One class of college instructors dislikes teaching introductory courses: big, unwieldy things, necessarily intellectually irresponsible because they must perforce skim over many topics, treating each but superficially, they demand that we doff our rigor and strike an undignified pose for the benefit of students who, honestly, are just trying to fulfill a distribution requirement and can’t be bothered.
Another class of college instructors enjoys teaching introductory courses: big, theatrical things, restricted of necessity to mere snippets and adumbrations, they afford us an opportunity to provide a glimpse of the problems that draw us in to scholarly work without dwelling on the labor involved in working out such a problem thoroughly; they demand that we express ourselves plainly to nonspecialists and challenge us to intrigue students who don’t have a native interest in the subject.
Suppose only one of these classes truly understands the introductory course. Which is it?
The Edge of the American West 
69 comments
December 16, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Charlieford
Hmm. Seems a loaded question. What you’re touching on though is one of the central dilemmas of modern education: we no longer believe in “liberal education.” But in most schools, the traditional liberal arts can barely support themselves (if we just count their majors). So these liberal arts reconfigure themselves as “general education.” They pretend, as they argue a place for themselves at the curricular table, they mouth the platitudes of the old gentlemanly, well-rounded, liberal culture ideals. But truth be told, all they understand is disciplinary specialization. SDo the “survey” course becomes an “intro” course, taught “as if” everyone out there was an aspiring major. of course, they aren’t, and so they hate it, and “gen ed” gets blamed for all that makes the students and the hapless professor miserable. But in part that’s because it isn’t “gen ed”: the intent of the curriculum isn’t to impart a liberal ideal. It’s calling a smattering of intro courses the modern equivalent of that ideal. OK, sorry, a bit off-topic. Back to your question . . .
December 16, 2008 at 3:54 pm
eric
I really tried hard not to make it a loaded question. Which side do you think I was favoring?
December 16, 2008 at 3:55 pm
soup biscuit
What about the class of college instructors who like teaching introductory classes, but dislikes the institutional constraints on how they are taught?
December 16, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Vance
I thought your account of the second attitude was less stilted (apart from “mere snippets and adumbrations” — what, no penumbra?).
December 16, 2008 at 3:57 pm
eric
What about the class of college instructors who like teaching introductory classes, but dislikes the institutional constraints on how they are taught?
No half-measures allowed—hence “Suppose only one” etc. You must choose!
December 16, 2008 at 3:58 pm
eric
(apart from “mere snippets and adumbrations” — what, no penumbra?)
It was “excerpts and adumbrations”. Is “snippets” too twee?
December 16, 2008 at 3:59 pm
urbino
The latter.
December 16, 2008 at 4:01 pm
eric
See, urbino knows how to play this game. Curt, decisive. Like Clint Eastwood.
December 16, 2008 at 4:02 pm
ari
Also: urbino!
December 16, 2008 at 4:03 pm
soup biscuit
Ok then; the latter — even if they are never allowed to teach it the way they see fit.
December 16, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Charlieford
Yeah. Only a bit loaded maybe. At first I thought you were leaning to the second, because the adjectives were less negative. Now I see you’re proposing in the first option that there’s just something structurally wrong with the survey class, and guy 1 understands that?
December 16, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Walt
It’s loaded in that whichever way I answer I’m going to end up with my hand blown off.
I think rhetorically if two things are juxtaposed even-handedly, we expect the second one to be the right answer, since it sits roughly where we expect to see the conclusion.
December 16, 2008 at 4:12 pm
silbey
The latter. The large story has as many challenging intellectual questions as the small story.
(AKA, here comes world history)
(AKKA, one of us here has written a book on globalization. Hmmm)
December 16, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Chris
Do you include language classes here? My father used to really enjoy teaching German 101 classes. He didn’t convert all that many to major in German, but he liked seeing the progress made by beginners.
December 16, 2008 at 4:21 pm
urbino
At risk of ruining my new reputation as a hard-bitten man of action, I’ll comment further.
The first teacher’s attitude reminds me of a resident of the fiction world, the “writer’s writer.” Both are driven to call attention away from narrative and toward craft. This is the wrong sort of person to have teaching an intro course or writing a novel that hopes for a wide readership.
