroom of crash test dummies while a committee in white lab coats and pocket protectors takes notes on clipboards from behind double panes of glass.

This is not what happens. Teaching demonstrations use real students as guinea pigs, and in many cases this is just another day in the semester for them. They may or may not be expecting to learn something, but you're nevertheless expected to teach them something, even though you may be regarded as a being one notch higher on the rung of respectability than the average middle school biology sub.

In the course of my on-campus teaching demonstrations, I have been asked to teach a wide range of subjects, from "your research" to "The Transition" to "this paragraph about Picasso" to "the Mexican mural movement." Now, the latest challenge: Amherst wants me to teach chapter five of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. First of all, there is no chapter five in OHYoS (or CAdS, its Spanish acronym), because the chapters aren't numbered. Secondly, whereas I taught the Mexican mural movement in an introductory literature class, I'm expected to teach a foundational work of 20th-century literature to 45 students in a senior seminar normally taught by a highly-regarded Latin Americanist.

As a friend observed today, while jovially buying five Cal mugs at the Cal student store, I've got my work cut out for me.