Teaching
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I can’t remember where I got this phrase, but the link is now dead or hidden behind the AHA paywall (November 26, 2014). ↩︎
What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom
I am probably not alone when I say that I have a hard time taking GOP “socialism” rhetoric seriously. The same goes for right-wing attempts to equate Obama with Hitler. Apparently, however, I need to keep this rhetoric in mind when planning my classes for it has entered my classroom in an unexpected way. In a blue book essay about totalitarianism this summer, one student explained nazism in terms of “socialism” and “big government.” There was no political intent behind these statements. The student simply drew on the language of everyday life, as students are wont to do.
This is a sad commentary on what rhetorical excess on the right is doing to our everyday vocabulary, but it also presents an opportunity. Without engaging in politicking, I can use this apparent linguistic and cultural deficit not only as motivation to be more thorough about how I teach socialism, nazism, and other modern political ideologies and systems, but also as an example for historical thinking. My instinct here is to talk about the use and abuse of history, which is probably what I will do. On the other hand, however, some of those who throw around the “s” word really believe that socialism is on the march in the United States. If I were to take such fears seriously, I would also use them to teach my students about how the meaning of language shifts and even mutates over time, sometimes meaning different things to different groups of people. This too would be a worthwhile lesson, although it would bring me closer to something that some students might perceive as politicking. I should probably take that chance.
Work
I had planned to finish my grading yesterday, but that has to happen today. I was just too exhausted. Looking at the wreckage around me that is my apartment, I wondered why. I also wondered about the incredibly fast passage of time. Ten weeks of a daily intensive history course in the afternoon (in two consecutive parts) and two four-week evening courses, three hours per evening, three evenings per week, with a three-hour minimum round trip commute on top of that help to explain both my exhaustion and temporal dislocation. But that came on top of twenty weeks non-stop ESL teaching at another place, sixteen of those weeks including morning and evening work. And I have continued my Saturday ESL. In other words, I have just finished thirty six-day weeks of teaching, with the exception of two days off over Memorial Day weekend and three days for the Fourth.
If this actually amounted to a living income in the DC area, I could be happy. Instead, it just lets me almost get by, sort of, because it is all paid by the course (history) or hour (ESL). Of course, in these economic times, survival is a pretty good achievement too. And I do like what I do.
There is a ton of planning to do for Mason this fall, because I will have three sections of Western Civ with fifty-five students each. I am supposed to have a grader for ten hours per week, which will lighten the burden, but I have to plan in such a way that I can survive if the grader doesn’t come through. The early morning section will be a killer, because of the commute, but I am looking forward to a semester with all the teaching in the same part of the day, in this case from morning until early afternoon. Putting that aside, though, I have three whole weeks where I can work but not commute or manage a classroom. I really need that.
Miracle Workers by Taylor Mali
I know my university history teaching and my work with adults learning to speak English is different than what Taylor Mali does with high school students, but I can still relate to his poetry about teaching. Maybe it’s because I often have teenagers in required courses. But maybe it’s because there’s something more fundamental to the craft, no matter who or what you are teaching. Here’s a piece he posted to his YouTube channel this year:
Update: I've removed my YouTube embeds because I don't want to set up consent notices for their trackers. Clicking the above screenshot will take you to the video on their site. (June 2, 2024)
Great War Course Planning
I’ve made a little more progress in my Great War course thanks to the early deadlines for book orders. We can’t cover as many books as I might have liked because of the compressed time period: three three-hour meetings per week for one month. I can’t fill all that time with lectures either, for then the main question would be who succumbs to fatigue first, me from speaking or the students from listening. More depth and less breadth is my goal, though the reading schedule will remain rigorous.
We’re going to do four major units with six books. First, there will be the origins question with July 1914: Soldiers, Statesmen, and the Coming of the Great War by Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. and Russel Van Wyk (Bedford/St. Martin’s 2003). We’ll supplement this documentary history with the first chapter of The First World War by Hew Strachan (Penguin 2005) Second, we will use several classes to cover the course of the global conflict using Strachan’s survey together with the personal narratives in Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis (HarperCollins 2005). Third, we will use Modris Eksteins’ Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Anchor 1990) to consider the cultural impact of the war. Finally, we will look more closely at the war in two countries with Imperial Germany and the Great War by Roger Chickering (Cambridge 1998) and France and the Great War by Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker (Cambridge 2003).
I might add some articles or online sources when I write the syllabus, and students will get a broader feel for the literature through brief oral book presentations at the end of the semester.
