Teaching Thursday: A Semester (and a year) in Review

I’ve finally reached the end of an exhausting semester and a good and productive year. My teaching has continued to change and I continue to learn things about my students and my own approaches. 

Here are three things that I learned this year.

1. Classroom Contingency. When I first taught Roman history again after nearly 20 years out of the loop, the class went remarkably well. The students read voraciously and discussed things vigorously. The papers were good and the classroom environment was exciting. Last year, when I taught History 101: Western Civilization I in the spring, the class met for 75 minutes starting at 12:30. It was a dumpster fire. The students were uninterested, didn’t engage in the work, and the class basically became triage.

This semester, the same Western Civilization class at the same time was remarkable. The students were engaged and excited and interested and personable. My Roman history class, in contrast, felt flat and disengaged. The students didn’t seem to want to read and they seemed unhappy when they did.

What this reminds me is to be patient with my classes (and myself) and recognize that in classes of less than 100 students, a handful of students have the potential to transform how a class responds. I will refine some things next semester, but I probably won’t make wholesale changes.

2. The Rise of AI. I was feeling pretty cocky that my classes didn’t manifest much in the way of rampant AI usage even as recently as this fall. In the spring semester, this all changed. My students in History 101 had to be reminded weekly that the goal of the class was not to teach them how to use AI to write essays and generally, they got it — reluctantly (after all learning is hard) — and ramped down their AI usage to background levels.

My upper level Roman history class, however, showed a willingness to lean heavily on AI. The results were, at times, impressive and at times, disappointing. In general, language was more polished and refined, papers were better organized, and generally hewed closer to the assignment. On the other hand, of course, it’s harder to know whether the students have invested much of themselves in the work. If the pundits are right and the rise of AI is inevitable, we can either become absolutist and ban it in our classes. Or we can adapt to it and find ways to help students retain their control over the writing within the confines introduced by AI. After all, all college writing has constraints on it: deadlines, paper length, prompts, instructional rubrics, and topics. Word processors, Bluebooks, typewriters, dictionaries, spell-checks, grammar-checkers, encyclopedias (wikipedias), the interwebs, ballpoint pens, and other tools have created affordances that shape the character of student work in the past, and we will certainly encounter new technologies in the future.

The question for me is whether it’s worth a pivot now or just wait until I see how this plays out.

3. Student Tensions. What is more and more interesting (and I think tragic, in some ways) is the growing tension between students being pushed to conform to a compliance based learning model where the goal is to fulfill requirements and students being genuinely interested, excited about learning, and wanting more engaging, deeper, and “authentic” experiences. 

For example, this semester, I offered a 1-credit reading course focused on Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution. Students showed up every Thursday at 7 am to talk about the book. They were interested and excited about it (even when it bored or frustrated them!). At the same time, more and more students have admitted that this or that class doesn’t fit their schedule not because they don’t have time, but because their interest doesn’t align with the growing list of requirements. This saddens me in part because even our best students are being pushed to do things not because they understand them, but because their schedule dictates certain requirements.

Now, I’m not naive and I know students will sometimes allow their worst tendencies to influence their judgment and to maybe find paths of least resistance. On the other hand, many of the students who tell me that they can’t fit this or that into their schedule are the kinds of students who want to dig deeper and challenge themselves.