Next year…

It’s come time to decide how to handle next year.

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The original vision for the course was to grow it large (to 400+ students). But I began to wonder if it might be better to go for the elite boutique market. We’re trying to make the leaders of the future better consumers of science. Shouldn’t we go for the Honors students, the ordained leaders of the future? A class of <20 highly motivated Honors students would be a joy — and easy. 
But after discussing this with Mary Beth Williams, the new Eberly College of Science Dean for Undergraduate Education (and guest instructor on this course), I began to wonder.  My blog post on our discussion drew some interesting and even moving responses, one of which got posted.  A student even took me aside and told me: if you’d already gone elite, I would not have been able to do this class.

So here’s how I see it now. (1) Mary Beth’s arguments are very sound. (2) I’m in this game for a challenge. It doesn’t get more challenging than teaching science to large numbers of students who have been turned off science by K-12 education. (3) I’m in this business to make a difference. How much difference can I make to <20 well-schooled kids already on the receiving end of boutique education?
So I’ve decided to forgo Honors teaching. Honors students are very, very welcome, of course. But they’ll have to share the class room with a cross section of students. And I will stop moaning about the unmotivated students I apparently can’t affect. Instead, I will  focus on the students who really are a joy: the lively, funny, engaged self-improvers that this course attracts in spades. 
The Dean’s office worked magic today, and extracted from the PSU system a classroom that can handle 178 students for Fall 2012.  I’ll hold as many places open for Freshmen as I can. And let’s do the experiment. Can SC200 work at 178? If yes, 400 will work. If no, back to 100 for Fall 2013. Not 20.
Game, Mary Beth.

2 thoughts on “Next year…

  1. MATTHEW S HOFFMAN

    I hope this decision culminates in the Austerlitz of your passion for teaching. (Not to say you that a potential Waterloo would then be on the horizon for you!)

    Often, in that aforementioned battle, images are conjured up of how the Garde Impériale rose out that sun soaked fog on some foreign field and surprised the Russo-Austrian army for the grand finale. The small elite gets the credit for the heroics, I suppose, but it is the general army, the regulars, that carry the weight of war on their shoulders.

    Some may be conscripted against their will (for the credits), others may commit desertion, but overall the main force will stick it out and march on having been taught how to fight ignorance with the weapons of science. A Coalition against Climate Change may crop up here and a Coalition for Creationism forms there, but I can’t help but feel arming the general population, rather than the elites, will have the greatest effect in this constant struggle with an incapacity for science.

    I believe this can change the landscape.

    Reply

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