December 16, 2008 at 4:48 pm
kid bitzer
seems like each of those speeches contains a mix of factual and evaluative claims.
as far as the evaluative claims–one dislikes, the other enjoys–i’d say meh.
but i think the second speaker makes fewer false factual claims.
(e.g. this in the first seems just, false: “they demand that we…strike an undignified pose”.)
but since neither one of them points out that it’s the most intellectually bankrupt thing they’ve ever heard of, i disagree with both.
December 16, 2008 at 4:50 pm
PorJ
I don’t get the either/or. You’re attempting to make the categories mutually exclusive. The way I read it the actual content of the two courses – and the learning outcomes – could very well be identical, with the only major difference being the instructor’s enthusiasm and commitment to a particular classroom/teaching dynamic. The supposition that only one can “truly understand” the course doesn’t make sense to me unless “truly understand” describes a prescribed attitude that has little to do with transmitting information or teaching students to think critically and analytically.
I must be missing something here – both professors truly understand the course and probably will teach it effectively (At least until they burn-out on it and start including fictional memories about their action in ‘Nam…..)
December 16, 2008 at 4:57 pm
adamarenson
At least for historians, I think it’s rare for a general-education survey to be an introductory course in drag.
Placing myself with the latter option above, I think the challenge is with:
1) presenting hundreds of years of material, much outside your subspeciality
2) doing so in a way that embraces the opportunities as well as challenges of the longue duree
3) and doing it all in a manner understandable to someone without extensive historical background.
Historians might do best to start with teaching the small, narrow, and specific — like a seminar — and then work from short-period surveys to large-period surveys. Then, when students take the courses in the exact opposite order, their teachers’ mastery can lead students to better understanding.
Except when departments hand the survey courses to the greenest of teachers.
December 16, 2008 at 5:01 pm
bitchphd
One class of bloggers enjoys stirring the shit….
I’m with the second class. Yay non-majors and introductory courses. (Though I don’t much like the “big lecture” aspect of the things.)
December 16, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Henry
I don’t understand what you mean by “suppose only one of these classes truly understands the introductory course.”
One of those classes is wasting their time and their students’ time teaching these classes. The other class is not.
Maybe someone wants to argue that class B is somehow harming their students by misrepresenting their class subjects, but I don’t see that in there. As it is, you basically have Class A = bad teachers, Class B = good teachers.
But wait! By describing all teachers of introductory courses as two diametrically opposed groups, this post itself is a “theatrical thing, restricted of necessity to mere snippets and adumbrations!” Are you obliquely putting yourself in Class B?
December 16, 2008 at 5:41 pm
shadowcook
I’m definitely in the second group. I love the theater of it. Students love a story with a point.
December 16, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Jonathan Dresner
Suppose only one of these classes truly understands the introductory course.
No: I reject the premise because they’re both wrong.
There’s nothing necessarily irresponsible about telling the big story first, nor is it impossible to provide some depth and rigor in the process. There’s theatricality in all classes: some of us are better suited to the lecture theater, and some to the seminar theater (and all of us learn how to do the other one, because we have to and we want our students to learn something). There’s superficiality in all classes: there’s only so much you can accomplish in a semester, always things you leave out that ought to be in there (I conclude many of my classes with a brief discussion of what I’ve left out that I wish I could have included) and students are always graded on a curve because they’re still students. Students in our classes are often there out of some form of obligation, even if it’s just a moral obligation to their chosen discipline rather than a structural requirement, or a need to fill “elective” time and credit hours with something they think won’t bore them, and that does affect how they respond, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have an opportunity to teach effectively — not necessarily entertainingly, but engagingly — to take full advantage of the situation.
December 16, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Jonathan Rees
Any historian’s answer depends upon whether they believe that there is a large but finite set of facts that they absolutely must get to over the course of a semester. I don’t, but I think I end up being more sarcastic than theatrical.
December 16, 2008 at 6:07 pm
bitchphd
… and one class of commenters must needs always quibble with the premises of the post.
December 16, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Michael Elliott
I will admit that, from time to time, I have found some pleasure in the theatricality of a lecture class. And that I have occasionally enjoyed being forced to skip over nuance in favor of the big picture. But at my institution, big is not really big. And no one tells me what to teach in said classes.
