Coco Sofia Fitterman is the author of the chapbook Say It With Flowers (Inpatient Press 2017). She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Literature department at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Baruch College, as well as a Poetry Editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and an Events Fellow at Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.
Alex Hall is a visual and sonic artist, a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Literature department at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Baruch College.
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Joe: The idea of this interview series was to speak with instructors at different stages of teaching. We’ve also interviewed two full-time faculty members, and we spoke with our friends Ghenwa and Alexander who are finishing their teaching fellowships. This is your first year teaching here, but have either of you taught before your GTF placement?
Coco: I did teach English to Chinese students online during the pandemic, which was a really weird experience because it’s like a company that hires literally anyone. You just have to do some kind of online training—oh, you’ve done it as well? Okay, yeah, I think a lot of people have done this job. But it was super weird. It was like a speed round, so basically a new student comes into your Zoom room every 10 minutes, and you have to do a quick lesson. They’re all different ages, and you have no idea what to expect. It was so chaotic.
Joe: It’s a wild model, I remember doing that for like a month a few summers years ago. What was your biggest surprise teaching at Baruch? What were you anticipating and were there any curveballs in your first semester teaching?
Coco: A lot of curveballs.
Alex: I didn’t really know what to expect in terms of student preparedness for English 2100 (First Year Writing). That class was difficult to teach because it felt like I was going over high school concepts that were bypassed. I know, as a product of the New York public school system, what it’s like within it. But it was at first disorienting, because we [GTFs] are coming from this land of like, I love words and why don’t you love words?
Coco: It’s interesting because both of us are products of the NYC public school system, which is so different with discrepancies in the type of education that you get from a public school in one neighborhood versus another. And I think the pandemic threw a huge dent in what was already a huge discrepancy. So I think 2100 was difficult because students are coming from completely different places in terms of reading level. So that was something that I had to learn from the feedback I was getting from students, paying attention to what they were and weren’t getting. Then trying to go from there.
Joe: Also just the scope of the class, there are so many skills and so many projects, but once you get there, it’s amazing.
Alex: I was also feeling that last semester. I wasn’t sure to what degree the teachings of the classroom really brought them there or just their own outside intuition. It’s everything.
Joe: And then they can do cool group work with people. Like moving people around to go to different groups. Do you guys do that?
Coco: I’ve done it for a couple activities but not regularly. It’s always fun. Do you regularly do that?
Alex: I only do it for peer review. Or if they’re falling asleep, I’ll make them stand up and go to the other side of the room into groups. I never do the same group twice. Because you can also match groups, like who might work as a leader in a group.
Coco: I should do that more, actually. There are a handful of students who really get into it, and it’s like, they should teach each other too.
Joe: Definitely. Were there any other challenges that came up for the semester?
Coco: It’s just difficult starting as a graduate fellow when you don’t have prior training.
Alex: We have the practicum, which really helps.
Coco: Yeah, the practicum is happening while we’re teaching. It’s tough because we are still building a repertoire of tools that you can draw from. It feels better this second time, but the first semester…
Joe: And the practicum is really helpful for talking through your class sessions, workshopping prompts and reading pedagogy articles. I wish I had watched someone teach before starting though. I feel I was going off the knowledge of being an undergrad, which was helpful to an extent.
Coco: Totally. I mean, it’s because we’re nerds that we ended up here. There’s a reason we’re doing a PhD in literature, because we like English classes. So I think it was kind of a shock at first being in front of a classroom of students who primarily don’t enjoy English classes…
Joe: At first…
Alex: I think the best reaction I had over these two semesters was when I started using videos more. You don’t need an essay to teach an essay all the time. Giving them video essays and having them talk about it was way more effective. And they hated some. They were like “This is the stupidest thing, I totally disagree with what’s going on, they’re contradicting themselves.”
Coco: I love when they have that type of reaction. I try to encourage it, like, yes! Disagreeing with something is great!
Alex: As long as they pay attention to something, they can disagree or agree with it. I’ve been trying to trick them all semester. And I’ve enjoyed that a lot more than trying to force them to read essays only.
Joe: What is the tricking?
Coco: Yes, please
Alex: Like thinking of other media as a way of writing essays. We didn’t read anything until a month into the semester. We just watched and listened to stuff. They hated podcasts because of the ads, yet, I can fast forward. But that and these video essays that got them into a nice analysis headspace that I wasn’t expecting. And then I used movies to teach research, which we built an entire research project from.
Joe: What is the project?
