Teaching a 100-level course with all a variety of students in it is HARD.
(Can you tell I’m working on my class for next spring?)
It’s particularly hard for my class, since there is no “next” class for them to take. There is only this; if they want to go deeper, they have to go to graduate school. And really, they have to go to grad school at Indiana University. So I feel an urgent need to give them as MUCH AS I CAN in just 13 2-hour lectures.
Last year, toward the end of the semester, I began thinking closely about how I was teaching, and I realized I was teaching in multiple voices at the same time. Like a fugue. Like this:
Or maybe more like this (Ernst Toch’s Geographic Fugue):
Multiple voices, each performing a variation on a central theme.
What are the voices?
1. Basic sexual and relationship health information.
2. Cultural attitudes that shape sexual and relationship health.
3. The science that generates research on both sexual health and cultural attitudes.
4. The cultural attitudes that shape the science that generates research
The challenges of teaching in multiple voices?
If you don’t know how to listen, it’ll sound messy and chaotic and overwhelming. And if you only hear one of the voices, you haven’t received the entire work. And if I can’t be sure that you’ve received the entire work, how do I know you’ve really understood any of it?
You can get an A in my class without every recognizing voices 3 and 4. But then you’ll be confused and frustrated by, for example, the lecture on sex research. Since the students bring different knowledge with them, only some of them will be able to hear all the voices at once. Last year, I had maybe 6 who Got the whole thing, all four voices. Out of 187.
Which seems to demand that I consider for whom I’m teaching. If I design my class KNOWING that most of the students won’t get half of what I’m teaching, won’t even NOTICE it, why not spend more time on the stuff they’ll all get, and go deeper into it?
When I consider that question seriously, this is the answer I get: boredom. My own boredom.
I can only care so much about the statistics on who uses which form of contraception or condom efficacy research or frameworks for thinking about gender. The basics of sexual health and (especially) the cultural attitudes about sexual health bore me senseless, and I can easily cover what I believe any sexually literate person should know is about half the time allotted to me. And the rest of the time I use to talk about the REALLY COOL SHIT.
It turns out the “AS MUCH AS I CAN” referenced above is qualified with “OF THE STUFF I REALLY LOVE.” Like most works of art, the curriculum of my class is an act of love – in this case, a love for the science that generates the knowledge that I’m there to teach.
Or they could learn it all on the street like the rest of us. Actually I just joined Fetlife.com, and I recommend it highly. AdultFriendFinder is also good if a little pricey for a full membership.
And it is 3 and 4 that really make me ANGRY lately. I dislike science used as a moral soapbox for popular cultural prejudice, or as George Bernard Shaw put it, the belief that one’s prejudices [or preferences] are the sacred and inviolate laws of the universe. And consider what 1% of 6 billion actually IS! I really won’t name any names of the most offensive stuff, but figure anything that has “secret” in the title or uses the phrase “survey after survey indicates” or the term “fMRI”.
As a college teacher myself, I think there’s something important about introducing students to material that’s a bit above their heads. 1) They can’t possibly make it to the next level if no one ever makes that level available to them. 2) Later, when they’re the curious, generally well-informed critical thinkers their education is helping them become, those ideas that don’t resonate now might be useful one day. They will hear or see or read something and will make the light come on. In the right context, and with a little more maturity, they will be able to use the tools you’re giving them, even if they don’t know it now.
But this can’t happen if the instructor is bored. Bored instructor = bored, totally checked out students.
I think the your answer is provided by the first video you linked to:
Keep your class how you like it, and color code your syllabus.
Maybe buy some Christmas lights in 4 different colors after they go on sale
It sounds stupid and way too straightforward to work, I’ll admit, but sometimes stupid, straightforward things are the extra oomph for another 5 or 6 students to Get The Whole Thing. You don’t even have to explain it explicitly, just let the colors and Christmas lights be a mystery of your class.
Possible review question before finals (I don’t know if you give a final):
Explain what you think each color of light strand means and how they relate to the class’ overall structure.
Sorry for the terrible editing, this is really just a top-of-the-head idea that I didn’t want to forget.
but the science and the social science are what’s interesting. they are certainly why I frequent this blog. (that and how delighted and joyful the occasional “ode to mucosa”-type’a posts are.)