December 16, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Jonathan Dresner
… and one class of commenters must needs always quibble with the premises of the post.
I’m a world class quibbler.
But at my institution, big is not really big. And no one tells me what to teach in said classes.
Well, that would be nice. I have reasonable freedom within my courses, but I feel this odd tug of responsibility to actually cover what the course claims it will cover, and not to assume that my historical interests are going to be the same as my students interests or needs. It’s a self-imposed requirement, covering the entire period indicated by the course, the entire area indicated by the course, and with as many different historiographical perspectives as possible. It’s a challenge, but that’s where I get my kicks.
December 16, 2008 at 7:04 pm
grackle
I’ll pick door number two, Alex. My bias undoubtedly comes from where I was taught, and there the underlying theme was always method – across departments and disciplines, as far as my own experience went. I took and take that to heart, that teaching and learning revolve around how one imparts and digests information, what one can do with it, how one can reach conclusions on one’s own, i.e. what are the tools I need to trust my own research? If this is the basis, the bias I work from, there is no difference between broad surveys and specialized sub-disciplines. If I were to teach Am Hist 101, 1492-1865, I would still have to impart a method of looking at the material, even while granting that I may not have time to give John Alden, John Adams, or John Brown his due. I would in any case want to give a sense of how different historians can look at the material and would want to particularly impart methods and means for those who might be interested to proceed on their own.
December 16, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Western Dave
Okay, now do it with high school students…. And welcome to my world.
December 16, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Galvinji
I always thought that it was a lot of fun planning a big survey course — it was useful to me to think about what I wanted to include, what I thought students should know, how to choose readings that will be interesting and fit the premises of the course. Of course, I also used the opportunity to teach survey courses to fill in huge gaps in my own education (e.g., Modern Europe, China, etc.) Too bad no one ever asked me to teach American History.
December 16, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Dan
Richard Feynman, the Nobel-winning physicist, wrote about how much he enjoyed teaching introductory classes. Why? Because it forced him to go back to basics, and he found that sometimes low-level students asked basic questions that turned out to have really profound answers (can’t find citations for these, I’m working off memory here, sorry). As I recall, Feynman also said he felt that if he couldn’t teach basic physics to newbies, then he didn’t really understand it himself. (All of this is related to what Galvinji says above.) So the answer to the question in the post is — you need to reframe the question.
((Full disclosure: I’m not a teacher or professor, I’m a preacher — which means every week I’m talking to mixed groups of newbies and experts, which means I have little sympathy with professors who get to talk to groups of people who are all at about the same knowledge and intelligence level. Lemme tell you, you guys have it easy, no matter what size class you teach.))
December 16, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Jonathan Dresner
sometimes low-level students asked basic questions that turned out to have really profound answers
This really isn’t an issue in history, because our courses — like our discipline — don’t start with first principles and work up. We don’t get to profound until we start dealing with the epistemological and causality questions at higher levels.
That said, I do feel that teaching World History has broadened my perspective immensely, and keeping up with the entire discipline (to the extent one reasonably can) a constant learning experience. My more narrow courses (early/modern china/japan, etc.) benefit from the wider historiographical and contextual sense I’ve acquired.
December 16, 2008 at 10:12 pm
eric
I reject the premise because they’re both wrong.
Do you never ask students questions that don’t have a right answer?
December 16, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Jonathan Dresner
Do you never ask students questions that don’t have a right answer?
All the time. And I tell them up front that there’s no one right answer, but that they need to demonstrate their mastery of the subject by examining both sides of the question and coming to some conclusion supported by the evidence. That conclusion may be to waffle, or to hedge, or to reject the premise of the question (how I wish they’d do that sometimes!), which is fine as long as it is, in fact, supported by the evidence.
Most of your other commenters seem to be rejecting the more negative of the two descriptions on the assumption that we’re supposed to be positive about our students and our courses, rather than examining the fundamentally correct critique of broad surveys encapsulated therein. (I could, just as easily, have said that both positions are correct, but it’s more fun the other way.) Or they’re too afraid you’ll grade them down if they don’t follow directions precisely….
