A much better way is to have much smaller classes with intense interaction between students and professors. \u201cElite\u201d private schools do this. It is more expensive. It is what my sister saw at Stanford University. Graduate courses at UCLA supposedly have smaller and higher quality mentoring of students — major research schools admit that undergraduate teaching is not really their thing. Maybe one might have some smaller upper division undergraduate classes at UCLA — but graduate school seminars and one-on-one research with a professor is their priority. But the much more intense interaction with a professor in the prestigious liberal arts colleges can yield better learning results. This is what one see at Williams or Amherst College. Students can thrive when directly engaged by professors in the more intimate settings of an elite private school. But it is the lower professor-to-student ratios make such schools more labor intensive and expensive. (As of this writing, tuition and room\/board at Amherst College is $71,300, according to a quick Google search.) Maybe, like in so many other areas, you get what you pay for.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- Smaller classes in \u201celite\u201d liberal arts colleges<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
But even in these smaller private universities, the paradigm is almost always the same: read seminal works, discuss them with a professor and your fellow students, and then write long essays and\/or research papers. This emphasis on lecture, with maybe some discussion added onto it, has been the format for university teaching since literally the Middle Ages. Look at a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1319 and it would look much the same as what you might find in a college lecture hall in 2019.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nThere is nothing necessarily wrong with this.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut there are so many other ways to teach and learn. Real life simulations, role playing, demonstrating learning via other ways than writing papers, etc. Part of the joy of being a teacher is that you can do almost anything — be incredibly creative in how you have students learn\/teacher. As a high school teacher of 25 years and an adjunct education professor for 10 years, I know this in my bones. But good teaching takes hours and hours of planning and thinking by the teacher — a high level of knowledge of the subject matter coupled with solid training and experience in pedagogy. In the UC system I was always impressed with the knowledge of my professors, not always impressed with their teaching skills other than lecturing. But that was enough: I can remember whole stretches of brilliant stretch of outstanding lectures to this day — Joyce Appleby speaking on the American Revolution, Eugen Weber on Western Civilization, E. Bradford Burns about Latin American history (\u201ctheory of dependence\u201d), Steven Spiegel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and David Rapoport and political terrorism. I was lucky to have been able to learn from such world-famous scholars. I knew this even at 21 years of age, although I did not appreciate how lucky I was until many years later.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nThese UCLA professors spent the vast majority of their time researching and writing for their peers in professional journals and in books. This is how they worked to gain \u201ctenure.\u201d It is why they became famous scholars. They maybe arranged a few notes in preparation for delivering their lectures but that would be it in terms of preparation. Teaching was far from their main focus in the UC system; they consider themselves researchers first, teachers a distant second. And they rarely actually spoke with and\/or held discussions with undergraduate students. I never once spoke personally with any of those professors I mentioned. When I was in their class they could not have picked my face out in a police lineup. The delivery of subject material was excellent; the personal attention given to me was execrable.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd that was in the \u201cbest case\u201d scenario. There is a worst case, too.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nI remember one professor at UCLA giving lectures on astronomy which were unintelligible. This professor, from a country in Asia, was a standout astronomer, I am sure. He probably had made important discoveries and achieved success in peer reviewed journals. But he did not speak English clearly and could not communicate well through a lecture. As a student I was not well served by some famous astronomy researcher who could not teach his way out of a paper bag. I struggled in that class. And I am far from the only college student with such a story. There is a crucial difference between someone who is a brilliant scholar in their own learning, and someone who is brilliant at teaching that learning to others. The two processes are not the same; they require different skill sets.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo I would give UCI and UCLA, the two universities I attended as an undergraduate, a solid \u201cA\u201d for quality of content and a squishy \u201cB-\u201d for quality of teaching overall.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut I would take a minute to talk about the best class I took in college. I was as a freshman at UC Irvine when I took the \u201cHumanities Core\u201d classes over three quarters (one academic year of study). The course, set up by Professor Keith Nelson, was about \u201cThe Human Condition\u201d and was a full 8 units — the equivalent of two classes and satisfied both the English and social studies general education requirements at UCI. This year long course of study in 1985-1986 was broken into three parts:
