Critical Theory and Russian Literature with Dr. Hruska

This article was part of a series by the Board of Student Academic Support Services (SASS) that interviewed OHS teachers about the classes they teach. We hope these articles will be a useful resource for students who are selecting courses for following years.

SASS: What is your favorite thing about teaching Critical Theory and Russian Literature?

Dr. Hruska: It’s hard for me to choose one thing. I really, really love teaching this course - it has been kind of a running joke among English instructors about how long it takes me to reference certain Russian authors or Russian works of criticism or talk obsessively about this class—I’m trying to control that. It’s partly because I love the subject material.

Before I got hired at OHS, when I saw the ad for the school and found that it existed, my immediate reaction was, “Well, they need to hire me and they need to have me teach a class for them on Russian literature.” I think that Russian literature is a natural fit for a lot of OHS students especially since 19th century Russians liked to be more upfront in the way that they addressed certain questions of life and death than other European writers were. Why bother living if we are all going to die anyway? Russian writers of the 19th century in particular liked to look at those questions head on—what is the point of writing about life? Is life meant to be lived, or is life meant to be written about? I think that OHS students often also like to think about these big weird questions as well. I really enjoy looking at these big weird questions raised by Russian literature along with OHS students and I think the conversations are fascinating.

SASS: What challenges students the most in this course? How would you recommend that students overcome these challenges?

Dr. Hruska: So first of all, I think that all of the classes at the AP ELC level are hard. There are a lot of things that are hard about all of those classes, but I can say specifically about what is hard about my class. One of them is that the works that we are reading are confusing. There are a lot of different things going on in the text—it can be hard to track which character is which.  Also, I think the papers are really hard and that there’s not a lot of buffering for your paper grade from classes at the AP ELC level. There’s 10% of buffering for homework and 5% from participation in my class. A lot of your grade is what you get on the papers, and the papers are really hard, and they are graded hard. So that’s part of it. I would say the challenges are keeping track of the threads in the texts and writing the papers. For papers, I mean the way to make them [easier] . . . it’s never going to not be challenging, but working on it in class, talking about expectations, and being available to help people in office hours is helpful. I also really like the new thing that AP ELC is doing of allowing a revision which I think helps to level the playing field . And so far as keeping track of complex texts. . . I’m not sure if there is a better way to phrase it beyond that we talk about them by focusing on the hard things, then trying to make the hard things less difficult . . . that’s a simplistic answer, and it probably works across all classes.

SASS: What does the average workload for each week look like?

Dr. Hruska: For OHS at the high school level, classes are supposed to have 8-10 hours of work per week, including class time, and the teachers at the AP ELC level work hard to make sure that the workloads are similar, so that one student’s grade would not be markedly different than another if that student were in a different class or a different section. In any given week besides class, the workload would be about 80 pages of fiction reading total because it’s 40 pages maximum before a class session, a response paper of about a page that should take around an hour to write, writing notes to oneself in the reading journal, and then if there is work to be done on a paper, then also that work as well.  I do think that hits or ought to hit the average 8 hours per week unless there is a paper.

SASS: How do you recommend that students prepare for the final exam in Critical Theory and Russian Literature?

Dr. Hruska: I’m proud of the final exam for this class because I constructed it to put the burden on the students to think about what is important for the class, why it is important and how you would construct questions to test what you see as important. Students sign up in pairs to write questions based on the lectures involving cultural and historical information. There are both short term identification questions and an essay question that asks you to take a historical or cultural idea and connect it to two different works. In that way it tests both one understanding of the historical/cultural idea and it also tests one’s ability to use that idea independently. I recommend that people essentially prepare for the exam all semester so that you don’t have to do as much at the end. Take for example the idea of the Natural School -  if you notice in a lecture that the Natural School is an important idea, you can then think about how this idea relates to texts going forward and write notes about it to yourself so that you may use that idea more productively when it’s time to write the exam question.

SASS: How is the participation grade for this course determined?

Dr. Hruska: There is a rubric of what the requirements are for participation—it’s a little bit subjective, but it gives pretty clear standards of what an A looks like, what a B looks like, etc.—and then a few weeks in to the semester, I have students write a self-evaluation where they explain what grade they would give themselves and why, and also tell me what I can do to be more helpful for them and make class discussion work better for them. I found that to work really well this year—this is the first time I’ve done it, and I intending to do it in future years too.

SASS: How is a student’s overall grade in Critical Theory and Russian Literature determined? What percentage of a student’s overall grade is determined by exams, homework, quizzes, participation, etc.?

Dr. Hruska: Here is the class breakdown:

Homework (including response papers and proposals): 10%
Participation: 5%
Paper #1: 20%
Paper #2: 20%
Paper #3: 22.5%
Final Exam: 22.5%

All AP ELC Classes have 4 major graded works that you have to submit. And it depends on which AP ELC class you are taking whether the fourth one is a paper or a final exam. For my class it is an exam, so there are 3 papers and an exam; for AP ELC Classic, it is 4 papers. There is also a little bit a difference between the classes in that some classes don’t grade on class participation at all, but have 15% of the grade be homework; mine has 10% of the grade on homework on 5% on participation. You can see the bulk of the grade is the papers. 15% of the grade is, did you show up and put in effort - I’m not saying that the response papers are easy, but a lot of the response papers are graded on whether you try.  You can get an answer entirely wrong, and still get ten out of ten points on an individual response paper.  A lot of that is about putting in effort. The papers are harder, and that is 85% of your grade - that makes this class particularly difficult.

SASS: What materials do students use in this course (textbooks, lectures, online resources, etc.)?

Dr. Hruska: Of course the single biggest thing is the reading. There’s more fiction in this class than in the classic AP ELC class. We do read some theory and non-fiction, but fiction is the soul of it. Other materials are the lectures that offer historical and cultural context, students’ reading journals, and response papers where students think independently about what they’ve read and come up with ideas—I don’t know if [response papers] count as material, but they’re really important for the class.

SASS: Are students expected to be on camera for the entire class?

Dr. Hruska: No—in general, the way that it works is I’m on camera all the time, and whoever is talking is also on camera while they’re talking. The reason that I don’t have everybody on camera all the time for the upper grades is that I like to have a lot of room for a notes pad where we take notes on discussion, and I like to have the focus on that. It’s a real estate issue and I think about it all the time for classroom setup. For eighth graders, I have everybody’s face up because I think so much of what happens in the eighth grade  class is about building an intellectual community and focusing on each other. It does mean that we have less space for visuals and we have less space for taking notes on a conversation, but by the time you’re in high school, I think you don’t need the camera on you as much to help you focus . . . I would love it if we could see each other all the time too, but there’s just limited real estate and the trajectory of the discussion becomes the big thing that we’re all focusing on, so that’s the thing I give the most space to.

SASS: What about this course that interests so many students?

Dr. Hruska: Well, I do think that there is something about Russian literature that is catnip for a particular kind of thinker. I know that I myself got really interested in Russian literature when I was in high school. I think that for those of us who are literature geeks, if you are going to be a literature geek, there are two ways to go in particular. One is by getting in to ancient Greek or Latin. That often is traditional for literature geeks and also an interest in Russian literature is a classic literature geek thing to do. I also want to say there are many other directions to take your literature geekery and it’s all beautiful, it’s all great, but let's be clear: Russian literature is particularly wonderful and I think that people are interested in it, people want to find out more . . . I think that that is part of why.