Today's random advice to job seekers: courses

If you've been invited to an MLA interview, you should expect to talk about your teaching. How much? At a Research I, perhaps not very much--but at a comprehensive like mine, expect to spend as much as 3/4 of the interview discussing pedagogy, course design, and the like. This sounds obvious, but it may not be obvious to those coming out of Ivy League or otherwise elite private universities, where graduate students do little teaching and perhaps even less teacher training. Some suggestions:

• Look at the college's courses beforehand. Most departmental and university websites now offer open access to catalog listings and course descriptions. What's being offered--surveys? Major authors? Film studies? "Niche" courses of various sorts? If syllabi are available, what's on them? Are the junior and senior faculty teaching different things? And is the university on a semester or quarter system? (In addition to giving you a sense of the department's orientation, this research should also tell you how much you'll be teaching, in case that wasn't specified in the job ad.) Bear in mind that the tonier the university, the more receptive it's likely to be to hyper-specialized courses; do not inform a tiny liberal arts college or regional comprehensive that you're ready and willing to teach anonymously published poetry in mid-Victorian periodicals.

• Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. And the American equivalent. Even at a big research campus, you're almost certainly going to have to teach this course, so be sure to prepare a syllabus for it. You should be ready to explain your choice of textbooks, especially in American literature. (Norton? Heath?)

• Service courses. If the department assigns t-t faculty to composition--in my department, we're all obligated to teach it once per year--then there's another sample syllabus to prep. Check to see what else people teach on a regular basis; it's likely, for example, that you'll be expected to teach an introduction to literary analysis or theory.

• Field survey. The Victorian period, British or American Novel I, etc. Be ready to justify your reading lists.

• Major author. Dickens, Faulkner, Joyce... Even if the department doesn't offer single-author courses on a regular basis, they may want you to be able to talk about how you'd go about teaching one. Medievalists and early modernists will certainly be expected to teach Chaucer and Shakespeare--possibly Milton as well--so be prepared.

• Dream course. Now, here's where you can go wild. It's essential that you be able to answer this question when it comes up, because it allows you to demonstrate a) that you've thought about teaching at some length, b) that you're ready to experiment in the classroom, and c) that you've got some imagination! In reality, the course may be wildly inappropriate for the department, but that's not what's at issue here.

• Problems. Be ready to talk about how you'd deal with students who have poor reading and grammatical skills. Have field-specific examples on hand. How do you help students learn to read eighteenth-century prose? Middle English? James Joyce?

• Technology. If your research into the department's course offerings turned up a lot of people using smart classrooms, distance learning, and so forth, then at the very least show that you know something about these things. But you should be prepared to talk about them anyway, given that many schools are doing more and more to incorporate technology into students' learning experiences.