This semester’s Introduction to Russian Culture is smaller by choice than the last several years, as we did not have a graduate student who could teach it with me. So I lowered the cap to 40 (from the usual 60) and have been teaching it solo. This, I admit, is easier from the standpoint of organizing since I don’t need to consult with anyone. It’s not quite as fun, however, since I don’t get to consult with anyone.
I also removed the attendance requirement, perhaps unwisely, but added two features. One I got from a colleague in history, who has used “ordering quizzes” in her classes for many years, to good effect, she says. The idea is simply that asking students to memorize dates seems rather silly since one can look them up anytime online, and anyway they’re not really the essential thing. But knowing that X happened before Y is important, as when you know that, you can begin to come up with ideas about causality and narrative. So I added three of those, one for each of the three segments of the class.
The other is the time-honored pop-quiz. If you’ve let me know beforehand that you won’t be in class on a day when there happens to be a pop-quiz, I’ll let you retake it. Otherwise, no dice. There will be six of these, and I will drop the lowest score. For some students, this will be the 0 they got when they skipped class on a day when there was a pop-quiz and they didn’t let me know beforehand.
The combination of these two things seems to have changed the way students listen and take notes (notes!) in class. They do both more, and they ask questions to clarify when things happened, who was involved, whether this preceded that, and so on. I’m not sure about deep learning, but it’s not straightforward memorization, and my sense at this point is that there’s some more critical thinking going on among the middle group of students. Those at the top are always good. The small group at the bottom who don’t really care still don’t.
The struggling students still struggle, but I’ve given them and everyone else something concrete to practice. We did this with the first of the ordering quizzes twice last week, where I gave them three groups of six items each, asked them to order the items in class, then we talked about their answers. I asked on the second day we did this, “Is this helping?” and got some enthusiastic affirmations.
The three ordering quizzes will be cumulative. By they end, they will be ordering things through approximately 1000 years of Russian cultural history. This I find rather cool. Some of the students seem to think so, too.
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Russell Scott Valentino 