It's tempting to begin this essay with a discussion of the challenges involved in teaching medieval literature at the community college level. The problem, of course, is that any notion of “the community college level” is, by necessity, fragmentary. The defining characteristic of community college students is their diversity— demographically, economically, and intellectually— and that diversity makes it virtually impossible to talk about any single characteristic approach to teaching in the community college environment. My own institution, Weatherford College, attracts mainly “traditional” students, i.e., students aged eighteen to twentyfour who have recently graduated high school. As a result, the average age of our student body is twentythree, well below the national average age of twentynine for community college students. Nevertheless, almost every class I teach contains a few “nontraditional” students, usually older students with families and previous careers. Furthermore, even the traditional students, those who have recently graduated from high school, come from remarkably diverse environments. Weatherford College is approximately 25 miles west of the Dallas– Fort Worth metroplex. Many of our students come from the relatively affluent suburban districts to our east, but many more come from very small, mostly rural school districts to our west. Several of my students each semester compete on our nationally recognized Rodeo team, a fact which I mention simply to point out that my teaching experience may not have much in common with that of an instructor in more urban community colleges or in other parts of the country.

All this is not to say that my approach to teaching literature is not informed by the fact that I teach at a community college, of course. Because my students often come to higher education with very little previous exposure to literature— and, more to the point, because almost none of my students are potential English majors— both my choice of texts and my approach to those texts are likely different in many ways from those of my colleagues at major research universities, for example.