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History of the World, Part 28

by MWilson


It just wasn’t pos­si­ble. And yet, there it was. Twenty-eight classes; twenty-seven topics.

I had an extra day.

I’d expected the oppo­site. Brook­lyn Col­lege had per­formed recon­struc­tive surgery on its core cur­ricu­lum and, in the process, changed the rules for the class I teach, The Shap­ing of the Mod­ern World. Since time immemo­r­ial the course had embraced mod­ern his­tory from the 1700s up to the present. The new reg­i­men obliged us to start con­sid­er­ably ear­lier, in 1500.

For the teach­ing of mod­ern his­tory, this revi­sion makes tremen­dous sense. Even under the old sys­tem I’d spent a chunk of the first class gloss­ing stuff like the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion and human­ism as back­ground for future top­ics. Under this new cur­ricu­lum, which now embraced the mod­ern era in its entirety, there would be an oppor­tu­nity to approach the deeper themes of the mod­ern era more holis­ti­cally than before.

There would now also be, how­ever, the need to cram two more cen­turies of his­tory into four­teen weeks of instruc­tion. The old anal­ogy of pack­ing five pounds of mate­r­ial into a three-pound bag had never seemed more apt.

I’d been unhap­pily pon­der­ing the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the change for months, since I’d first heard ideas for revis­ing the cur­ricu­lum being bruited. What was I going to have to leave out? Was I going to end up hav­ing to yadda-yadda the French Rev­o­lu­tion? Would I be forced to spend the whole semes­ter speak­ing entirely in bul­let points? “Man­i­fest Des­tiny, states’ rights, Lin­coln, seces­sion, Fort Sumpter, Get­tys­burg, sur­ren­der, Recon­struc­tion, impeach­ment, seg­re­ga­tion, Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mov­ing on!” Maybe I’d just hand them a copy of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (b/w R.E.M.‘s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” per­haps) on the first day and be done with it.

And yet when I sat down to draw up my syl­labus, and so started shuf­fling and rear­rang­ing my top­ics over and over like a bad Scrab­ble hand, I soon found that they fell nat­u­rally into an arrange­ment that yielded twenty-five lecture/discussion top­ics. That plus two mid-terms accounted for all but one of my avail­able class periods.

It would have been easy to fill that class with any of a hun­dred sub­jects that were oth­er­wise going by the boards. I wasn’t exactly suf­fer­ing from a dearth of mate­r­ial. For that mat­ter, I could even almost sneak in a lec­ture on my actual area of inter­est (ancient Rome). Well, per­haps not, but it was funny to think about. Or, since dur­ing my first year of teach­ing I had often ended the semes­ter roughly one class behind my syl­labus any­way, I could sim­ply des­ig­nate that extra day on the sched­ule as “This is the day I’ll catch up to where we’re actu­ally sup­posed to be.”

But con­cur­rently with the need to accom­mo­date the increase in scope, I had also been wor­ry­ing about ways to make my class more involv­ing and more inter­ac­tive. I always try to fos­ter some level of class dis­cus­sion, but with 45 stu­dents a sec­tion and with a press­ing need to cover a cer­tain amount of ground every class, dis­cus­sion can some­times end up get­ting com­pressed. That also means you have less of chance to try to elicit some kind of input from the 35 stu­dents who appar­ently are struck dumb the moment they cross the thresh­old into a class­room. I was already hav­ing all the stu­dents each do one brief oral pre­sen­ta­tion on the pri­mary sources we read. But with this extra day, I started cast­ing about for some­thing that didn’t involve another round of me stand­ing up there try­ing to con­jure enlight­en­ment in them like Canute com­mand­ing the waves of the sea.

I made an impul­sive deci­sion. I decided Novem­ber 20th would be Debate Day. It had a nice, perky, friendly sound to it. Debate … Day! Splen­did. I typed the two words into the empty hole in the mid­dle of my syl­labus and then sent it out for copy­ing before I could change my mind or fig­ure out exactly what it meant.

Okay, that’s a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion. But the fact is I did com­mit to Debate Day before I really had a con­crete sense of what I wanted it to be (other than Involv­ing and Inter­ac­tive) or how it would work.

