Know Your Profs is an ongoing series of profiles on the instructors at Camosun College. Every issue we ask a different instructor at Camosun the same 10 questions to get to know them better.
If you have an instructor you’d like to see interviewed in the paper, but perhaps you’re too busy to ask them yourself, email editor@nexusnewspaper.com and we’ll add them to our list of teachers to talk to.
This issue, we chatted with Camosun English prof Nigel Brooks about being able to teach new courses, the decline of post-secondary education, and what beverage he thinks goes well with ploughman’s lunches.
1. What do you teach and how long have you been teaching at Camosun?
English. Over 25 years—hard to believe.
2. What do you personally get out of teaching?
I really enjoy the college’s greater emphasis on smaller classes and on teaching. My approach has always been to relate what I teach to the student’s current cultural world; the college’s emphasis on being part of our community lends itself to this.
3. What’s one thing you wish your students knew about you?
That I learn a lot from them; teaching is a two-way street. I have students who know more about, say, Neil Gaiman or H.P. Lovecraft than I do. I’ve had students give me a copy of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns or lend me one of the books in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Feedback from students on the latest trends in popular culture helps me with something I love to do: linking some of the more daunting classic works of fiction to our contemporary world. I show how, for example, Shakespeare’s The Tempest influenced the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet (starring Canadian Leslie Nielsen) and all subsequent sci-fi films.
4. What’s one thing you wish they didn’t know about you?
That I can’t always remember students’ names.
5. What’s the best thing that’s happened to you as a teacher here?
Being able to teach new courses. I got a PhD in the Renaissance but I’ve moved on to teach American and Canadian literature and, more recently, I taught a course titled From The Garden of Eden to Hollywood, about the role of myth throughout western history. In the last two years I taught Of Monsters and Madmen, about crazy scientists and forbidden knowledge, and, most recently, After Armageddon, about the post-apocalypse, which you find everywhere nowadays in TV series and blockbuster films.
6. What’s the worst thing that’s happened to you as a teacher here?
A reduction in the number of second-year English courses being offered.
7. What do you see in the future of post-secondary education?
For years people have spoken about the decline of post-secondary education. In the 1925 novel The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, an academic talks about the way in which higher education is becoming too profit-driven, so such a concern has been around for decades. The definition of what constitutes a more highly educated person has evolved as well: not so long ago being fluent in Latin was the mark of an educated person, but who now is that familiar with Latin? Change is inevitable. Sometimes I worry about the increasing dominance of the newest technical devices serving as a distraction: the medium overwhelming the message. The most important aspect of education is to give people a sense of history and how our culture has evolved—no matter what field they are in. I would hope that post-secondary education doesn’t lose its mission of making us aware of the roots of our own culture while at the same time widening our knowledge of cultures different from our own so that we don’t build big walls that shut out the rest of the world.
8. What do you do to relax on the weekend?
I like on occasion to travel to different parts of our region. On one weekend recently I visited the San Juan Islands for the first time and learned about the Pig War.
9. What is your favourite meal?
That changes over time, but most recently I have been enjoying ploughman’s lunches with a good beer.
10. What’s your greatest pet peeve?
Condescension.