Turns out yesterday was the day it really sunk in that I was doing this really hard thing that gets easier as time goes on, and one day I might just be competent at it. I worked Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening on a plan that would break up Monday’s 2 hours into smaller, more manageable chunks, and surprise, surprise, it worked. There are a lot of little things that could’ve gone better, but overall, the class went more smoothly, and the students were much more engaged than they were last week. Up until now, I’ve tended towards the grumpy-old-man position on college teaching: I should lecture for an hour or more, and it’s their responsibility to stay awake and attentive and receive the wisdom I’m benevolent enough to share with them, and all the hoo-ha coming from the pedagogy people about catering to the 20-minute attention span is an encouragement of ADD. I could not have been more wrong. And also, I realized that I’ve completely mis-remembered my own college career.
I learned a lot of content listening to lectures and taking notes. But I learned most about context and process (which if you ask me, is not only more important, but more broadly applicable) in the classes that were built on reading and discussion. Most of that was because the class was always moving in one direction or another, and we rarely spent more than 20-30 minutes on a single topic or reading. But a lot of my learning came from the fact that I was I was routinely filled with dread at the prospect of having to talk about something I invariably felt I didn’t understand, which made me all the more likely to have been hyper-attentive in both reading and discussing. Which should tell you that I completely misunderstood the point of discussion as a venue for people to argue about things they were 100% sure about. I’m starting to get now why ABDs go back to audit seminars–I think I could actually relax and enjoy them now.
We’re not doing enough reading to turn the entire class over to a giant discussion section, of course, and for those students who are as apprehensive as I was about talking in class, it would be sheer torture and a quick route to premature heart disease. But I’ve hit upon something really simple, and I can’t believe I didn’t realize it until now. If I do lecture, I shouldn’t go over 20-25 minutes. The lecture itself should cover no more than a few landmark points of fact, and include an exemplary anecdote or two. And all of the above should be contained under a thematic umbrella related to the rest of the content for the day/unit/course. I came to this whole teaching project with an idea that breaking the time up into smaller chunks would be sooo much more work, but it’s astonishing how quickly I can fill 20 minutes with just the stuff that’s rattling around in my head. Turns out I don’t really need to talk about more than the highlights of the development of the constabulary (the nuts and bolts that require a good bit of preparatory reading and strict attention to notes), and if I spend any more time on the nuts and bolts, I don’t get to the interesting and important stuff about the role the police played in Irish society (the stuff I can talk about without notes for quite a while). And when I stray from my notes and start talking about the latter, they start asking questions. I mean, duh. Where have I been all this time?
Everyone always says they learn more when teaching than when they were in coursework themselves, and I’m certainly finding that true. But I’m finding I’m learning TONS more about how much I actually know (way more than I thought), how to think about the whole project of doing history, and how to talk about all of this supposedly esoteric content in a way that makes sense to people who have been doing chemistry or industrial design for the last three years.
On to Wednesday…
Grims, I really hated the courses I had that were primarily discussion based and it sounds like you have a brilliant balance going on between lecture and discussion.
Do you have memories from undergrad courses at all? I have, like, singular memories of moments in a few courses. Wolf’s World Religions with Berndt, Tobius, me, and you sits among the top, but I have no memories of actual content. Seriously. I have no memory of a fact from Schell’s world civ, Strieter’s France, Beahan’s China, or anything from Mulligan, or that strange alcoholic man who taught my Russian history class; I can’t remember his name. I remember far more about profs than about content. Events pre-2002 in my scholarly life are essentially boiled down to: I have the degree that says I attended that school and finished a course, but I have only memories of parties and emotional/personal turmoil. Is it lame to say that undergrad was more about defining myself and learning to define myself than anything academic? And my experience so totally does affect how I teach. No-one ever made a personal connection with me among the faculty at MSU. I was always the odd man. Whatever. Your commentary always precipitates a crisis of delusional consciousness in me. Hmmmm. That quote’s Facebook wall worthy, I think. I reach how I write how I found what was interesting to me, though. Presentations that make me think about content in a way that I would have never thought of myself always engaged me. There’s something quite frightening, invigorating, and sublime about realizing that someone’s had an idea about a subject that you never would have had if you’d had a million years to think about it. That’s not a difficult thing to do with a 20 year old, and since kids get dumber as time goes on and less aware of the world on concrete terms, it gets all the easier to shock them.
Whatever.
Alles was.
It’s not lame in the slightest to recognize undergrad as a personal rather than academic experience. That holds pretty true for me as well, especially since I had the terrible idea to write it all down in a diary at the time. If you ever start feeling too full of yourself, take a gander back at your 19-year-old self. Jesus.
I think I remember the course content more because I spent so much time worrying that I wasn’t smart enough to do whatever it was that I was doing, and trying to pack in as much content as would fit into my wrinkly little brain. I call it the Panic Method, and for a nominal fee, I’ll shoot you up with adrenaline so you too can try it!