I admit part of my moti­va­tion in hold­ing tightly to this idea was per­sonal. Because I believe that one of the man­dates of this core cur­ricu­lum course is to develop cer­tain col­le­giate skills, and because given the rate at which we fly past 500 years of his­tory I want them to be exposed to some­thing at some level of rea­son­able depth, every semes­ter I assign a 6-page, argument-driven research paper. And that means every semes­ter, around Thanks­giv­ing or Spring Break, I’m laden with a daunt­ing stack of 90 ama­teur dis­ser­ta­tions cer­tain to con­tain numer­ous remark­able inno­va­tions to the gram­mar of the Eng­lish lan­guage of the sort that would, were I an Old Tes­ta­ment prophet, inevitably cause me to rend my gar­ments. More­over, for some rea­son, from among the panoply of top­ics I make avail­able to them a siz­able minor­ity always selects the one about unfree labor. Every semes­ter they zero in on unfree labor like fruit flies dis­cov­er­ing a bowl of over­ripe man­goes, and every semes­ter I end up sick of read­ing paper after paper on slav­ery and serf­dom, serf­dom and slav­ery. I’m think­ing of retir­ing the topic, like Lou Gehrig’s num­ber, there for every­one to see but nobody to touch ever again.

Any­way Debate Day would be an alter­na­tive to the research paper — an oral research project instead of writ­ten one. (My con­stant harp­ing on the need to develop a the­sis for their papers — one that an informed reader could dis­agree with — led me, in fact, to the debat­ing idea.) The more stu­dents I could get to do the debate, frankly, the shorter my stack of essays and the less I’d have to read about serf­dom, or the role of Louis XIV in the devel­op­ment of abso­lutism (another curi­ously over­rep­re­sented favorite). Plus I’d be eas­ing the path of stu­dents who could do research and who knew the mate­r­ial but who, alas, found no joy in com­po­si­tion. The debaters them­selves would be rein­forc­ing key take-aways for the course; hear­ing them expressed in some­one else’s voice than mine might just (I rea­soned with myself) make a few more coins drop. And for a top­per, I’d be giv­ing the stu­dents, espe­cially the ones bored by his­tory (or my pre­sen­ta­tion of it) an event late in the semes­ter to look for­ward to. I couldn’t build a cos­tume party or a Cold­play con­cert into the syl­labus or any­thing, but this might be the next best thing.

The plan that slowly coa­lesced, as August waned and my anx­i­ety about the new sched­ule waxed cor­re­spond­ingly, was to use Debate Day to have the stu­dents argue pro and con on top­ics span­ning the whole semes­ter. The more I thought about it, though, the more my sat­is­fac­tion in hav­ing an entire class set aside for this event mutated into a mad­den­ingly famil­iar frus­tra­tion: that 75 min­utes is a tiny, tiny sliver of time, espe­cially given the breadth of what we have to cover. It’s like try­ing to pack the Sis­tine Chapel into your Samsonite.

For Debate Day to be use­ful and suc­cess­ful, I had in my head a sort of wish list. I wanted to touch on sev­eral top­ics from across the semes­ter. I wanted to have each side present their argu­ments, address coun­ter­ar­gu­ments, and have time for rebut­tals. I wanted to be able to involve as many stu­dents as par­tic­i­pants as pos­si­ble. Most of all I wanted to have class dis­cus­sion after each debate, because I fig­ured they’d be to respond to per­ora­tions from their peers as well as or bet­ter than from some­one who still remem­bers a time before Christina Aguil­era. I wanted the whole thing to be both fun and infor­ma­tive — a break from the rou­tine, but not a dis­con­nect. Also, I wanted a mil­lion dol­lars to fall from the sky. (With my luck it would be in gold bars.)

Even­tu­ally I set­tled on a scheme of five top­ics, each focused on a mile­stone from the course — one that could be approached as much on rea­son­ing as on the facts of the case. We’d start with whether the king (or any king) should be dethroned (from the stand­point of Eng­lish cit­i­zens in 1642), then move on to the mer­its of fed­er­al­ism (1787), war guilt for Ger­many (1919), appease­ment (1938), and glob­al­ism (today). (Notice: no serf­dom.) Each side would have four min­utes to present, plus a minute for infor­mal rebut­tal. If all went well, that meant that I’d have five min­utes of inter­reg­num after each topic for very brief reac­tion and com­men­tary from the rest of the stu­dents, bring­ing me up to a very solidly packed 75 min­utes. It would have to do. I could have killed a topic and loos­ened the lat­tice­work con­sid­er­ably, but I just couldn’t do it.

