Catch a falling star

11 07 2013

I’m pretty good at riffing, which serves me well in front of the class.

Yeah, I sometimes go off my rails, but if I have to choose in lecture between adherence to a tightly-written script and occasional glances at outlinish notes, I’ma going with the glancing, occasional off-railing be damned.

Sometimes, though—more often than off-railing—my lecture or the conversation with students will take us into questions we’d have never planned to ask and allow us glimpses into a cranny within a subject we hadn’t known was there.

I love it when that happens.

The only downside, however, is that because those questions and glimpses are unscripted, I don’t remember them. Last semester, for example, one of the students in my bioethics class responded so unexpectedly to one of my questions that all I could say at the end of that session was “Wow, I didn’t think that was how the discussion was going to go, but that was really amazing.”

So damned amazing that when I tried to reconstruct it afterwards I forgot the comment that sent us all scrambling after him.

I do try to write down those bits which arise that I think should be handed off to the next semester’s class, but often students will come up to me after class with questions or I’ve got to clear out for the next class or run to catch the train so that by the time I have the time to recall the moment I. . . don’t recall the moment.

I’ve learned to let these fallen recalls go, because a) whatcha gonna do? and b) I know there will be other moments in other classes—some of which I may just catch.

That’s my version of faith, I guess: these moments will come, as long as I let them, these moments will come.


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I’m free to do what I want any old time

8 12 2011

My students are failing.

My American government students, to be exact: first-semester, first-year, bright, inquisitive, charming, and failing.

A big piece of this is on them. I tell them what will be on the exam (“make sure you study all of the terms which are bolded in the text, and the context in which these terms are used”; “study Figure x.x, as I almost certainly will ask questions about it”), write out the main points on the board, pause often for questions, and still, they fail.

They fail, in other words, because they’re not studying.

But they also fail because I’m doing something wrong. When I taught large lecture courses I always prepared lectures and rarely strayed from the material. My notes were always outlines rather than fully-articulated texts, and I made time for questions and comments every class, so a certain amount of riffing always occurred, but boyo, I kept the trains running on time.

Once I moved to smaller classes, however, I realized this approach didn’t necessarily work; smaller classes, it seemed, demanded more interaction. So I started mixing up my prepped lectures with more open-ended sessions, giving more time over to the students and allowing for a more free-form approach to the material. I hated doing this, at first—when I lectured, I was in control, and independent of students who may not have given two hoots about the material—but over time I learned to ease up, let things happen.

This still works in my upper-division courses, but, man, it is not working for this intro class. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll change things up next semester, but it will clearly involve a tightening of  my requirements and a battening down of my presentations. I do think freedom has its place in the course, and will preserve as much of it as I can, but it’s clear that without more rigor, that free-thought is simply frittered away.


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