Pithy insights from outside

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m teaching an elective course on the American Revolution for non-history majors this semester.

Last night we discussed the taxation controversies of the 1760′s.  We spent a lot of time on eighteenth-century notions of power and liberty, the fact that the colonists were  predisposed them to see conspiracies and tyrannical plots with every exertion of government authority, and the violent response to the Stamp Act.  I wrapped things up by explaining that although Parliament repealed the act in 1766, they also explicitly asserted their sovereignty over America, and mentioned that at our next meeting we’d explore the controversial measures Parliament employed after the repeal.

I noticed that one girl in the class was shaking her head, a puzzled expression on her face.  When I asked her if she was confused about something, she said, “That’s just stupid.”

“What is?” I asked.

“That they just kept doing the same thing when everybody got so mad about it the first time.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just about the best and most concise summary of British imperial policy in the 1760′s that I’ve ever heard.

Teaching and Technology: The Rise of the Machines

I’m not an especially big fan of TV, and there are only a handful of shows I watch on a regular basis.  One is the original “Law & Order,” which I enjoy because it’s very story-driven.  One of my new favorites is “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” based on the film franchise in which a homicidal computer system uses cyborg assassins to carry out its plan to destroy mankind with nuclear weapons.  I have yet to miss an episode.  Three aspects of this show particularly appeal to me.  One is the fact that I love the original movies.  Another is Summer Glau, the highly attractive young lady who plays a re-programmed cyborg working for the human resistance.  Third, the dominant machine theme resonates with a dilemma facing those of us teaching in college classrooms nowadays.

When I started teaching college courses, the only gizmos I used were a dry-erase marker and an overhead projector for the occasional map or photograph.  It was a flexible system that worked pretty well.

Later I attended a faculty conference in which an outside speaker assured us that our students had the attention spans of small terriers, and that if we wanted them to understand and relate to the material, we had flipping well better start talking to them on their level.  (I should have been more skeptical when the sound unexpectedly kicked in during his PowerPoint presentation, scaring the living daylights out of his audience and causing him to leap two feet into the air.)  So when I had one class that was struggling with a survey course, I started creating PowerPoint presentations for each session, which I projected on a screen during class and posted before each meeting on a course website.  My lectures, bound as they now were to bulleted lists and images, became disjointed and shallow, a recitation of Greatest Hits of World Civilization since 1500.  The students, meanwhile, stopped assimilating the material into good, thorough notes.  Some of their grades actually got worse.

Now that I’m back in the classroom, I’m faced with the technology dilemma again.  Here are the conclusions I’ve arrived at so far:

1) I’m not at all opposed to having classrooms loaded with instructional aids.  Far from it.  The more in each room, the easier our jobs become.  There are times when pictures, maps, film clips, and sound not only enhance a lecture, but are necessary in order to fully grasp the material.  If the best way to incorporate these elements is to embed them into a PowerPoint slide, then so be it.  If classrooms offer us the flexibility to choose between a computer port, a document camera, and an old-fashioned marker board, then so much the better.  The content should determine the medium, not the other way around.  The more options instructors have available, the more effective they’ll be in the classroom.

2) The biggest obstacle to utilizing technology in the classroom is generally not the instructor, but the classroom itself.  We’ll gladly use what’s provided, but lugging your own projector to every class and hooking it up gets a little old.  The fact that facilities sometimes differ across the same campus makes the problem even more vexing.  What do you do when one of your classes is in the glorious new building equipped with screens and computer ports, but your other class meets in the antiquated building across campus?  Do you take it when you can get it, or do you try to keep your classes consistent?  It’s extremely difficult to prepare for your classes when each one requires a different methodology: PowerPoint for your Monday class in the new building, handouts for your Tuesday class in the old building, etc.

3) I believe we should all think twice before converting our lectures into PowerPoint presentations just because it’s the hip thing to do.  Some material is very ill-suited to the cookie-cutter, headline, bulleted list format of a computer slideshow.  History, for example, is complex, subtle, and interpretive.  I lecture from an outline that I keep before me on a lectern, but any student who simply copied that outline would be no more prepared for an exam than a visitor to a stadium would be prepared to relate the ebb and flow of a baseball game simply by copying the numbers off the scoreboard.

4) As instructors, we owe our students the most comprehensive, clear, and effective presentations we can prepare.  We don’t owe them fifteen weeks of non-stop entertainment.  We should keep their interest and stimulate them, but at the end of the day, learning takes work.  One of the purposes of a college education is learning how to think.  It takes a well-rounded, well-informed individual to function as an adult in the real world.

So-called “smart classrooms” are wonderful.  Let’s use them wisely, lest our smart classrooms churn out dumber and dumber college graduates.

(The nifty photo is from the Terminator Wiki.)

Reading the Revolution

Next semester I might get the chance to design and teach a class on the American Revolution.  It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I’ve had the assigned reading for a course like this worked out in my head for years.

My favorite one-volume history of the Revolution is Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause, part of the Oxford History of the United States.  An updated edition just came out a few years ago.  Comprehensive and readable, it’s the logical choice for the main textbook. 

I’d supplement that with Bernard Bailyn’s classic The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, or maybe just the first few chapters.  It’s a very important study that clarifies a lot of otherwise puzzling aspects of the period’s rhetoric.  I don’t want to focus on politics to the exclusion of military affairs, so Joseph Plumb Martin’s firsthand account of life in the Continental Army would be a good middle-of-the-semester read.  I’d love to assign Charles Royster’s magnificent A Revolutionary People at War, too; it’s one of my all-time favorites.  Of course, I’d probably have to pick a chapter or two in order to fit it in with everything else.  I’d wrap things up with Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution, assigning a final paper asking students to assess the Revolution’s results in light of Wood’s arguments and the other material covered during the class. 

This class, though, will be aimed specifically at non-history majors who are interested in taking an upper-level U.S. history course for one of their required electives.  I don’t want to smother their enthusiasm with too much reading material.  The Glorious Cause is massive (the new edition is over 700 pages), so if I stick with it, I’ll probably have to jettison some of the supplemental readings.  I could abandon a main text altogether and rely entirely on chapters and excerpts, but as a student I much preferred the convenience of a short stack of assigned books to the hassle of downloading or copying a different assigned reading every week.  My problem is that all these books are very near and dear to my heart, so I’m faced with some agonizing choices.

It’s therefore time for a little audience participation.  Chime in with any suggestions you might have, but bear in mind that this class will cover political, military, and social aspects of the struggle for independence.

(My thanks to the always-handy Wikimedia Commons for the Trumbull painting of the surrender at Yorktown.)