Thirty is the number I have somewhat arbitrarily taken as my limit number for Introduction to Russian Culture for the coming semester: ten artifacts/episodes from “Old” Russian culture, ten artifacts/episodes from “imperial” Russian culture, and another ten from the (again rather arbitrarily designated) post-1917 to the present “period.”
I say arbitrary, but there’s an organizational reason for this number as well, as I teach the class twice a week in 75-minute segments, and in the past while I thought I could do three 20-minute segments (meaning three items per class), I was never completely happy with that. It always felt like we were rushing a bit. So two per class, with time to settle in, discussion, “practice” with the concepts involved, invocation of current events and how they measure up against whatever we’re looking at, and a 15-week semester. So thirty.
I am feeling good about this organization, but I admit that I have felt good about past organizations that have not worked out as well as I expected. My hopes are a bit higher this time in part because I feel like I have a much better sense of who the students are now, what they expect, and what they’re capable of. It’s a mixed group, general undergrads, but also a handful of students either taking Russian or with some part of their heritage in either Russia or Ukraine. A good portion of the class in recent years have been from the business school, satisfying a general education requirement by taking something that is also of interest.
The idea I stumbled upon is this can be a bit like a foreign language class in which one provides only the amount of material one thinks the students can actually master. Thirty items is what I believe they can master. I’m not positive about this. Maybe it should be more like twenty, or even ten, but I there are items that I would feel bad if we didn’t get to in such a class, so that is another sort of limit case: what would I feel embarrassed about their not having learned something about by the end?
It’s true that this sort of looks a bit like a cultural literacy course, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing (it’s a gen ed course, after all), and there is always the “so what” question in this kind of exercise, also known as the “what’s at stake” question, or, in this case, “Why is this important, significant, worth remembering?”
This is of course the more important question, not “What is this?” but “Why is this important for understanding what we’re learning about?” It’s the question I will ask them for each of the thirty items.
###
Russell Scott Valentino 