Alex: It was a comparative research paper, and I used La Haine (1995) and Do the Right Thing (1989) as my own and built it from there, so comparing them visually, historically with race relations in New York in 1989 versus race relations in France in 1995, relationships to authority. Collecting research in ways that bolsters arguments for both films. We originally watched it in class, which was nice.
Joe: What was something you wished someone told you before you started?
Alex: The big thing I wish I had known is that there will be different levels of English language literacies.
Coco: Maybe mine is more emotional, because I was really anxious last semester about if I was doing badly. But people were saying that there’s just no way that it’ll be perfect the first time.
Joe: Or the second, or the third, or the…
Coco: Exactly.
Alex: And it’s so hard to remember in the thick of it,
Coco: Just striving for everything to go perfectly is not realistic. The other thing that was helpful was that maybe you think it’s going badly, but you actually don’t know what gets communicated and you don’t know what they might be taking away from the class.
Joe: Some don’t have reference of what an English college class “should be”
Alex: I found that harder, honestly, remembering that neither of us have taken a college level English class in forever
Joe: Did you guys take composition courses in undergrad?
Alex: No
Coco: I had a class in my program called “Writing the Essay”. But it was specific to my program that was already in the liberal studies department. But we all worked on different things. My professor kind of made it more an upper level class because he made the theme around photography, so we read lots of Barthes. I remember reading Camera Lucida for the first time like, whoa this is crazy.
Joe: I wanna be 18 and read Barthes for the first time again
Coco: I felt so smart. I was really into it, obviously. But I’m trying to think back on the students who just didn’t want to be in that class, and what the professor could have done. I don’t know, he was really good at engaging everyone and made it more democratically interesting to students.
Joe: Do you take some of that with you as an instructor? Democratize interest?
Coco: Yeah, I think so. In terms of instructor models that I can think back on, for these types of classes, I don’t think that super—I don’t know how to put it—really niche, specific performance studies classes that I took in undergrad as a performance studies minor really relate. But maybe it’s more about how the professor made comparisons to things that felt really grounded.
Alex: That, like, the student’s empathy, trying to be nice and just making real-world connections. Yeah. I was thinking back when you were talking about, like, the closest thing I had to comp in my first year, it was just like “Reading and the World.”
Coco: Reading the World? That’s what it’s called?
Alex: It was called First Year Seminar, but it was kind of just reading interesting things around the world, and it was this Buddhist monk who taught it. And she was a real pain. No one would read for her class because she had no sort of overall guidance, and she would just trust us to do it. And after like halfway through the semester, she just started to berate us and give us reading quizzes every day and scream, “Why are you not reading?”. I really think about her as an example of what I don’t try to do for my students.
Coco: Like a negative role model.
Alex: If they’re not doing something, it’s not their fault. In everything that we do, we need to meet halfway.
Coco: Totally.
Joe: Well this goes great for the next question. Do you have a teacher who made an impression on you or a difference in your life or education?
Alex: Yeah, my poetry teacher from when I was at Bard. I had a lot of great teachers that gave us really interesting readings. There’s so much stuff out there. But I have this constellation of mentors. I temper that just as feet on the ground.
Coco: I have been thinking so much about this adjunct professor that I had at NYU because I feel like I’m now in the same position as he was then.It’s helpful to have this reference, because when I was an undergrad and he was a PhD student who was teaching a class. It was like an elective class. It was a really cool topic, technology and performance. So clearly it’s an elective, like people wanted to be there, but he seemed like it was his first or maybe second time ever teaching. And I have so much anxiety about feeling perceived as super disorganized, too casual, not “professorial”, not doing the things that a professor “should be doing”. But when I think back on it as an undergrad, I thought this guy was so cool. I loved how casual he was with the class. He was just super enthusiastic. He was – you guys will love this – he’s a DJ and his DJ name is Pure Imminence.
Joe: On the record, shout out to Pure Imminence
Coco: Shout out to Pure Imminence (aka Nick Bazzano). I ran into him recently at a restaurant. He was with his family. I saw him and I was like “Hii! I’m a teacher now!” It was a really cute moment.
Joe: That’s so sweet.
Coco: Yeah! But it’s this perspective shift, though. It was my first time experiencing a professor who was a young adjunct, which is probably how students perceive us. And all of those anxieties… well maybe actually some of these things are pro’s. So I think of this as to not stress so much about what a professor should be like.
Joe: There are so many anxieties when we first start teaching… Do you feel supported teaching here?