<\/p>\n\n\n\n- Knowledge and Choice:<\/strong> Professors Gerasimos Santas, Linda Georgianna, James Chiampi, Kenneth Bailes:<\/em>
- Texts included Augustine: Confessions<\/em>; Dante: Inferno<\/em>; Machiavelli: The Prince<\/em>; Descartes: Meditations<\/em>; Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author<\/em>; Herr: Dispatches<\/em>; Fitzgerald: Fire in the Lake;<\/em> Einstein and Freud: \u201cWhy War?\u201d letters<\/em>.<\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- The Middle Class in the Nineteenth Century:<\/strong> Professors Keith Nelson, Meredith Lee, Guy Sircello. <\/em>
- Texts included Hobsbawm: Age of Revolution<\/em>; Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France<\/em>; the French Revolution<\/em> \u201cDeclaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen\u201d<\/em>; Goethe: Sorrows of Young Werther<\/em>; Balzac: Eug\u00e9nie Grandet<\/em>; Ibsen: A Doll\u2019s House<\/em>; Zola: Germinal<\/em>; Marx: Communist Manifesto<\/em>; Engels: Condition of the Working Class in England<\/em>. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
- Violence: Domestic, Racial, Imperial.<\/strong> Professors Spencer Olin, Ermanno Bencivenga, John Rowe, Michael P. Clark. <\/em>
- Texts included Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange<\/em>; Hobbes: Leviathan<\/em>; Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality<\/em>; Lorenz: On Aggression;<\/em> Twain: Huckleberry Finn<\/em>; Conrad: Heart of Darkness<\/em>; Walker: The Color Purple<\/em>; Tuttle: Race Riot<\/em>; Gandhi: \u201cNon-Violence\u201d;<\/em> Brecher: Strike!;<\/em> Kafka: Metamorphosis<\/em>; Olin and Nelson: Why War?<\/em><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
How cool is that?
<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe course of study and texts were diverse and wide-ranging, to say the least. Even 33 years later I have fond memories of wading through St. Augustine and Machiavelli — reading about the riotous sans-culottes<\/em> in Hobsbawm\u2019s dramatic account of the French Revolution, Goethe\u2019s pathetic Werner shooting himself, Zola\u2019s bleak and angry French coal-miners, Kafka\u2019s Gregor Samsa waking up as a hideous bug, and the wild wild Clockwork Orange<\/em> of Stanley Kubrick. I still have several of the books I bought for that course in my personal library. I must have moved a dozen times since college but I still have those books. Like a turtle and its shell I have dragged these books with me wherever I have gone. I would not part with them.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd looking back at this reading list I recognize that some of these books I have read several times since, but I did not remember that I first read them in my Humanities Core class as a freshman until I looked back today at the official syllabus. Other authors, like Marx and Engels and Freud and Gandhi, I went on to read many secondary books about. Many of the \u201cbig ideas\u201d presented here I have thought about ever since I was an 18 year old college student in that class and was first introduced to them.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat I most admired — and found so rare in college — was the interdisciplinary nature of the UCI Humanities Core class. By designing the curriculum so that big themes and ideas were examined both from historical perspectives as well as through literature, the learning was by design going to go so much deeper — such deep learning stuck with me over time. I can still remember whole passages of that class decades later. The ideas presented in 1985-1986 never left me.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nMy mother died in late 1996 from cancer and I moved back to Orange County briefly to live with my mourning father. We went over together to UCI in the winter of 1997 and sat in on a few Humanities Core classes after I suggested it. Much older than the kids in the audience sitting around us, we flew below the radar and pretended to be college students, believe it or not. In such a large lecture hall, how would the professor even have known? I remember reading the assigned book Tarzan of the Apes<\/em> by Edgar Rice Burroughs. African American professor Lindon Barrett then asked the class if we had liked it. I remember looking around and seeing what seemed like many students in the mostly Asian American audience raising their hand that they had indeed liked the novel. Visibly embarrassed, Professor Barrett then went on to explain why we should have been offended by the underlying racism of the book. At any rate, my father and I both enjoyed the Humanities Core lectures we attended.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nI went on later to design my own interdisciplinary American studies class. As a teacher myself I tried to carry on the practice of twining literature and history into one class to present \u201cbig ideas\u201d — important themes that show the complexity of life through individual literary characters who operate in the context of larger historical forces. It allows all involved — teachers and students — to hit that \u201csweet spot\u201d of deep learning when literature and history are integrated together to portray the richness of the human experience. Interdisciplinary learning allows for the synthesis of diverse learning, rather than for isolated \u201csnap shot\u201d pictures of relatively superficial learning.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy don\u2019t all secondary schools and universities have such \u201ccore\u201d classes where English and social studies instructors \u201cteam teach\u201d? Where the two (or even more!) teachers seek to achieve a synthesized whole out of separate disciplines when looking at the same phenomenon?