Because students will need a little time to begin reading in the first place, I will begin the class by looking at a selection of classic films. There could also be a lecture at the beginning on broader trends in war and society, although I’m tempted to forego that in favor of students raising related questions during discussions.
Incentives for students to read will be not only the subject matter and two short papers, but also a midterm and final exam. While I am no big fan of exams in history courses, many undergraduate students seem to need this carrot and stick. They might even appreciate it, though I would expect none to admit as much.
What happens during classroom time will depend largely on class size. The theoretical upper limit is 45, but I’m told 25 is more usual in the summer. Even that would be too large for meaningful discussions, so I’m thinking about what kind of discussions among small groups of students could occur within the larger classroom, with the groups then reporting results to the class as a whole. I have little experience with this setup in history; however, I regularly use the technique when teaching English to non-native speakers. I believe that this student-centered approach could be applied to history, in which learning historical thinking and a new topic is also about doing. Students need to read, think about, and discuss history in order to make it their own. Discussions in small groups could significantly increase the amount of practice that each student gets in a larger class.
Integrating these student-centered discussions into classroom time should also help with the pacing of each three-hour evening session. There will be more variety for everyone, and time usually passes more quickly for students when they are actively engaged in the class.
A Different Approach to History 100?
George Mason’s Hist 100 courses are supposed to cover Western Civilization in one semester. To manage this Sisyphean task, I switched from a chronological to a thematic approach. While this makes sense from an analytic point of view, covering themes seems to alienate some students, because the themes appear in the foreground, not the events and personalities. Moreover, the themes tend to bridge larger periods of time. With “Religion and Society,” for instance, I cover the Investiture Conflict, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Wars of Religion, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. And “War and Society” goes from the French Revolution through the Second World War into the Cold War.
The material in my thematic courses has been organized in a more meaningful way than was possible under a broad chronological approach, but it has not held students' attention. That is why I am thinking about covering a selection of specific episodes the next time around. I could put these up front and use the people, ideas, and issues involved as a vehicle to understand the broader themes that I want them to learn. A possible subtitle for such a course might be “Select Events and Ideas,” which might also make the history feel more manageable to the students.
Great War Course
I still need to work out the details, but here’s my catalog description for one course I am teaching this summer:
Hist 388-C02 - The Great War
Some 9 to 10 million people lost their lives in the Great War between 1914 and 1918. Most of the dead were soldiers; however, the war affected the lives of nearly everyone, not only because of the mass mourning it inspired, but also because of its economic, social, cultural and political consequences. Why did Europe’s great powers go to war? Why did they keep fighting? How did soldiers and civilians experience the war? What were its consequences? This course seeks to explore the First World War, a total war, from as many angles as possible, including politics, diplomacy, strategy, tactics, economics, class, gender, generation, and nationality. The course will center on discussions of assigned readings, which will feel heavy during this short term. We will also consider some films. Grades will be based on class participation, two short papers, a short book presentation, and a midterm and final exam.
The particular challenge with this course is the intensive summer format George Mason University uses. The course meets for about three hours, three times per week for one month.
Work
Due to budget cuts, George Mason University did not book me ahead of time to teach history courses this semester. Hence, I took a couple more ESL courses at LADO. Of course, the History Department at Mason offered me something right before its semester started, but I was already working at LADO by that time. Saying no to LADO at the beginning of January on the mere chance of work at Mason was not an option.
The downside is money. Of course, that’s always an issue for teachers, but it’s particularly difficult for people teaching at private language schools. Universities pay adjunct professors by the course, which leaves financial gaps between semesters, but which also leaves time for other part-time jobs. ESL schools pay only by the hours one actually teaches, meaning five hours of actual teaching is only a “part-time” job, never mind preparation time.
Another downside is my crazy schedule. Besides teaching ESL in my DC neighborhood on Saturday mornings, as I did most of 2008, I am teaching mornings in Arlington and evenings in DC. This schedule can be a little disorienting, not to mention tiring. It has an upside too, however, insofar as it leaves me time during the day for job hunting. The trick is to switch gears between the classroom and this other side of my life, and to remember that the actual job search is the most important thing. That’s not easy for a teacher whose natural inclination is to give his classes the highest priority.
One practical upside to my current routine is the lack of long trips out to Fairfax. I have also been enjoying the break in my routine. Teaching ESL to students at a private language school often means the students really want to learn. They can see how the material affects their ability to interact with their environment, unlike students who take an introductory history class simply because it is mandated by the university.