I dis­trib­uted the require­ments to every­one dur­ing the first few weeks of class and then took vol­un­teers for the pro and the con of each topic, fill­ing ten slots and account­ing for (because they could sign up as indi­vid­u­als or as teams on each side) about fif­teen stu­dents per sec­tion out of 45. Any­one who didn’t get a slot would do a paper.

Later I heard from col­leagues that those who do debates tend to do them spo­rad­i­cally through­out the semes­ter, rather than con­gealed in a lump in a sin­gle class. This resolves the prob­lem I was fac­ing of risk­ing an over­stuffed class period and invok­ing the law of dimin­ish­ing returns. But I had fixed the debates in my head as research projects, done in stages like the paper: pick a topic; do pre­lim­i­nary research; sub­mit an out­line and draft bib­li­og­ra­phy; do focused research; sub­mit an optional first draft and final draft. If the debates were done at the same level of effort (and they needed to be, since they’d be ful­fill­ing the same com­po­nent of the course grade), then they could only be done at more or less the same time as the dead­line for the papers, in the last quar­ter of the semester.

This rea­son­ing was only par­tial solace for the ran­dom feed­back I was get­ting (now that it was too late to change any­thing). I told a pro­fes­sor I admire that I was hav­ing stu­dents debate five top­ics cov­er­ing var­i­ous issues of mod­ern his­tory. He seemed inter­ested and so I asked if he had any advice for facil­i­tat­ing the event, since it was tak­ing place the fol­low­ing Mon­day and I was a lit­tle ner­vous. He responded incred­u­lously, “You mean you’re doing all five debates on the same day?!” I was not heart­ened by this.

In the weeks lead­ing up to Debate Day I did what I could to smooth the process. I tried to use office hours and spe­cial appoint­ments to meet with all the debaters indi­vid­u­ally to make sure they were becom­ing con­fi­dent with their top­ics and had a sense of how to use their time effec­tively. But, you know, any group of fif­teen stu­dents will yield you five that you can’t get rid of and five who’d as soon pull out their fin­ger­nails as lay eyes on you out of class. In the end I dis­missed all the non-debating stu­dents fif­teen min­utes early one day so the par­tic­i­pants and I could talk debat­ing strat­egy and tac­tics. For­tu­nately in both classes there were stu­dents expe­ri­enced in speech or debate who pro­vided good advice to the oth­ers, and so these brief ses­sions were as pro­duc­tive as any 15 min­utes could be; but I was still con­cerned. I was fac­ing up to a new man­i­fes­ta­tion of a com­mon prob­lem: the impos­si­bil­ity of mak­ing a direct con­nec­tion with every student.

By the time Debate Day dawned I had a Char­lie Brown stomach-ache about the whole thing. I was com­mit­ted to mak­ing it work and yet my con­fi­dence that I was doing the right thing had been not incon­sid­er­ably eroded. Plus I had hinted that I’d be bring­ing food and I’d totally spaced on actu­ally pick­ing any­thing up. At least run­ning around Mid­wood try­ing to find open stores at 7:30 a.m., in advance of an 8 o’clock class, kinda took my mind off my other con­cerns. By the time I got to cam­pus and ran into the office to copy off the agenda/feedback sheet I’d be hand­ing out to all the stu­dents, which I’d final­ized only the night before (after being torn about how and whether to elicit audi­ence feed­back), there was a line at the his­tory depart­ment copier. A line! The office was always deserted at that hour, and on this day of all days I’m run­ning behind and there are two (senior) pro­fes­sors ahead of me at the copier? Man, my karma sucks. (You call it advance plan­ning. I call it karma.) If this had been a Peanuts strip I would have thun­ked my big round head against the office wall and said, “I’m doomed.”

