Teaching Thursday

Posted on by Josh Nudell

With apologies to Bill Caraher, who offers regular reflections on teaching under this title, it was appropriate. Today I read two pieces—including one by Bill—about teaching worth engaging with.

The first came in Keith Law‘s newsletter where he talked about his experiences teaching one course on communication. Klaw is one of my favorite sports-writers and his blog is one of the reasons I write about books in this space. He described the course this way:

It’s turned out to be one of the hardest, most anxiety-inducing things I’ve ever chosen to do.

Teaching is not rocket science, but that doesn’t make it easy. It takes continual adjustment and the ability to adjust on the fly when the best laid plans fail to survive first contact. This reality is something that is hard to appreciate when your only experience with teaching is as a student taking classes that you may or may not have enjoyed.

I am all-too familiar with the fear that Keith Law explained is haunting him:

I’m constantly plagued by the fear that I’m not doing enough for the students – that maybe what I’m teaching them isn’t useful enough, or that I’m just not giving them the information or insight they’ll need.

Any time a class goes well I am reminded of how I posted a sign that I read about on the internet on the inside of the door of my first post-PhD office. It read:

You are only as good a teacher as your next class.

No class is going to be perfect, there are only so many hours in the day, and only so many of those are spent in the classroom. All you can do is reflect, adjust, and move forward. I suspect that KLaw, someone who is a reflective person and who I think came into the experience with a healthy appreciation of teachers, is doing fine. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but laugh knowingly when I read the entry.

For college teachers who want to improve, you could do a lot worse than read Bill Caraher’s regular Teaching Thursday column.

Today’s entry was the latest in a long series of posts that document how he has adapted his World Civilizations course over the years.

World Civ can be a hard course to teach and a frustrating one to take. In the first “half,” it is a course that tackles several thousand years of human civilization spanning the entire globe and taught as a general education course to first-years and non-majors. There is no chance at comprehensiveness and I find that approaching it through a series of themes and broad connections easily become abstract to the point of uselessness except to students who are already passingly familiar with the specific examples that illustrate the theme.

(I often think that World History would be a more valuable course at the senior level, but this is not the system we have and I can see an argument that such a radical inversion would hurt enrollment.)

In this series , Bill has talked about his solution to the problems of a World Civ class, namely flipping the class and challenging the students to produce material together in class, as well as the reasons he made the change. I wonder a little bit about how this assignment would work in a class that meets multiple times per week rather than in long blocks, but I also recognize wisdom in how he has developed the class. It can be a surreal feeling to walk around a classroom where the students are working in groups and I am just eavesdropping. Bill calls it “boring;” I can’t disagree. But if the students are engaged with the historical material while I am bored, doesn’t that mean that I have done my job?

I am not sure that I will — or even should — go quite as far as Bill has in moving the class material to class time, but our courses also have different demographic contexts. And yet, in my first time teaching my World Civ class in its current institution and current iteration, I am finding myself thinking about almost all of the same issues. There is only so much that I can change mid-stream, but I have a lot to consider for next time. In addition to the mechanics of a World Civ course, Bill’s post engages with outcomes and ungrading more generally and both are worth considering. Check it out.

Salt

Posted on by Josh Nudell

As of April 29, 2020, the WHO declared that “most people consume too much salt—on average….twice the recommended maximum levels of intake,” and laid out guidelines for reducing salt intake. Increasing consumption of processed foods has gone hand in hand with the growth of cities, leading people to consume more salt, saturated fats, and sugars and less fresh fruits and vegetables. Fresh food has always been one of the limiting factors for urban areas, but the modern solution of introducing heavily processed and preserved foods has introduced new health complications.

This was not always the case. Ancient cities, for instance, often relied on imported grain that could be transported long distances without spoiling. In these cases, getting enough salt was a significant concern. Before the advent of reliable refrigeration, though, food preservation required salt, which, in turn led to labor-intensive operations to evaporate salt from the seas in order to fuel the production of fermented and aged foods, and for adding directly to fish like cod in order to preserve them for future consumption.

In Salt, Mark Kurlansky evaluates the production of salt in a global context, aiming in the process to offer a history of the world as defined by this one commodity. He is partially successful and offers a portrait of food production around the world with a wealth of details.

Individual episodes of this story were fascinating. For instance, I was struck by the lengths taken to ensure salt production, including elaborate brining pools to encourage evaporation of sea water and exceedingly deep mines in China to extract rock salt. Likewise, the discussion of individual foods like cod and hams, products that were largely made possible by the widespread availability of salt, were right up my gastronomic alley.

