Susi Paterson is known on campus as “the Shakespeare lady”, a label with which she takes no issue. “I began reading Shakespeare at age fourteen,” she says, “starting with Twelfth Night, which I didn’t understand the first time around. I thought it was funny, but I didn’t grasp its meaning. As a kid, you’d surely want to start with something easier.” As a girl growing up in England, she has memories of visiting the Globe Theater to watch a performance of Twelfth Night. “All of the girls fell in love with the actor playing Feste,” she says. “Just imagine a group of fourteen year-old girls, hardly cerebral, talking about this actor and how gorgeous he is.”
She doesn’t know any of Shakespeare’s plays by memory, though she can often list scenes and line numbers when she hears specific quotes. “We go through these plays so many times in my classes that I just memorize it after awhile. I would be disturbed if a teacher of Shakespeare didn’t do that, if you didn’t want to make it your life.”
Susi takes considerable pleasure in teaching Shakespeare, a subject that has far more appeal for her than explaining the rudiments of grammar.
“Language is about what reaches a critical mass of people,” she explains. “That’s why I can’t get too animated about ‘the rules’. The majority of grammatical rules are either random, arbitrary things imposed by Victorian schoolteachers, or else they are fluid and change with time.”
She believes that, rather than teach grammar, her truest goal is to teach writing, to prove that the student has some stake in it. “The best way to address that is to ask, what are the social and cultural consequences of failing to write? You don’t need to tell people to follow the rules; you need to give reasons to improve your writing.”
She has advice for students aspiring to become teachers: “Make sure you have some credibility. If you apply for a job, spell-check is not going to do it for you. We all expect clear communication, and that proves that English majors are still relevant.”
During her final year of college in England, Susi realized that she wanted to carry on studying. “Things were not done,” she explains. “They were just opening up.” She had been studying literary theory at the time and wanted to do some graduate work. “I didn’t want to just constantly study,” she says. “I wanted my academic work to go somewhere. I knew I needed a job, and I had to see if I both liked teaching and was good at it, because those are not the same thing.” Because students in England are not allowed to teach until reaching the final year of the Ph.D. program, she decided to study in America, where she would have more flexibility. “Things operate differently in the United States, and so, I decided to try teaching while I was studying for my Master’s. The American system was a much more sensible way of pursuing graduate work.”
Although she has entertained a fantasy of living in Germany should things ever go pear-shaped in the United States, she has never seriously considered returning to Europe. She describes the American opportunity to attend college, something that her parents did not have the chance to do; her father worked in a coal mine before being drafted in World War II, and her mother was taken out of a school to become a nurse for the same cause.
“They were both very bright people, but were simply unable to attend college.” When she became in an American citizen in 2004, she met one of her former students, a refugee out of Bosnia, and realized the importance of becoming part of one’s community. “You can’t be apathetic,” she says, “especially after everything everyone does to earn these rights.”
Susi began teaching at UNH Manchester in the autumn of 1999. While discussing Hamlet, she was very impressed by the students’ asking questions and responding to the exercises with enthusiasm. “That personal commitment is what appealed to me,” she says.
She took a liking to the first-generation college students who focus on their work, rather than become lost within the college environment. “The best part about teaching here is that I get to know the students really well, if they want that. The other day, I got an e-mail from a student I hadn’t heard from in years, explaining that she was moving to Virginia and reminiscing on the time spent in my classroom. Those are very enduring connections.”
She compares her experiences here to her time teaching at a much larger college, where the smallest classes consisted of twenty-five students and the largest consisted of more than three hundred, loaded with staff and teacher’s assistants. She explains that, in those environments, there’s no opportunity to get to know the students. “I don’t like anonymity,” she says. “I don’t like to see students disappear. I think I do a better job when they remain, and I think the students learn more when they’re not anonymous.”
She ends the interview by saying that, if she were working at a residential college, she wouldn’t be able to be as focused on the students. “I really like teaching, and it’s amazing how fortunate I am to be here. It’s really strange to think that, in one generation, we go from working in a coal mine to having a Ph.D., and that can happen to the people here, too, provided you have help from people who care.”
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