December 16, 2008 at 11:13 pm
The Brucolac
Entering college assuming I’d end up in some sort of social science, I took Biology One and Two from a group thoroughly convinced of the second view. I fell in love with the excerpts, snippets, adumbrations, and penumbras. I also fell in love with the idea of surprising people who thought they knew me by telling them I was a Bio major. It wasn’t until I was a senior or so that I realized I wasn’t that interested in the labor involved in working out the problems of biology. Too late! Now I’m an environmental lawyer— a decent synthesis, but I really wish I were a historian or a geographer. All of which is to say hell yes to the second version, but beware of seduction.
December 17, 2008 at 12:15 am
teofilo
This really isn’t an issue in history, because our courses — like our discipline — don’t start with first principles and work up. We don’t get to profound until we start dealing with the epistemological and causality questions at higher levels.
I don’t see why this precludes intro students asking questions that turn out to have interesting implications for those epistemological and causal issues.
I’m a preacher — which means every week I’m talking to mixed groups of newbies and experts, which means I have little sympathy with professors who get to talk to groups of people who are all at about the same knowledge and intelligence level.
I’m a tour guide, which means I’m often in a similar situation (though I’m not sure college courses, particularly intro courses, are necessarily all that uniform in knowledge and intelligence). I find these posts and threads about pedagogy very interesting for both the similarities and the differences they reveal between academia and my field. I often feel a strong sense of recognition when I hear about the issues involved in teaching, and this post is particularly recognizable.
December 17, 2008 at 1:21 am
alumiere
i think the 2nd choice has a better grasp
and this is coming from a former student who found fields she loved from survey classes and took some other survey classes that were amazing and helped round out her ability to think for herself
whereas she found she hated the field she was majoring in (twice – pre-med, then chem-e) before she figured out that while she was good at science and enjoyed having a broad overview of all sorts of scientific fields, the things that really piqued her interest in learning were the fields she struggled with in survey classes and had to work her ass of to “get” (film, photography, art, english, theatre) – so she ended up with a bfa and all but thesis on an mfa in theatre design before she ran out of money to pay for school
December 17, 2008 at 3:59 am
A White Bear
For a lot of us grad-student teachers, electives in the major are few and far between, so we end up doing most of the 101 and survey courses. I am the sort of person who loves the opportunity to do them because it forces me to really think about what is most important to me about my discipline and make it important to a bunch of people who don’t give a shit. I hadn’t taught composition in a few years before this semester, and I had forgotten how ridiculously rewarding it is. All these adorable kids in their first semester at college were so energetic and responsive. On the last day of class, I got a card they’d all written in and two (2) hugs.
But survey teaching can be a real bear. I have my spiel down, but every semester, half my class is made up of anxious perfectionist English majors, and the other half are hateful, glaring non-majors who are taking it as a general ed course. I can do all the theater and diagramming and simplification I want; when you’re teaching a late-night three-hour lit survey, no one is in the mood for drama and mind-bending awesome shit.
When I have taught electives, they have required much less preparation and planning, and far less energy from me in the classroom. Anyone with a graduate degree can teach a decent elective, because that’s all we’ve taken for however many years. The only problem I find with electives is that I assume they’ve taken intro-level courses and absorbed the basics. When I have to take time out of the semester to teach citation styles and basic writing and literary analysis, it’s really frustrating.
December 17, 2008 at 4:32 am
Sybil Vane
Latter.
December 17, 2008 at 5:21 am
Cosma
As I recall, Feynman also said he felt that if he couldn’t teach basic physics to newbies, then he didn’t really understand it himself.
And, in fact, the Feynman Lectures on Physics are notorious among physicists for being impossible to teach from, or to use for self-study, though lovely to come back to when you already know undergraduate physics.
I hate to say it, because I do want to be positive about my students and classes, but mostly my experience of the large survey class has been much closer to the first option. Part of this may be that in science and math those courses are much more scripted and constrained. There are some tools which we absolutely have to teach the students how to use, not because they’re the most important or interesting or even useful ideas we’ve got, but because they’re required for other courses, especially courses in other departments. If I teach introductory statistics for engineers, I am not doing my job if I don’t teach them linear regression, analysis of variance, t-tests, control charts, etc. Nobody would get interested in statistics from these things, and in fact I know that they’re not really all that widely applicable, but it’s what the engineering departments demand. If they had the math, I could teach them linear regression in a week, tops, followed by ANOVA in five minutes (“it’s linear regression with dummies”), but they don’t. So the class drags for all concerned.