And yet, I was often frustrated by Salt. The problem is in Kurlansky’s attempt to weave the history of salt through the history of the world. Sections where he dug into the history of the industry worked exceedingly well, but other sections examined historical events like the French Revolution in such a way that it blew the importance of salt out of proportion. In the chapter on the American Civil War, for instance, he alternated between a fascinating discussion of Avery Island, the birthplace of Tabasco Sauce, and accounts of the US Navy destroying southern saltworks. The former was great, the latter I thought less enlightening in that it offered only a partial portrait of the war while also adding only marginally to the story of the mineral.

However, the biggest problem I had with Salt is that it is a book rich in detail and light in narrative through-line.In a highly technical book this lack of narrative would be less of an issue, but here I found the lack to make sections of the book rather slow going one chapter didn’t neatly lead to the next in any way except that they both explored aspects of the salt industry. Kurlansky’s overarching thesis is that salt was really important in world history, which is hard to deny, but also doesn’t offer a clear way forward to carry out that argument (as I might tell my students). I might go back to Salt to season some of my history classes, but as a commodity history its broad scope and argument were not to my taste.

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In addition to the backlog of books I haven’t written about (yet), I recently finished Robert Massie’s Dreadnought, after which I am now in the market for a book that actually talks about the development of the British Navy from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through at least World War One since my go-to historian on the topic, N.A.M. Rodgers, evidently never published the third volume of his history of the British Navy. I am now reading Maja Novak’s The Feline Plague, a magical-realism novel about Slovenia’s transition from communism to capitalism in the early 1990s.

Course Reflection: Fall 2019

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The end of the semester always hits me as a sudden stop. I go from the constant, frenetic scramble to prepare for class and grade assignments to few imminent deadlines and fewer set schedules. Work still looms and I still have jobs to apply for, but I find the schedule change abrupt and disorienting—particularly when the first involved teaching five classes and the second includes a snow-day and an imminent winter holiday.

Still, it occurs to me that I have fewer than three weeks until the cycle starts up again, and reflecting on what just happened is the first step in preparing for what comes next.

My reflection from this semester is simple: five classes are too many. That’s it, that’s the Tweet.

For no other reason than hoping to earn something that resembled a reasonable salary, I picked up one bit of teaching after another until I was teaching distinct five classes, three of which were functionally new, grading for another, and grading for an online class. I taught five days a week at two campuses a half an hour drive apart and basically gave most of my evenings and weekends to keep up with the prep and grading and, even then, needing to cut corners and falling behind in every class. In short, I taught none of these courses to my satisfaction.

This is not to say that these courses were catastrophes. They weren’t. Each had bright spots — an exercise, a reading, a class discussion — just that I was stretched too thin to give each class the attention it deserved.

Discussion of individual classes after the jump

AP World History (Ancient)

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The College Board received push back a couple of weeks ago when it announced changes to the AP World History curriculum, making the course begin in 1450. Critics online gnashed their teeth about a number of things, raising the legitimate concern that this would further marginalize the pre-modern world and that the chosen date, such that it meant anything, would default to a Euro-centric world view. The board responded this week by announcing that the new date is 1200, not 1450. Critics gnashed their teeth, albeit also in befuddlement at the seemingly arbitrary date.

(For what it is worth, the College Board’s stated explanation for the date, that it will allow “a study of the civilizations in Africa, the Americas, and Asia,” does check out. Now Genghis Khan, Mansa Musa, and the rise of the Aztecs all fall within the range. 1200 starts the course in media res, but that was inevitable when you put a start-date on a course.)

Reading the College Board’s announcement about the changes, I am of two minds. First, I am sympathetic when they say, based on the feedback from teachers that the current model is unsustainable because they are trying to do too much.

The current AP World History course and exam attempt to cover 10,000 years of human history—from the Paleolithic Era to the present. In contrast, colleges manage the unique breadth of world history by spreading the content across multiple courses.

The announcement is a little misleading when it says what college courses do and do not do—I did have a World History from the beginning of time to 1960 course in college—but, from the other side of the table, these broad strokes courses are incredibly hard to teach. Even “just” teaching a world history or Western Civilization before 1500 is covering a laughably enormous swathe of time, which is also the reason I have no pity for the US history professors who complain that there needs to be another mitotic division of their survey sequence, taking it from two to three courses. It has, however, been my position for a while that if I were made Grand Poobah of History Curriculum, I would invert the current paradigm and only teach the survey courses after students had been exposed to historical methods in specialized courses. The idea here is that by going from the specific to the general rather than the reverse, the students are better prepared to appreciate historiographical arguments and big themes.

The problem with this approach is that it is not scale-able as part of a standard test scheme meant to grant college credit. The situation the College Board finds itself in is quite the bind. It needs a single survey course to stand as a substitute for a college course because fragmenting the courses would neuter its ability to be a standard test and therefore undermine credibility. At the same time, the enormity of the course makes it difficult to teach the material in such a way that prepares the students to succeed at the work asked of them on the test. I don’t love this incentive structure with regard to student testing, but given the incentive structure in college courses I at least understand it. Moreover, in looking at old sample questions, the test itself isn’t bad in terms of the skills it is designed to measure. But it is also a lot. Obviously something needs to change.

