Gold Stars Nonetheless

I am exhausted from the frustration and anger and negativity that seems to be clouding my latest posts. Last night, I started to get a headache and I imagined all of my anger rushing to explode out of the top of my head, like in cartoons or clip art, but it didn't have quite enough strength to bust open my skull. Instead, it pooled right at the top of my brain making a big puddle of pain.

Actually, I just had a sinus headache, which I cured with Sudafed and Ibuprofen.

Good things did happen this week, things that did not make me feel like a complete professional failure.

On Thursday nights, I teach a 20th century world history class. This is in no way anything about which I can profess expertise. Every semester that I have taught it, I have had to do quite a bit of work just to stay ahead of the textbook (after all, if my knowlege only extends to a chapter ahead in the textbook, why do they need me as anything but a test-master?). You would think that an increasing field of knowledge would make teaching easier, right?

Well, my problem is that I cannot quite manage all of the information that I acquire. The world became more integrated and entangled as the 20th century progressed, so the "this happened here, and that happened there" approach of my textbook doesn't quite make the pieces fit together in a satisfying way. This becomes even more complicated after World War II, in which I know about enough to be dangerous, and all of it is American and European-centric. I'm gradually moving away from that because this is a world history class, not a western civilization class, and because at least half of my students are not from an American- or European background.

Right now, I'm at a point in the semester where I begin to lose control of the information and have to struggle to pull events in different parts of the world into a cohesive whole. This time around, I'm starting with the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, then I am following the textbook, explaining events in the different regions of the world as they unfolded in the shadow of these two antagonistic behemoths. I've also made nuclear weaponry and technology crucial to their understanding of the potential doomsday climate in which events at different corners of the world unfolded. I'm also making technological innovation crucial to understanding the ways that access to complex technologies could allow one nation to develop and dominate while others struggled to merely emerge from under colonial rule, much less go to the moon.

In the course of doing this, I've sometimes felt that I've slacked on my duties as a teacher; but now I'm thinking that my techniques of "slacking" have actually resulted in rather brilliant lessons.

My first brainstorm involved the inclusion of field trips. This is an evening class, meeting from 5-7:40, so we do have the freedom of a longer class period. Furthermore, this class is a "mid-semester" or "late start" class that crams a whole semester's worth of class into half a semester's worth of time. That means that most of our semester took place during the extended hours that museums begin to have in the spring.

That fellowship that has been causing me so much grief ends right before my class begins. I underestimated the amount of time that I would need to get from our fellowship meetings to my class meeting. "Oh crap!" I thought, when I realized this. "I really fucked up. I can't have every other class start close to half an hour late."

Then, the epiphany: Have the students come to meet me, rather than me go meet them. We could convene at a museum, where I would give them an assignment, and then reconvene just before the museum closes to debrief or to allow me to take them on a mini-tour of particular exhibits or artifacts that I want the to see. My assignments have them learn the information that the museum conveys, pay attention to the types of media or items that the museum uses to teach this information, explain what they thought worked or did not work, and then analyze the inclusion or exclusion of certain ideas or people. In one case, two exhibits in the museum dealt with the same subject, the Atomic bomb, from two different angles, scientific and military. So, I had them compare and contrast the two exhibits.

Holy crap! It worked. They really seemed to be getting something out of the exercise. If nothing else, the scale of some of the items in the exhibits -- like the missiles at the Air & Space Museum -- impressed them in a visceral way that neither I, the textbook, nor any images in class could. I haven't figured out how to harness that visceral reaction, but it does seem to pull them into the subject more effectively than other modes of teaching.

I already have an assignment that incorporates museums; but it is general, leaving the particular museum choice up to the student which prevents me from asking pointed questions about specific exhibits. With these field trips, I took that assignment and tailored it for the particular museum, which seems to be much more effective. I had hoped that the troublesome fellowship would help do this. I just thought that the content of the fellowship would meet that end, not my fuck-up in scheduling around the fellowship!

I began to realize that the field trips were making an impact beyond the assignment during my second brainstorm. I confess that this brainstorm originated in my desire not to lecture that day, and instead show a movie. Bad, lazy teacher! While searching for the right movie that wouldn't make me look too lazy, I had another epiphany.

I showed them exerpts from a documentary on Noam Chomsky in which he explains the concept of "manufacturing consent" and "propaganda models." Then, I showed them some of the more dramatic parts of The Atomic Cafe. Finally, I showed the final scenes of Dr. Strangelove, in which Kubrick parodies the missile gap with the "mineshaft gap." At salient points in the excerpts, I paused the DVD and we had discussion about the concepts in the bit we had just seen.

The first film was supposed to give them a critical model for analysis about information distribution. The second film demonstrated that information distribution, while also showing some of the outright lies propagated about nuclear weapons and the effects of such things as testing on the environment and indigenous people like those in the Bikini Atoll. The final film served as an example of the ways that, despite that "propaganda model," people can and do reject or criticize information intelligently. In the process we also discussed how the internet complicates that "propaganda model."

We are also going to discuss what all of this means to the rest of the world if one of the expanding and aggressive superpowers is selling the Atomic Cafe versions of nuclear armaments to its public in order to gain that "consent" for its foreign policy actions. We've already touched on the ways that all of that nuclear proliferation has affected international politics today.

This makes me also want to find films like those in The Atomic Cafe or even like Dr. Strangelove, but from other perspectives, like the Soviet or the Cuban or the Congolese or the Vietnamese or the Chinese. It might be beneficial to have documentary footage of some of those developing nations during that period of time, as well.

Three things came out of this teaching experience. First, the method of "start film, pause film, discuss film, start film" is really quite effective in keeping them awake and engaged with the film's subject. Who knew? Second, they started pulling in their experiences at the museum to connect with the films and to critique the museums. Third, they were actually much more curious about The Atomic Cafe than they were about the other films, even when one was funny and the other gave them some of the framework for critique. Their reaction resembled those of other students at museums who are intrigued by the reality of objects, or who read documents and are stunned by the (for lack of better word) reality of the information. The film was "real," as in "not made up," as in "truth" for them, and they were transfixed.

They also laughed a lot.

I think when I focus on the work, like on interesting ways of teaching or on what I like to write, to the exclusion of what others elsewhere might think, I can really groove.

Despite the really crappy ending to my week, this part went well. Another part like this went well, too, but that's a separate post. So, I give myself two gold stars!