December 17, 2008 at 5:40 am
silbey
We don’t get to profound until we start dealing with the epistemological and causality questions at higher levels.
You have to bring up those questions in basic, survey courses (not in the jargon that we historians love) otherwise you’re just running lists past them.
And you know what? The students love those questions because they live in exactly that kind of murky world as well.
Most of your other commenters seem to be rejecting the more negative of the two descriptions on the assumption that we’re supposed to be positive about our students and our courses, rather than examining the fundamentally correct critique of broad surveys encapsulated therein.
Well, aren’t you just a pleasant chap? Possibly the other commentators did not/do not agree with your analysis.
December 17, 2008 at 5:53 am
Jonathan Dresner
“We don’t get to profound until we start dealing with the epistemological and causality questions at higher levels.”
You have to bring up those questions in basic, survey courses (not in the jargon that we historians love) otherwise you’re just running lists past them.
And you know what? The students love those questions because they live in exactly that kind of murky world as well.
You’re right, and I do, but the difference is that I have to bring those questions up most of the time, rather than the students coming to them. Very few of them have ever had the experience of questioning the validity of a source and using it anyway (they flutter between literal acceptance and hyper-cynical rejection), and it’s an interesting process trying to bring them there socratically. I bring up questions of causality, too — I love the “fall of the Roman Empire” lecture — but they are, for the most part, entirely accepting of the standard textbook renditions of what caused what.
The most interesting questions I get are the unanswerable ones, where I have to say “I don’t have an answer for you yet because we (the Historians’ we) haven’t looked at that question (as far as I know)” (though I often go on to point out the source and theory problems of answering a particular question, or the interesting questions we have been working on in the meantime).
Possibly the other commentators did not/do not agree with your analysis.
Most of the other commentators either indicated a preference without reasons, or articulated reasons which supported one side without publicly examining the other. They may well disagree with me, but they didn’t, as we used to say in math class, “show their work.” I ding my students for this all the time: faced with a choice, it’s not enough to say why one choice is good unless you can prove the other choice isn’t better.
December 17, 2008 at 6:02 am
kid bitzer
no, silbey–it’s because jonathan is a bold, intellectually audacious thinker–the kind of renegade who tears up the rule-book! when given a hypothetical, he doesn’t just fight it, he triumphs over it! he smashes it, in a way that never would have occurred to the rest of us sheeplike meek ones! he leaves us stunned, appalled by the daring originality of his refusal to go along with a party game!
but he also feels responsibilities–feels them deeply. and he imposes responsibilities on himself–because his bold intellectual autonomy is self-legislating!
really, it’s not that he’s a pleasant chap. it’s just that he’s awesome.
December 17, 2008 at 6:31 am
Michael Turner
“I must be missing something here – both professors truly understand the course and probably will teach it effectively (At least until they burn-out on it and start including fictional memories about their action in ‘Nam…..)”
I took Linguistics 1 at U.C. Berkeley from James Matisoff. Now there’s a guy who could have gotten away with saying, “back when I was in ‘Nam — or “cao-dung” as they call it in Lahu). But he didn’t. Instead, he provided examples of interesting features of English, embedded in fragmentary bits of accounts of his fieldwork in Indochina that alluded hauntingly to the conflagration through which he passed to reach his linguistic informants. I looked up his dissertation once, and in the acknowledgments he described the experience simply as “the adventure of my life.”
Interestingly for this discussion, Matisoff seem to pose as the first sort of instructor, in a way that made him wildly successful as the second sort. He posed as the first sort in the most wonderful way — he acted as if he were a freshly minted PhD teaching an intro course, unsure of his footing, very slightly bewildered about the whole process. It was in fact, a great act — drop-dead funny deadpan, undoubtedly honed over years of teaching Linguistics 1. He figured out how to strike “an undignified pose” in an effective way.