This does not, however, mean that I agree with the changes the College Board made. My main issue is the decision to prioritize modernity, particularly because the AP European History, which starts in 1450, has already done the same thing. At this point I could start declaiming, ridiculing the absurdity of teaching a world history course that takes for granted the miracle that is agriculture, that conveniently forgets that Rome laid the groundwork for modern Europe, or that doesn’t bother trying to understand the founding and development of *any* of the world’s major religions. Yes, there are a couple of things that happened after 1200 (or 1400) that are important, but these are all built on precedents and developments that came before.

The college board has put out that it is open to creating a second AP World History (Ancient) course, which, despite the awkwardness of the name (congratulations, Richard I of England, you’re an ancient king!), is a fine ambition. But here is the thing: I am skeptical of how quickly yet another AP course can be developed and instituted, let alone how widely it would be picked up. Things have changed since I was in high school, but when I was coming up I didn’t even have access to one AP World History course, let alone two. I got my start with classes on all things ancient through my Latin teacher. Now I am fortunate enough to teach ancient history to college students and am consistently impressed with how many students from all sorts of disciplines come out to take my classes.

Maybe I am wrong and this interest will prompt dedicated high school teachers to make the second course come to fruition, but in the meantime I cannot help but think of this as a missed opportunity on the part of the College Board. There had to be a change to the AP World History course, but instead of even temporarily erasing antiquity, it should have kept the earlier portions, perhaps as an AP World History (Foundations), and developed (Modern) as the secondary offering.

1493 – Charles Mann

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I have a mixed relationship with reading non-fiction, and particularly with reading history books. On the one hand, I enjoy it and there are lots of interesting stories that I want to read about; on the other hand, it is work-adjacent and I have a little voice nagging me that if I have time to read this history, why don’t I have time to read the latest scholarship. This and other issues explain why 1493, a book recommended to me by a friend who teaches high school history, sat on my to-read shelf for so many months. But here in 2018 I am trying to read more non-fiction and I decided that it was work-adjacent enough that I finally picked it up.

Mann’s thesis in 1493 is fairly simple: although it is fashionable to forget, condemn, or otherwise disregard European explorers such as Christopher Columbus (Colón, as Mann calls him), they collectively initiated a process that resulted in the development of the “homogenocene”—a sub-epoch of the holocene that unified the global ecosystem. In other words, we are living in a world that is linked to an unprecedented degree. What makes 1493 worth reading is the evidence he marshals to support this thesis.

1493 starts and ends in Mann’s garden, contemplating the fruits, vegetables, and tubers that found their way from all over the world into this patch of ground. Between weeding his tomatoes, Mann treks all over the world, looking at in turn tobacco, malaria, silk and silver, rice, potatoes, rubber, human trafficking, and all of the other organisms that went along with these goods back and forth across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Woven in are elements of environmental determinism and the ways people have tried to change their fates, how the global Columbian Exchange resulted in millions of people dying from illness, but saved millions more by introducing crops like the potato that can thrive in otherwise marginal land.

Mann is an engaging writer and while he is more comfortable entertaining speculation where there is at best circumstantial evidence than I like, he builds his argument by bringing academic research to life. This strength comes to light, for instance, when Mann talks immigration to the Americas. There is discussion of the slave trade, but he also discusses the rise and fall of Maroon (fugitive slave and native) communities and the influx of Asian populations in Central and South America. Mann embraces the complexity, explaining in lucid terms the push-pull factors that lay behind the population movements, how the demographic changes led to changes in the economic structures and goods, and, above all, how the cultures constructed their social hierarchies. Memory and its opposite, which are central to cultural memory, serve as a recurrent through-line as the tomato and sweet potato became embedded in cultural self-fashioning and many of the people who introduced these crops were, for better or worse, forgotten.

This is not a deep dive, but that is the tradeoff for its truly global scope. In the end, I appreciated 1493 and can envision using some chapters for a World History course. Mann’s basic thesis about the Columbian Exchange is shown beyond question, and it is hard not to be caught up in Mann’s sense of wonder at the immense changes. There are moments when that enthusiasm seems to walk the line with admiration for the human agents of the changes, irrespective of their outcomes. Of course the irony here is that despite Mann’s stated aim of restoring Columbus to this global narrative, these men were in the long run forgotten by the world they played an incidental role in helping to create.

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I am currently reading Omer El Akkad’s debut novel American War, which is a story set during the bleak future of the second American Civil War.