It’s also fun meeting people from so many countries. Lumping my current courses together, my students come from Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil, Poland, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, Japan, Algeria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. Many of them work as au pairs or nannies, and some come from the diplomatic community.
This summer I’m scheduled to teach Euro Civ I and II again at Georgetown University. I’ve also got two history courses at George Mason University, Western Civ again and also one on the Great War. The courses at each university are intensive, but they come one after the other, so I won’t be teaching more than two intensive history courses at a time, though I might also continue with the Saturday course at LADO.
Meanwhile, the search for a full-time job must pick up. It might be at university, but I am seriously considering history at private schools as well as possibly something that matches my skills in the government. The State Department could make sense, especially as a foreign service officer who does public diplomacy. Unfortunately, the process for getting that kind of job can take a very long time, as much as two years, if I understand correctly.
Meanwhile, life goes on.
Is College Worth It?
A New Personal Record in Plagiarism Cases
I had a new personal record in plagiarism cases this semester: eight. With ninety-seven students total on my rolls at the end of the semester, that makes a little over 8%. To be absolutely clear, I am talking about open-and-shut cases. The burden of proof is on the professor, as it should be, so I never report any honor system violations based merely on my suspicions, no matter how strong they might be.
Some of the cases stem from this semester's new bibliography project. In the past I had tried to craft integrative essay assignments that made plagiarism impossible or very difficult, but I had wanted to move beyond text analysis and writing to also cover research skills, which have proven to be a major deficit among many of my students. I had thought a bibliography project would invite less plagiarism than a straight research paper, since I have not seen bibliography essays for sale on the internet. I was right about buying a finished product, but not about preventing plagiarism. Feeling overwhelmed, a few students panicked and opted to copy and paste material they found on the internet. These examples were the clumsiest. I also saw some examples where students worked harder to integrate internet material than they would have had to work, had they simply opened some books and summarized their contents. I saw both types of behavior on the other essay assignments too.
What happens to these students depends on whether it is their first or second offense. The first offenses that I have seen have led to a zero for the assignment in question. Since these are often worth 25% of the course grade, students found guilty of their first honor system violation have to work hard just to earn a "D" in the course. Second offenses have led to failure of the course. Perhaps there were also other sanctions for second-time offenders that I do not know about.
The high number of plagiarism cases has made me wonder what I could change about assignments and assessment in future. Since I am not slated to teach this spring, I have some time to mull this over. Meanwhile, what are your thoughts and experiences?
At the Bus Stop
People who ride busses have to spend time waiting. I often use the time to think or read, but sometimes I observe the world around me while allowing myself simply to be. And sometimes I pull out a notepad and write down my thoughts.
The sun has started shining differently in the morning and evening. It’s lower in the sky, and it lends a different light to the objects it touches. The colors change, as if they were in pictures printed from slides. (What was the name of that process, when we made pictures from slides, which were basically the opposite of negatives?)
When the sunlight is like this, it becomes a pleasure to let it shine into my eyes as I almost—but not quite—look into it. It carries something that my being craves, the stuff of good moods and a friendly disposition, which can too easily go into hiding when days grow shorter and the nights longer. (How do people survive without the sun in the far north?) During much of the year I go out of my way to be in the shade, but this sun is different. It will disappear soon, giving way to the cold wind and darkness, but not before it has given me the strength I need for a journey in the cold tonight, after the warm feeling and my memory of it have passed.
Language Study Tip: Daily Practice
The following post originally appeared on Language for You (now closed) on on this date under a slightly different title.
When learning a foreign language, it is important to practice daily or even more frequently than that. Many readers will say, "But I don't have time for that!" Sure you do! Really. You just have to let go of the habit of doing a lot of homework and studying all in one long weekly session. Do many short sessions instead. If you only have two hours a week to devote to learning a new language, you could break part of that time up into shorter chunks. You could, for example, take one hour for a long study session. And then you could divide the other hour into four 15-minute sessions. That would give you a total of five sessions in a week. Add to that the class you are probably taking, and you are up to six sessions per week. That will give you the repetition you need to make new words, grammar, and habits of thought sink in. This little amount of time is not ideal. More studying is desirable, but it will bring you a better return on your investment than one long session per week.
Of course, once you get into the habit of these short study sessions, you will find that you can schedule more. What about the five or ten minutes you spend waiting for a bus or train? What about the time you spend on the train? What about when you're walking? You can't look at your books then, but you could look at flash cards with idioms, confusing words, or irregular verbs. You could also simply try thinking in the language you are learning. In this way, the two hours you spend learning the language will grow substantially without actually costing you extra time. And because you are studying frequently and regularly, your brain and mouth and ears will grow accustomed to the language more quickly.