Teaching anybody much of anything about any serious subject in one 3-unit course is absurd, and students should know that. So — why not become the absurdity you are trying to convey? And Matisoff did. Why take it so seriously anyway? Especially if you carried knowledge back out to the world over a sea of flame, as he did.
You are nothing. You are only the vessel. If a funny, self-deprecating vessel will make the student drink, the subject itself wins, and that’s what’s important, isn’t it?
December 17, 2008 at 6:42 am
Michael Turner
Matisoff could be very funny in certain other ways, as well.
December 17, 2008 at 6:46 am
Jonathan Dresner
Kid Bitzer, that’s going into my T&P File, for sure. Nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me during finals week.
Teaching anybody much of anything about any serious subject in one 3-unit course is absurd, and students should know that.
Oddly enough, accrediting agencies don’t.
December 17, 2008 at 6:46 am
silbey
difference is that I have to bring those questions up most of the time, rather than the students coming to them
That’s a different statement than the one you originally made, which was that the questions don’t emerge until higher levels.
As to them emerging only because the professor brings them up, well, sure. That’s kind of what intro courses are about.
I ding my students for this all the time: faced with a choice, it’s not enough to say why one choice is good unless you can prove the other choice isn’t better.
I came up with some reasonably sarcastic responses for this (ranging from “it’s a fricking comment thread,” to “is this going to be on the final?” to “Wait, blog comments are *graded*?”) for this, but I thought that kid bitzer handled it effectively in the next comment, so I’ll just bow to his remarks.
December 17, 2008 at 6:50 am
MichaelElliott
I’m wondering if I can hijack this thread and ask people to talk about the teaching that the did, or were trained to do, as graduate students. In English, graduate students invariably teach introductory courses, though these are not big lecture courses. They are small (or should be) writing courses. I did have a chance to teach a one-semester survey of American lit. a couple of times, but I think there were something like 20-25 students. But that survey prepared me to teach the same material to a larger course.
I have been thinking about how different this is in the sciences, where the big intro courses are seen as an incredible burden. Here, and elsewhere, they are often given to non-tenure-track faculty who basically specialize in teaching the big intro courses. (We at least treat these people pretty well here, I think. So there’s a clear division of labor. I would also point out that I have a brother and sister-and-law who are both tenured. high-powered chemists who teach the intro course.)
Anyhow, I was going to a function last week, and started talking to a woman who is her first semester here in the sciences as an assistant professor. I asked her how she liked things, and she said it was great, but a big adjustment in getting used to teaching. Oh, I said. Did you teach as a graduate student? No, she said. Well, I said, what are you teaching now? She replied that she was teaching one graduate seminar, with 6 students.
December 17, 2008 at 7:11 am
Stinky
Is the answer “both”? The second answer coming at the beginning of the semester and the first at the end?
December 17, 2008 at 7:16 am
JPool
I don’t actually enjoy the theatricality of lecture courses (I don’t think I’m that good at that aspect of it yet), and yeah, the sort of student discussion that I truly love mostly emerge at the seminar level, but I’d still count myself in the latter group. What I love about the intro courses is the ability to fold epistemological questions into the narrative and the chance to get students to think about the different sort of thematic approaches that you can take to making sense of the same period. Not all students get there at once, but it’s incredibly satisfying to see students who came into a course with their heads down trying to fulfill a requirement begin to grasp some of the deeper questions.
December 17, 2008 at 7:52 am
Grover
While intellectually (hopefully) engaging upper division classes rock, I love the non-majors in the intro classes. Where else could I have gotten a kinesiology major football player to admit, “wow, like, I always hated history, but now I think it is, like, kind of fun. I even found a whole section in a bookstore for history books, and I bought one.”
December 17, 2008 at 7:55 am
Jonathan Dresner
That’s a different statement than the one you originally made, which was that the questions don’t emerge until higher levels.
You’re right: what I meant, originally, is that the profound questions don’t come from the students in the early stages, by and large. I wasn’t clear on that, sorry.
That said, I do find that they often have very interesting, often quite insightful, questions about culture rather than history per se, especially in my Asian history classes.