<\/p>\n\n\n\nMy experience has been that it requires a degree of coordination between different teachers and academic departments that is hard to achieve. There is no good pedagogical reason against interdisciplinary learning but there are bureaucratic ones. The History and English departments are too often like separate fiefdoms and the teachers don\u2019t know each other well. Or they don\u2019t want to cooperate and work together. Or the academic disciplines are \u201cturf conscious\u201d — jealous of their territory being infringed upon by other departments. Or they can\u2019t be bothered to collaborate — it requires too much time and energy. They have other priorities. The learning would go deeper if everyone planned and taught together with intention, but interdisciplinary courses only happen if institutions choose to create and support them. The norm is just to have each department and teacher do their own thing. But the learning suffers. I remember asking one history teacher why he did not collaborate towards integrating his class content with the English teacher across the hall teaching the same students. He told me, \u201cWe don\u2019t have that kind of working relationship.\u201d<\/em> In other words: we don\u2019t get along<\/em>. The students consequently missed out on an opportunity to learn in a deeper and more multifaceted way. Any synthesis of learning they will have to make happen themselves without help from a\u00a0teacher.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis is what happened too often with me. I remember taking a whole slew of single courses in college that, while interesting in themselves, did not build the one on the other. They were isolated, unrelated islands of learning in a trip that too often was not going fixedly in one clear direction. In the end, I had an undergraduate \u201cPolitical Science with an Emphasis in International Relations\u201d degree.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut the Humanities Core at UC Irvine was the best class I ever took.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nI am still thankful over three decades later.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nThank you, UCI History Professor Keith Williams<\/a>, for helping to make it happen.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- Texts included Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange<\/em>; Hobbes: Leviathan<\/em>; Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality<\/em>; Lorenz: On Aggression;<\/em> Twain: Huckleberry Finn<\/em>; Conrad: Heart of Darkness<\/em>; Walker: The Color Purple<\/em>; Tuttle: Race Riot<\/em>; Gandhi: \u201cNon-Violence\u201d;<\/em> Brecher: Strike!;<\/em> Kafka: Metamorphosis<\/em>; Olin and Nelson: Why War?<\/em><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
- Violence: Domestic, Racial, Imperial.<\/strong> Professors Spencer Olin, Ermanno Bencivenga, John Rowe, Michael P. Clark. <\/em>
- Texts included Hobsbawm: Age of Revolution<\/em>; Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France<\/em>; the French Revolution<\/em> \u201cDeclaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen\u201d<\/em>; Goethe: Sorrows of Young Werther<\/em>; Balzac: Eug\u00e9nie Grandet<\/em>; Ibsen: A Doll\u2019s House<\/em>; Zola: Germinal<\/em>; Marx: Communist Manifesto<\/em>; Engels: Condition of the Working Class in England<\/em>. <\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
- The Middle Class in the Nineteenth Century:<\/strong> Professors Keith Nelson, Meredith Lee, Guy Sircello. <\/em>
- Texts included Augustine: Confessions<\/em>; Dante: Inferno<\/em>; Machiavelli: The Prince<\/em>; Descartes: Meditations<\/em>; Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author<\/em>; Herr: Dispatches<\/em>; Fitzgerald: Fire in the Lake;<\/em> Einstein and Freud: \u201cWhy War?\u201d letters<\/em>.<\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
- Knowledge and Choice:<\/strong> Professors Gerasimos Santas, Linda Georgianna, James Chiampi, Kenneth Bailes:<\/em>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/rjgeib.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/humcorecourseofstudy.jpg\")
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