And you know what? It can be fun. It takes your mind off your daily troubles and lets you accomplish something in a short period of time. Pretty soon you will notice that you can feel good about this activity, which gives you one more reason to feel good about yourself. These positive feelings will spark you to keep up and even expand this new study habit.
Online Forums: Blackboard and Wikispaces
Thursday
I had high hopes for today. I had no grading to do or lecture to prepare. I could take off my teaching hat and devote the day to a lot of pressing personal business, especially job applications. But I was nearly immobile for much of the day. Why? It’s not like I haven’t taught long evening classes before, I thought. But then I did the math. This is the first semester I have taught a daytime class and a long evening class. That in itself might be unremarkable, but then there’s the commute too. So maybe I should not feel guilty about Thursdays and just accept that at the moment it is my weekend. After all, I spent last weekend grading, and that will happen next weekend too. And I am teaching English as a Foreign Language on Saturdays to a group of au pairs at a school in my neighborhood called LADO.
But back to that math. Yesterday I got up at 7:00 and left the house a little after 9:00. The commute by bus and train and bus is 90 minutes on a good day, though usually a little longer. I lectured from 11:30 to 12:20. I advised students on an upcoming project for the next hour. I had lunch and caught up on the news via the web. Then I updated Blackboard, the online learning system that George Mason University uses. I returned to the office at 5:00, an hour earlier than usual, because I figured I’d have more visitors than usual, which I did, right down to 7:10. At that point I had to quit advising students and deliver a lecture beginning at 7:20. I managed to end that early, that is, at 9:50, and then I answered student questions until 10:15. I caught a bus at 10:30. Waited 15 minutes for a train. Got into DC about 11:30 and waited for a bus. I got home about midnight. That’s 15 hours on the move. And it really is on the move, because adjunct professors at Mason only have access to office space for office hours. There is not enough room to give us a work space too.
So maybe it’s okay to be exhausted on Thursday, which really is my weekend this semester. One good thing: I’ve been able to ride the train during non-peak hours. Another: I’ve started doing yoga again, and I intend to keep that up, regardless of whatever crazy work schedule I might have in future.
Lessons from the Classroom
The Vocabulary of Grammar
Looking back, I am surprised at how easy it was for me to get through high school and many college courses without knowing a lot of basic vocabulary related to English grammar. I knew English grammar intuitively, and I could write, but I could not talk about grammar. I am lucky I knew enough intuitively, for this weakness could have become a real handicap for me in my studies.
In fact, it did become a weakness in one subject: Russian. We had to take a foreign language at Dartmouth College, and I fulfilled the requirement with Russian. But I was horrible. I do not believe that I ever rose above a C+. Part of the problem was study habits and discipline, but much of it related to my lack of appreciation of the nature of grammar. The professors used terms like genitive case, dative case, direct object, personal pronoun, possessive pronoun, conjugate, and decline, and it seemed like I had to devote too much energy to understanding that vocabulary and the things it indicated instead of learning Russian. Or I missed points entirely because I did not recognize their significance.
I only appreciated this dilemma later, after I took a break from Dartmouth and came back. During my time away I was in the army and stationed in Germany, where I learned to get by with rudimentary German. Upon returning to Dartmouth I decided I would like to learn German properly. My experience was enhanced considerably by a practical little book by Cecile Zorach entitled English Grammar for Students of German. It explained the way English grammar worked for certain situations and then compared it to German. It was through these comparisons that I began to gain an appreciation of the mechanics of English grammar and a vocabulary with which to talk about it. This knowledge later served me well when I found myself in Munich teaching English to Germans. Of course, the learning process never ended.
The Most Famous Closed Trial with Secret Evidence
Sometimes history just leaps off the pages and proclaims its relevance for our own times. On December 24, 1894, The Times of London published a long editorial about the first trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for alleged treason.
"We must point out that, the more odious and unpopular a crime is, the more necessary is it that its proof and its punishment should be surrounded by all the safeguards of public justice. Of these, the most indispensable is publicity. . . . It may be important for the French people to preserve the secrets of their War Department, but it is of infinitely greater importance for them to guard their public justice against even the suspicion of unfairness or of subjection to the gusts of popular opinion."
The Times correspondent wrote these words when there was still little doubt of Dreyfus' guilt in the public at large. There were no Drefusards yet, that is, members of a movement to see the wrongfully convicted man exonerated. It was three years before Emile Zola wrote "J'accuse." The point wasn't about guilt or innocence. It was about the rule of law, which meant due process out in the open even for grave matters of national security. The later establishment of Dreyfus' innocence reminded observers why.