December 17, 2008 at 7:56 am
Charlieford
“I play for the people at the back of the room.” Bob Dylan talking about concert performances
December 17, 2008 at 7:56 am
ari
Michael, if you explain exactly what you’re after, and you really want to know what people think, I’ll be happy to post it as a question.
December 17, 2008 at 8:24 am
Fats Durston
I have little sympathy with professors who get to talk to groups of people who are all at about the same knowledge and intelligence level.
Not my experience by any means, so far, at five different schools. Wide ranges in almost every class.
December 17, 2008 at 8:37 am
silbey
I do find that they often have very interesting, often quite insightful, questions about culture rather than history per se
That’s been my experience as well.
My experience also has been that we need to be careful about assuming that, because the students don’t frame the question or use the language we expect to ask the question, that the questions themselves are immediately less than profound.
December 17, 2008 at 8:46 am
Jonathan Dresner
My experience also has been that we need to be careful about assuming that, because the students don’t frame the question or use the language we expect to ask the question, that the questions themselves are immediately less than profound.
I don’t believe that I do assume that: I try very hard to address student questions at both the factual and conceptual levels, and to acknowledge when their questions lead to bigger ones.
I also am not entirely sure we’re using “profound” to mean quite the same thing, since we seem to be converging on agreement on most of the substantive issues.
December 17, 2008 at 9:08 am
MichaelElliott
Ari: I’m just curious what people teach as graduate students in other fields. I’ve realized that I have no idea, and am too lazy to actually do the research. I’m not sure that’s worth it’s own thread, though.
December 17, 2008 at 9:29 am
Staying Up to the Second in the Blogosphere « The Academy’s Bench Warmer
[…] Edge of the West comes to mind–posts there get comments crazy fast. I was digging on this post and thought I might add something, when I noticed that it had 20 comments in under an hour. Also […]
December 17, 2008 at 9:46 am
silbey
I don’t believe that I do assume that:
I don’t know that you are, either. I was struck by “the difference is that I have to bring those questions up most of the time, rather than the students coming to them” because it’s been my experience that students quite often bring up questions (in intro courses) that fit quite neatly into larger historical questions, they’re just not asked or framed the way trained historians would ask or frame them.
To give an example, a lot of my students have been obsessed with the idea that 9/11 was a government conspiracy, arranged by the Bush Administration for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Youtube seems to be the vector for a lot of these ideas. We talk about that, and (after at first pushing back quite vigorously), I realized that the intellectual motivator for them was a dissatisfaction with the surface narrative of 9/11 and Iraq and so on, and a desire to go behind the scenes and try to figure out what the strings pulling the puppets led to. They weren’t trained to use the language that we use, but they were still trying to grapple with some fairly profound questions.
December 17, 2008 at 9:49 am
TF Smith
Isn’t “Prof. A” missing the point?
Prof. A (the one who dislikes teaching introductory courses because they are intellectually not as rigorous as upper division and graduate level courses) is disdainful of an opportunity to reach a wide pool of (mostly) young people with the knowledge (however limited by time and circumstance) that the professor – one thinks – loves to teach and respects as a discipline?
For my money, teaching the H 100-level understanding that Joe or Jane 18-year-old (who – generally – can vote, marry, have children, pay taxes, serve on a jury, and be trusted with the power of life and death by the state) needs to get some concept of why the society they live in is in the shape it is in may not be as rigorous as a 600-level course, but it is certainly respectable – even worthy.
“Prof. B” has the right attitude.
December 17, 2008 at 10:48 am
Jonathan Dresner
a lot of my students have been obsessed with the idea that 9/11 was a government conspiracy,
I’ve had moon-mission denialists, apologists for various nations, sixteenth amendment skeptics, ninja fans….
They weren’t trained to use the language that we use, but they were still trying to grapple with some fairly profound questions.
Have you read any Sam Wineburg? (e.g.) He’s mostly looking at secondary ed, but I’ve used him in my historiography courses to open up extremely good discussions of the relationship between history teaching and historical thinking.
December 17, 2008 at 11:01 am
silbey
sixteenth amendment skeptics,
Never had a sixteenth amendment skeptic.