Coco: Absolutely. I do feel like Baruch has a more supportive environment than what I’ve heard from other campuses, so I feel lucky.
[Agreeing in unison based on other GTF stories]
Coco: Everyone here genuinely wants to help.
Alex: And our observations here. Dan was so helpful.
Coco: Right, like full time faculty here really do want to be there for GTFs. I think there are some things that are institutional problems.
Alex: We had a crazy email chain before we started teaching about course caps…
Coco: Yeah and Brooke was very supportive. She was fighting for us, and in the end, admin was like “okay never mind.”
Alex: I feel like even with institutional problems like that, there is local support, or at least localized empathy from people in the departments. It feels nicer knowing that other people are around.
Coco: And having that website with resources is so awesome
Joe: We’re very lucky to have senior faculty who are so supportive. Especially when they’re like, “don’t do extra work, you’re already overworked.” I remember in my practicum Dan told us that he times himself when he grades. I spent way too much time grading when I first started teaching. Why am I spending 20 minutes on a five page essay? We drafted it twice.
Coco: Grading is something I’m still trying to figure out
Joe: You’re gonna love this next question… how much time do you guys spend per week teaching, grading, preparing for class?
Coco: It feels like all the time.
Alex: I’m gonna say five hours a week, outside of class.
Coco: I would say 6-8 per week, depending on the time of the semester.
Joe: Do you guys scaffold a lot of your writing? Are you grading a lot?
Alex: I’ve been scaffolding big time. It saves everyone time.
Coco: This semester I had a worksheet of like, what kind of feedback did you get? What did you change in your drafts? It helps them not write everything the night before and it also directs their focus on the drafting process.
Joe: Similarly, how is your – the phrase we’re using is – work/life balance? [Laughter] Because you’re also taking seminars at the Graduate Center, right?
Coco: It’s tough. I feel I’m slacking on my seminars.
Alex: I really wanna do the reading, but it feels like there’s no time.
Joe: Just like your students
Alex: I feel I have to spend so much more time recovering within the semester. I didn’t realize that until the winter break
Coco: Like self care?
Alex: Clay masks. Just totally detaching from the academic world, which is very difficult. And to take a seminar with that. It’s paradoxical.
Coco: Yeah, and to have other stuff too. I’m working with Lost and Found. I edit for The Advocate and copy edit for this poetry journal called Trip Wire. And then having an artistic practice. Do readings and stuff. It’s a lot. It’s hard to balance but maybe it will be different in time, or with 2850. Do you find yourself planning – sorry, now I’m interviewing the interviewer – do you find yourself planning for class every day? Do you have a kind of set formula?
Joe: The first time teaching it, it was a lot, because you’re building a syllabus, materials, lesson plans. And I was like, oh now I have to do literature professor stuff. But I have a formula now, we have reflective writing, group work, we close read together. But I try not to overplan. Because sometimes “what’s going on here?” is more than plenty with Great Works.
Coco: I feel “what’s going on here” takes up a whole class for me.
Joe: Absolutely. So, now that we’re talking about building syllabi and our classes, do you integrate your own research interests into your teaching at this point, and if so, how does it come through? And, if not, would you like to, and what would that look like?
Alex: I feel like I’m going to be able to get into that more in the upcoming weeks with our multimedia project. We’re starting audio stuff and I’m comfortable in that world, if only just sharing, how do you do this one thing with audio for free, and make it sound good?
Coco: I tried showing them some conceptual art practices. In my class on New York, there are a couple of artists who I thought engaged the space of the city in a way that could translate well for students. I showed them Pope L’s Crawl piece. He was this really cool performance artist who passed away recently. Basically his piece is just wearing a suit and crawling up Broadway and other locations. But the discussion questions were like, what are the political implications, racial implications? How does this practice engage the space? And we talked about artworks like that without using terms like “conceptual” or “situationist”. But I was talking about my interest, which is our history in a certain sense, part of what we study. It was fun to see their reactions. I assigned a part of this book How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell – it’s really good for undergrads, actually – and there are some sections about art practices. There’s a piece mentioned where this artist puts a rope around this section of space where you can see the sunset nicely, and then the gallery visitors sit and then watch the sunset and applaud. And that’s the piece. And they loved that one. The fun thing I’m realizing is that theory, or what we call theory, is just common sense sometimes. Once you explain it, they’re like, well, yeah.
Alex: They love that grounding, and you bring it back to real life.