Tomorrow my class is discussing Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999). Burns tells this dramatic tale with his own gripping prose interspersed with documents from the period. And he extends the tale as far as 1998, in order to help readers understand the affair's legacy. For those with more time on their hands I also recommend Jean Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: George Braziller, 1986), a big history book that reads like a good political thriller.
Received Rights versus Human Rights in the 'Declaration of Independence'
Featured image: The famous "Declaration of Independence" painting by John Trumbull
Today citizens of the United States celebrate Independence Day. On this day, 232 years ago, thirteen American colonies proclaimed their independence from Great Britain in a famous document that Thomas Jefferson wrote, the Declaration of Independence. As a history teacher, I find this document fascinating, because it fuses together two different political traditions. On one hand, it recalls seventeenth-century English constitutionalism and its arguments about what had supposedly always been the rights of Englishmen. On the other hand, it advances the kind of powerful and universalizing claims about natural law and human rights spawned in the Enlightenment and given their most dramatic expression during the French Revolution. These connections make the document an interesting object lesson for the history classroom. They also can act as a healthy reminder to Americans that our Declaration of Independence displays not only differences from European political traditions, but also powerful affinities for them.
Human Rights in the History Survey
I have been teaching History 100, the one-semester survey of Western Civilization that is required for all students at George Mason University. Yes, really. One semester. As I mentioned earlier, this semester I decided to abandon the old chronological approach and follow a thematic one instead. I organized the course into six major themes, plus an introductory unit on historical thinking. One of those themes was "Politics and Human Rights."
If one looks at Western Civ textbooks or the reading lists from my days as a graduate student, human rights are not going to be an obvious subject of study, especially not for a history survey that can only afford to choose six major topics. Yet they are not only important to learn about, they also offer a powerful integrative vehicle for talking about a variety of issues that have been central to the history of the West since the eighteenth century.
Language and Culture: The Way We Speak
I originally posted this piece on this day on my old teaching blog, Language for You.
Learning English is not just about sentence structure, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation. There is also the problem of culture. People talk about different things in different countries, and when they discuss these things, they might use blunt language, euphemistic language, or something in-between. The choice might be personal, but often it is cultural.
One cultural peculiarity of Americans is small talk. For instance, I have no trouble chatting with total strangers while waiting in a grocery store line or for a bus. When I try that in southern Germany, however, people look at me like I am very strange indeed, or so the reactions have seemed to me.
Culture also affects how we talk about ourselves at job interviews, which is the real point of this short post. You see, NPR recently did a story on the challenges non-native speakers encounter in the United States when hunting for a job. Check out Sally Herships, "Overcoming Cultural Barriers To Jobs."
What do you think? Have you got any cross-cultural stories to share?
Textbook Costs
I heard a report on Marketplace this evening about the high cost of textbooks and how Congress wants to force publishers to reveal to professors the costs of books they require in their courses. I find it strange that such a measure should be necessary. Is it that hard to figure out what books cost? I use Amazon when writing a syllabus. So do many other cost-conscious professors. And who is this professor they quoted who talked about being courted by publishing representatives with good chocolate in the mailroom and meals out? Certainly no history professor.
The report blamed the rapidly growing cost of textbooks on an expansion of the used book market because of the internet. Really? Used books sounds right, but to my mind this isn't the internet per se, but rather the chains that sell books in so many university book stores. I don't know what kind of arrangement they have with their host universities, but I wouldn't be surprised if these universities are complicit in the process, insofar as they are earning money from these arrangements.
Returning to the original topic, it is sometimes hard to tell how much new books will cost students, because publishers can only qoute net prices. In the past I tried to bundle books from a publisher, in order to lower costs. Result: the net price to the bookstore went down, but the bookstore priced the bundle with no discount, because it had to make these books more expensive than the used books it wanted to sell at some two thirds to three quarters of the new price. It earns a higher margin on those, after all.
Some students at Georgetown University have the right idea. They set up a book coop that collects books at the end of the semester and sells books at the beginning of the next semester at the prices the owners of the books set. I wish George Mason University had something like that. I've tried to help by setting up a Google group on which my students can establish contact with each other for the purpose of buying and selling their books. So far I've had no takers.
