Teaching Thursday: Because the Night Belongs to Teaching

Next semester will be the first semester in some time when I haven’t taught at night. It’ll be weird not having that one day a week when I have to head back on campus — swimming a bit against the stream — and entering an oddly quiet and dark building to teach students.

Walking across campus at night is a favorite thing. At its best moments, it reminded me of the bustling evening and nights on Ohio State’s campus. Many of you know my fascination with Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons. Nowhere was the undercommons more visible than on a campus at night when the denizens of the campus area came into the library and campus buildings to take advantage of heat, electricity, internet, books, and company. When things got hectic, I loved that the Science and Engineering Library was open 24 hours and had convenient places for quick and quiet naps as well as plenty of tables for writing, reading, and translating (or whatever it was that I did in graduate school!).

The University of North Dakota’s campus is obviously a bit different. Our campus has never had much bustle at night. When I first started a well-known writer from North Dakota used to teach in the classroom adjacent to my office. He was a part time instructor and not a very pleasant guy who once yelled at me for talking on my office phone — which apparently he could hear through the wall — while he was teaching (forgetting, I suspect, in his boozy torpor that I could hear his lectures in my office). Occasionally, students and faculty would walk alone across the quad more likely to be heading home than to another building. All the same, campus still tended to feel more subdued than empty. 

Today, the building where I teach is one of the few that is open to people without key card access. When I walked the halls, I’m more likely to see a faculty member lecturing to a mostly empty classroom as their class meeting is being zoomed to remote students than a traditional college class. The motion sensitive lights often click off leaving hallways dark and somehow more silent than they appeared under the fluorescent lights.

When I first starting teaching at night, my students were a bit different. My classes were made up of non-tradtional college students (quite a few were Gulf War veterans), athletes, and airplane flying students (we have an acclaimed College of Airplane Flying at UND). They were also big, often over 150 students, and I was helped by graduate teaching assistants. I often taught in the university’s high tech (at the time) Scale-Up classroom.

Over the last decade, our classes got smaller, we lost our graduate program, and we moved from the big scale up room to a smaller “active learning” classrooms. At the same time, my students have more disciplinary homogeneity in some ways, consisting almost entirely of airplane flying majors. This isn’t a bad thing as our airplane flying students are among the most diverse on our campus and many of them are genuinely excited to learn history if for no other reason than its a break from the rather more technical and professional education in airplane flying classes.

The one constant in my night teaching experience is that these classes were always once a week. That meant that I had the luxury of 2 hours and 30 minutes of time each week in a single block. While students rarely have the stamina for a full 150 minutes each class session, the night class gave me very broad canvass to approach topics, methods, and assignments. It allowed me to experiment with a no-homework model (which in reality was a limited-homework model) and work alongside students in the classroom as they completed assignments both collectively and as individuals.

It also created a sense of camaraderie. No one, other than the most hardened academic, wants to spend their time in a sterile classroom in the cold, dark, North Dakota night. So we worked hard as a group to make the best of it. I think this is what I’ll miss the most from teaching a night class.