At least there was a dig­i­tal pro­jec­tor for those stu­dents using visual aids. I wheeled it into class, got it set up, and started the whole she­bang five min­utes late. Already my care­fully bal­anced sched­ule was list­ing in the wind. The wind … of my karma.

As class unfolded, I started to relax. Atten­dance was excel­lent, and given that it was an “extra” (i.e., non-lecture/discussion) day, dur­ing Thanks­giv­ing week at that, I hadn’t known what to expect on that front. (Of course, hint­ing in the lead-up to the big day that the debate top­ics were likely to resur­face on the final might have helped.)

The debaters were really well pre­pared. Their pre­sen­ta­tions were all pretty close to the stip­u­lated four-minute max, and most knew their mate­r­ial well enough to get their heads out of their notes and talk directly to the class. Use of visual aids was spo­radic but good. Off-the-cuff rebut­tals were often unex­pect­edly effec­tive. Best of all, the stu­dents in the audi­ence got more and more involved as the event went on, even after the cook­ies had run out.

Dur­ing my sec­ond sec­tion some­thing hap­pened that sur­prised me. The two young men who were doing pro and con, respec­tively, on the issue of appease­ment had met up before­hand and taken the trou­ble to con­vert their two four-minute pre­sen­ta­tions into an eight-minute dia­log as between two pas­sion­ate par­ti­sans, which they deliv­ered with great effec­tive­ness and with only a few glances at their notes. Address­ing me as Prime Min­is­ter Cham­ber­lain [!] and the rest of the class as the British cab­i­net, they volleyed back and forth with verve and humor, leav­ing many in the class both delighted at the show and maybe, just inci­den­tally, with a bit of a clearer idea of inter-war Europe and the com­plex­i­ties of what that means about the soci­ety that descended from it — our world. These two men had been all but stone-silent through­out the course, and here they were, bring­ing a dif­fi­cult topic to life like two junior Franken­steins. It was just one moment in many, but it stayed with me.

Debate Day was not per­fect, and I know there are prob­a­bly dozens of bet­ter ways ped­a­gog­i­cally for me to have rein­forced the ideas we addressed that day for the stu­dents in my classes. It did, how­ever, unex­pect­edly cre­ate a con­nec­tion for me. I’d been spend­ing all this time think­ing about the event, and the semes­ter itself for that mat­ter, in terms of forms and func­tions, mechan­ics and deliv­er­ables. I tend to think mod­u­larly like that. But I was reminded of some­thing basic and vital, which is that every assign­ment, every exer­cise, every event con­tains a poten­tial­ity, a seed, for stu­dents to stretch, to strain their bonds, to shed their skin. It seems pretty obvi­ous and right in front of you, like a song you’ve heard your whole life that sud­denly, heard in a new way, reveals a new layer of meaning.

I walked home that day think­ing that the biggest chal­lenge of my job is not some­how “cov­er­ing” five cen­turies of mate­r­ial, or grad­ing a stack of essays, or plow­ing through blue books. It’s mak­ing that stretch­ing, strain­ing, and shed­ding hap­pen. It’s an art, a skill, a tal­ent. It’s not taught to us — even the need to focus on this skill is not taught to us. Acquir­ing and per­fect­ing it is the one goal every nascent teacher should address him­self to from the day he stands in front of his first black­board. To me, right now, it seems like a task harder than clar­i­fy­ing the Eng­lish Civil War, harder than grad­ing a hun­dred blue books, a task I know is not beyond me but which I have the blur­ri­est idea of how to go about achiev­ing; and for all I am on some days the gruff cynic ready to aban­don the world to Hobbe­sian may­hem, I know that more impor­tant work there can­not be.

It’s a chal­lenge fright­en­ing and exhil­a­rat­ing at the same time. I am, I real­ize, a clumsy jour­ney­man in a trade that molds that unfath­omable thing, the human mind. I have a long way to go. In tak­ing on this role of adjunct pro­fes­sor I was flung uncer­e­mo­ni­ously into the deep end of the pool, and all this time I’ve con­cen­trated on stay­ing afloat. Now, I have some­where to swim to. n

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Posted by MWilson on Mar 15th, 2007 and filed under Dispatches from the Front. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site

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