Joe: Absolutely. I have a combination question. What have you been most excited to teach and what do your students seem most excited to learn about?
Alex: My students have all been really taken by the relationship between rap music and race theory.
Coco: So you are doing theory?
Alex: Not on purpose, honestly.
Coco: Yeah, exactly.
Alex: I played them two videos on the first day of class, and there’s this group of students, none of them know each other, who are all writing about this, and won’t stop writing about it. But they’re very good at it, exploring it in a detailed way, making the connection between the writing and the interest. It’s that connection between the outside room and the classroom, I guess is what they’ve really taken to.
Coco: That’s cool.
Alex: I like teaching the essays, too. It’s my favorite thing. I love doing essay workshops. I don’t know why, it just makes sense to me.
Coco: I think my students are really into the project we’re doing now, which is a research project about a specific place in their version of New York. I said that it could be a neighborhood, but I would prefer it to be like a specific place within a neighborhood. There’s one student writing about a bodega that everyone goes to to hang out and drink and eat. Another student is writing about her local mosque that she goes to, that she’s gone to since she was a child. Since they’re from New York, the vast majority of them, or have been here since they were little, they seem so excited about choosing their place. Then they have a worksheet for collecting sensory data. as a primary source, so it was really cute to see what they wrote. I had a column for all the five senses and they were so detailed. I think they enjoyed that “oh, I get to write about this place that I like going to. In class.”
Joe: I remember that part of the practicum is developing and writing a teaching philosophy. Do you feel like you have one developing, could you describe it briefly, even just your approach to teaching?
Coco: It’s hard to see it when you’re in it, but the aspiration is to have most of the knowledge generated by students and to be more of a facilitator, rather than, top down, this is what you need to learn. But instead like, oh, you’re interested in this, do you know about this? A kind of encouragement. “Shifting students’ mindsets from the rules and formulas of standardized tests to the full landscape of real world writing. What we consider to be good writing is subjective in the real world, that students may not necessarily realize.
Alex: That was a big part of our practicum, too, which was really nice. I think what I’ve come to prioritize in my teaching is this “meeting halfway” philosophy. And using different media to substitute for things that they may not be interested in. Maybe, intermedia as a pedagogical tool.
Joe: So, what advice do you have for new GTFs?
Alex: It’s all of the stereotypical things that we’re told that are all true. But they don’t matter if you hear them cause it won’t affect you. “Be kind to yourself” or “Don’t spend too much time doing things.” You’re gonna do it anyway. But it’s still true.
Coco: I think for me, what people did say, but that I should have taken into account more, is don’t stress if your teacher-personality isn’t formed yet. Don’t be afraid to just be yourself. It’s true because you can’t help it. You can’t do anything else but be yourself.
Alex: And it’s okay to have a bad lesson or to be unprepared. It took me a very bad lesson to be like, wait a second. Let’s do it again next week!
Coco: Exactly. I kept thinking that I irrevocably messed something up. But it’s not true. Just change it up. You have to assess the vibe of each class. Just don’t be so anxious about it, because it’s fine. It’ll be fine.
Joe: Just calm down.
Alex: You might not calm down until your second semester, but try to anyway.
Joe: I like that. I’m so excited to hear how Great Works treats you next year.
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Closing reflection: Coco and Alex are clearly talented instructors who give deep care and attention to their courses. What began as an “interview” quickly transformed into a genuine dialogue, perhaps simulating the calm candor of their very classrooms. I am grateful for their honesty about teaching for the first time. It’s always nerve-wracking, we feel we do not know what we’re doing, and a lot is experimental. Though it is clear to me that Coco and Alex are deeply invested in their students’ growth as thinkers, writers, and learners. Their ability to root class in the concrete experiences of their students, to situate content in a way that nurtures student curiosity and creativity, and their background as artists themselves all seem to generate a welcoming and exciting classroom for their students. I was especially drawn to the creative ways of incorporating other media into teaching writing. Coco and Alex are natural teachers and it was a joy to speak with them after their first year teaching, and I’m excited to see how they continue to grow in their future semesters at Baruch.
Key takeaways: Meet your students halfway; Intermedia pedagogy; Shoutout to Brooke and Dan; Bring in the concrete world and life experience; Perfection is impossible; You’re actually doing much better than you think; Recovery time is not just for semester breaks; Be yourself, your teaching personality will develop over time; Just try to calm down.
Find Coco here: https://www.cocosofia.net/
Find Alex here: http://alexvertefeuillehall.com