It’s the end of a long semester and a good time to think a bit about my teaching. I made any number of strategic mistakes this semester including teaching too many small classes which scattered my attention. I also did a few good things that I want to note down here not so much for other people (who will likely find these commonsensical), but for myself so that I can remember how to adopt similar approaches in the future.
There are, inevitably, some lessons that I’ve learned and some challenges that I need to become more adept at addressing in the future. I’ve decided to categorize these (in the spirit of my “Three Things” series) as the good, the bad, and ugly.
The Good: I owe my one success in teaching this semester to my buddy David Pettegrew. Over the course of a number of conversations about my Roman History course, he told me that he focused his class on a small number of longer texts that he scaffolded with lectures over the course of the semester.
I had long been a lecture+discussion guy where once a week we’d dig into a short text and muscle through an hour long discussion. This was never entirely successful because invariably half the class wouldn’t have done the reading and students often struggled to understand a short text without so much context that they’re doing less thinking about a primary source and more about trying to plug it into the context that I provided.
This semester, I did fewer readings, stressed the importance of actually doing the readings in class, and provided more, big picture context for the sources. I then found the class was more prepared to read the texts on their own terms and engage with the complexities of an ancient source. The discussions, which were generally scheduled for two days instead of just one, began with a basic interrogation of the text, its organization, and its meaning. The second day usually focused on the how we might use the source to construct a historical argument and we began to narrow our open ended discussion by creating outlines and citing the text specifically.
The end result of this approach was amazing. Not only did more students do the reading because I was able to stress it over the course of a few weeks, but they also seemed to be willing to dig deeper into the texts and bring their own, historically informed, interpretations to the fore rather than simply parroting back the narrowly defined terms necessary to make sense of a heavily excerpted text. Needless to say, I’m going to adopt this approach to teaching upper level history classes in the future.
The Bad. I wonder if part of the legacy of the COVID pandemic is a transformation in how students treat classroom time. As I’ve blogged about in the past, the students at my institutions are generally over extended. They work too many hours outside of school, often take too many credits in a race to complete their coursework in the shortest time possible, and frequently have personal challenges that take away from their ability to focus on school. COVID made it easier for students who found themselves overextended to attend classes, even if it was just a kind of lurking attendance that Zoom provided.
Many faculty at my institution have moved away from using Zoom. Some of it is Zoom fatigue. Some of it is fear that students are taking advantage of zoom to avoid fully engaging the class. Some of it is impatience with the poor implementation of Zoom in our classrooms.
The results of his unhappy confluence of student attitudes, faculty frustration, and technological limitations, is that attendance has become incredibly fragile. In one of my non-major, lower-level, survey classes, less than 50% of students attend on a regular basis and even among majors attendance is sporadic at best. This dip in attendance is despite my efforts to privilege classroom time over “home work” in recognition of the complexities of student life.
I refuse to revert to punitive practices such as quizzes or writing assignments (which will tend to punish students struggling to keep up with their work the most and tend to be economically and socially regressive), but need to figure out ways to balance attendance in class with my learning outcomes. Students and the classroom are changing and it is no longer enough to simply hope and expect students to attend.
3. The Ugly: Like many faculty, I try to keep a fairly firm division between my research and my teaching. I do this for many reasons, not the least of which is the increasingly politically fraught world of university instruction and the limits of “academic freedom.” I also realize that it is harder to teach what you know well than what you’re learning alongside your students.
This strategy had worked very well for me over the past decade of teaching, but this semester, I decided to fly a bit too close to the sun. I extended my Roman History class into Late Antiquity and found myself some how teaching what I knew. It was, as one might expect, a hot mess, or, in keeping with the theme of this blog: downright ugly.
Fortunately, I have some time to mull over my questionable decisions and either try to hack back the weeds that have grown up through my fertile understanding of Late Antiquity or simply end my Roman history class at Diocletian and limit my discussion of Late Antiquity to a few classes in Medieval history. Whatever the solution, I need to figure out how to tidy up my occasional forays into “stuff that I know” if I’m going to continue to teach European history.
Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 