Course Rantings
By: Calista Lee ‘24
The other day, I spoke to an English teacher in my dorm about senior winter and spring courses that get ignored by a lot of students. She told me that lack of interest has caused many of these courses to get canceled in favor of the more popular ones. This made me wonder— what English courses have been canceled since last year?
There have been a couple new courses, such as ENG535: Theater of War: Staging Race, Religion, and Empire, but I was shocked at the loss of some of the old ones. ENG540: Her Story, His Story: Plath, Hughes and the Two Ariels was the first I found when comparing the Course of Instruction 2020-2021 and 2022-2023 version.
When I saw this, I was actually pretty surprised. This class taught the story of Sylvia Plath and her estranged husband, poet Ted Hughes. Plath had left a collection of poems on her desk before committing suicide, and gained posthumous notability for the quality of her writing. Hughes found these poems and published them, but not before editing them significantly. Some of Plath’s original poems described Hughes’ poor treatment of her, which he entirely left out before publishing. The class focused on the differences of the original and edited manuscripts as the story behind them.
With such a compelling history, this class being removed was shocking to me. I don’t know the details of its removal, but such an interesting and important story must have been intriguing to others. So I’m curious as to the circumstances that led to this course getting removed.
The next lost course I learned about was ENG545: Junot Díaz: The Diaspora’s Fictionista. I won’t lie— I probably wouldn’t take this course. The course description is bland and it doesn’t get into the history of the author or his books. The disappearance of this class wasn’t really unexpected. A major factor in student interest is course descriptions. Students aren’t going to go out of their way and spend their precious time looking up information on English courses, so when a description isn’t alluring, they just won’t sign up. That’s reasonable, but it’s still sad to see a class with a contemporary writer disappear.
This next one made my jaw drop. I had been scrolling through the Course of Instruction book when I saw the ENG549: Faulkner and Woolf: Finding Your Way in the 20th Century Novel class. Recently, I’ve been really into Faulkner’s writing after my dad recommended one of his books to me. I got so excited when I saw this, but I realized I was looking at the 2020-2021 edition. I quickly looked it up in the most recent version, and imagine my surprise when it wasn’t there.
I reached out to Mr. Nathaniel Hawkins, the Department Chair of English, and he told me that class had been removed due to an ongoing low enrollment. The course description isn’t that interesting, but wow. Faulkner and Woolf were revolutionary writers, and it’s sad that these courses got removed.
The last English course that I noticed was ENG587: Beyond Korean Cool. With the amount of students in Exeter heavily engaged with Korean culture, I’m really confused as to why this class is no longer listed. The course details talk about K-pop as well as Korean history, which I’m sure interests many students. I’m assuming the instructor may have left the school, but that’s just a guess.
A solution for interesting courses falling by the wayside could be to generate interest and hype around them. As I said before, some of the course descriptions make the classes seem boring or laborious. Many students have no prior knowledge of these topics or authors, so all their information comes from the course details. In other cases, a teacher will tell me that they’re going to teach a senior English class in the future, for example, and that makes me more curious about it.
Classes can look boring when they aren’t talked about or described well, and I feel like there would be a more even distribution of student interest if the more unknown courses were simply discussed more. A lot of the subjects for these are important, and it’s crucial that we don’t let them fade away.
Although many English classes were canceled for next year, it’s important to look on the bright side of things. There are still many interesting courses that offer a wide range of topics, as well as new ones that have a fresh start. I’m pretty upset about some of these courses being taken away, as I wanted to take a couple of them, but these courses getting removed offers space for new ideas and new lessons.