Fostering Historical Thinking with Brecht’s Galileo
Spring is almost here, which means its time to order books for the summer term. Summer in DC gets hot, and the summer terms are short, so I usually try to assign things that are both reasonably entertaining and not too long for the general audience I get in my introductory survey courses that are mandatory requirements for all majors. Besides covering a variety of themes and genres, I often try to pick one book that will jump-start historical thinking. I want a book that will make students more aware of how much "the past is like a foreign country" that we will not understand, if we do not try to fathom the conditions and assumptions of the time without letting our contemporary worldview get in our way.
Last year I tried Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, which I had first experienced as a TA for Sandra Horvath-Peterson at Georgetown University back in the 1990s. Of course, Brecht adapts Galileo's story to his own purposes, but it provides a useful point of departure for a discussion about the Scientific Revolution. It also forces students to come to terms with the limits of historical fiction.
It usually goes pretty well, though the first section I did it in was a little rocky, partly because not enough students had done the reading, but also because I was surprised that so few people had any general knowledge of fascism. The paperback edition we used, translated by Eric Bently, contains some excellent material on Brecht's prejudices, but it spends too much time on material more of interest to specialists in drama. Some students read the first part of it, but most gave up and went straight to the play. So I integrated a mini talk of Brecht's time into the discussions and got them to reason out how the problems of the nineteen thirties and forties had manifested themselves in a play Brecht had set in the seventeenth century. I also assigned sources from 1615 and 1633, so that they could get a sense of the issues from Galileo's own time.
One point I tried to make clear was that science was only then beginning to manifest itself as an independent discourse, that it was perfectly natural for the Church to be interested in science at the time and even claim authority on the matter. Of course, I'm no specialist on the matter, but it seems to me that this basic point is worth making. Most students seemed to get it too. Indeed, I felt like cheering when one woman near the end of a class wondered aloud what people would think about our own world in another few hundred years. Sound trivial? Maybe to historians and those for whom historical thinking comes naturally. In our presentist society and with this presentist generation, I think the question was excellent. This student and her classmates were thinking historically.
The success of this discussion was also due in part to another issue. I have begun to “legitimate confusion” for my students,1 that is, I have begun to cultivate an awareness in them of just how hard historical interpretation can be and how important learning how to ask questions can be. With this attitude, students can explore sources and ideas honestly and thoughtfully without fear of getting it wrong and looking bad. With such an awareness, students were willing to attempt the leaps of imagination necessary to navigate among three different time periods, the early twenty-first century, the nineteen thirties and forties, and the first few decades of the seventeenth century.
I might try this book again, though I could also do with a change. Perhaps some of you have some ideas?
Spring Break and Teaching
It's spring break at George Mason University (GMU), and, starting tomorrow, I will have the apartment to myself during the day. Of course, there is a mountain of student work to correct and classes to prepare, but I think I will be able to resume blogging here again. For starters, I do not have to spend three hours a day in busses and trains between Northwest DC and Fairfax, VA. Excuses aside, I sure do admire those of you who are able to teach and blog at the same time, and I hope to begin doing the same again myself. And, hey, I even have a TA this semester, though I don't really have an office, unless having a place available for office hours that three other people use counts.
I'm teaching three sections of History 100 again, that is, GMU's one-semester survey in Western Civilization. I'm doing it differently this semester than in previous semesters. I've thrown out the chronological approach in favor of a thematic one. I would have done this earlier, but I never got around to planning it out. This time I did not let a minor detail like that get in my way. Better to name six major themes ahead of time and then work my way through them during the semester. The chronological alternative was simply too frustrating for both me and my students.
I've also dispensed with traditional exams and writing assignments. Instead they are each doing a Wikipedia project, an idea I got from Mills Kelly. They are also doing a group research project (three to four students each) that will result in electronic output, whether a wiki, a blog, an old-fashioned website, or something on GoogleDocs. Traditional writing and research skills still matter, but I thought I would give them assignments that teach other skills as well.
One thing I've learned in the process already: I have to spend a lot of one-on-one time with individual students who are less familiar with this media. But they're catching on, and the course wiki I set up with Wikispaces is working well. Each page has a place for threaded discussions, and the students are talking. I'd like to think it was for the love of the subject, which in some cases it is. I am also basing a substantial chunk of their grades for the course on online and class participation.
I do not think my thematic approach will have implications for my summer session at Georgetown University, where the mandatory survey, Themes in European Civilization, lasts two semesters. Also, because each course meets daily for five weeks in the summer, there will be no need for a wiki and there will be less opportunity for a long-term project. I'll probably work with the old format of exams and short papers, but I want to give that a little more thought.