Have you read any Sam Wineburg
Yeah, I’ve read a bit of his stuff and find it nicely thoughtful. Haven’t used in a class, though.
December 17, 2008 at 11:29 am
TF Smith
So when a student in a history course does the equivalent of a geography or astronomy student suggesting the Earth is flat, how does the panel recommend handling it?
Active engagement/debate? (which is often my instinct, but runs the risk of running the class off the rails, at least for one session)
Active ignorance, and simply moving along?
Derision?
Backing away slowly while maintaining eye contact?
December 17, 2008 at 11:42 am
bitchphd
Michael, I was very lucky as a graduate student and was able to teach a range of composition courses, 200-level courses in my area of specialization, and even a senior seminar for honors students (which was basically a test run for my first graduate seminar a couple of years later). We got a couple of weeks’ training plus a quarter-long course (mandatory) about comp/rhet pedagogy during our first year of teaching, which was absolutely invaluable; no formal training for the literature courses, but I did start an informal group of grad students who’d meet occasionally, with one or two faculty in attendance as well, to just talk about teaching literature and how things were going.
Despite being bitter and disenfranchised towards the end of my grad studies, I do have to say that I think my alma mater did a fabulous job of supporting its graduate students all the way through and doing their level best to help us on the job market. (We also had seminars at least a couple of times a year about “alternate careers,” during which former students would come back and tell us about their jobs as reporters and tech writers and such.)
December 17, 2008 at 11:43 am
Matt L.
Harummph. I just turned in my grades for three sections of Western Civ and I feel like Professor A. I probably am professor A, but at the beginning of the semester I try to be Professor B.
A nice hypothetical question, but its also false choice as other commentators mentioned earlier.
Pedagogically and cognitively, the organization of history curriculum is backwards, especially if the goal of the major is to teach some of the contours of the discipline, like methodologies for analyzing primary sources, using secondary sources to frame a historical question, historiography, etc. These are all easier to grasp in a small class that is focused on a relatively narrow time period and limited geographic scope than they are in the “history of everything” survey class.
So the US survey or Western Civ, or Global History or East Asian Civilizations should be taught as the last class, after students have acquired the tools for historical thinking in a series of more focused courses for a given geographic region. Then the students could really rock on the epistemological and methodological questions that the “history of everything” classes should bring up.
December 17, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Jonathan Dresner
So when a student in a history course does the equivalent of a geography or astronomy student suggesting the Earth is flat, how does the panel recommend handling it?
It really depends. Most days I’ll ask for a bit of explication and engage in some discussion. If it’s a canard I know reasonably well — the moon-landing, for example, or Rape of Nanjing denialism — I will try to point out the range of supporting sources and the problem of absolute proof, walk through some of the debate and its importance. If it’s one I haven’t really dealt with before — and the sixteenth amendment was a new one this semester — I’ll try to get some clarification, then say “that doesn’t sound quite right to me, but let me look into it some more and get back to you.”
In short, I deal with it more or less the same way that I deal with any student error: offer the best facts and arguments I have available and retreat for reinforcements as necessary.
I’ve never run into full-bore Holocaust denialism (though I have to deal with the issue of Maoist apologetics on a regular basis), so I can’t really say how I would respond: I would be inclined to respond vigorously, but doing so reasonably respectfully (no matter how much you don’t like a student’s views, if you express disrespect for the student themselves, you can lose the entire class) would be a challenging balance.
Pedagogically and cognitively, the organization of history curriculum is backwards
Yes.
December 17, 2008 at 12:17 pm
silbey
So when a student in a history course does the equivalent of a geography or astronomy student suggesting the Earth is flat, how does the panel recommend handling it?
I lure them near a window and then push them out. This does not help my RateMyProfessors score, I’m afraid.
Actually, much what Jonathan Dresner does.
December 17, 2008 at 12:41 pm
TF Smith
The defenestration method sounds promising…and it might actually help you at RMP, because of the entertainment value for the audience, alone.
December 17, 2008 at 3:14 pm
silbey
The defenestration method sounds promising…and it might actually help you at RMP, because of the entertainment value for the audience, alone
Have to pick a medium to low window: fatal, but not enough time for them to use an iPhone to log on to RMP.