By: Samantha Wright Allen
With an ER doctor as a brother and a medical researcher for a father, it’s little wonder that at one time Adam Barrows was pre-med.
But when a rejection letter set his world spinning, the young Barrows – who’d only ever taken one English course in his undergrad – had no idea he’d end up as an English professor at Carleton University.
Barrows also had no idea teaching would become his “central passion” and that in 2012, more than 10 years into his career, he’d win two awards: the New Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award and the FASS Teaching Achievement Award.
“My heart wasn’t in the work,” says Barrows of his young self. “It was in the literary word and the spoken word.”
He read voraciously, scouring books like War and Peace when he should have being doing his biology homework. “I finally realized maybe what I’m doing in my spare time, I should be doing all the time.”
But that awakening came after three years of life as a vagabond, which saw him traipse from Seattle to San Francisco working odd jobs. In Montana, Barrows says he and his wife worked as ranch hands, “where I was trying to write my great American novel.”
“It was American,” Barrows laughs and soon admits he has two unpublished novels stuffed in his desk at home.
Finding success at teaching was “an uphill climb.”
His first attempt as a teaching assistant was a disaster. He describes leading a hostile classroom that he was not trained to understand or direct.
“I virtually wept when I read the comments,” says Barrows, remembering the “rock-bottom low evaluations.”
Now, more than a decade later, it’s sky-high scores combined with an innovative teaching philosophy that’s garnering him his awards.
He remembers it all clicked when he guest-lectured Gulliver’s Travels.
“I prepared for months and months and months,” he says. “I was nauseous for weeks.”
But when he stood before the 300-plus students, “it was just magic,” he says. “I had that room in the palm of my hand. I could just see that I had a knack at this.”
Barrows makes sure he has a knack for names, learning every single student in his sometimes 70-plus seminars. It’s important, he says, that students know he cares that each person is present.
“You’re all part of this community together,” says Barrows, adding he thinks students respond to his endless enthusiasm for literature.
And that excitement is born from constantly teaching new material, sometimes even books Barrows has never read before.
He admits preparing new lectures each semester creates an intensive workload – but it’s a personal survival technique.
“It’s this massive ambitious personal goal that I’ve set for myself and I’ve set it to make sure that I never burn out on the thing that I love the most.”
It’s also what drives his creativity. Barrows has two research papers on the go, inspired by classroom discussions at Carleton.
Barrows says he can’t believe he gets to make a living reading and talking about books and he hopes his students take some of that joy.
“I want them to look back at my class as an oasis of pleasure,” says Barrows, adding he wants students to say: “I feel like I understand something about the world and how it works, and beautiful language.”