Teach a class
If you got to teach a class, what would you teach? Not "have" to teach a class, got to teach. Captive audience, wisdom of (your) ages.
I’ve got to design a syllabus for a semester-long hypothetical class. Two years ago I picked comparative physiology as my subject. Today? I’m drawing a blank. So, talking myself through it, I reasoned: you should only teach what you already know. What do I know?
umm…
I know a lot. But what? What sort of knowledge that’s not a cookbook class, like human anatomy? It’s so structured I won’t learn much designing a syllabus for it. Of the other stuff I know, it’s both fragmented and integrated - bits and pieces of a huge diversity of topics, scattered around all manner of tangential information and experiences, all lumped into the integrated sum of my brain. One semester, 13 weeks, 26 lectures, and 3 tests? What do I know that fits that format?
I think what I’ll do is take a cook-book class, like anatomy (which I utterly love) and recast it. Why is it so difficult for students to wrap their heads around a class like anatomy? They learn more than that, and on the fly without effort, in other areas of their life in less time. It’s not the mass of the content. It’s conceptual development, cognitive hierarchy, setting the stage and ordering the players and dialogue to make a coherent and memorable play.
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