Why teaching can harm the planet

This has been the first week of the Cambridge term and I have been launching one of my favourite lecture courses. This is a series on “The History of Roman Britain” for third years (Part II students, in our jargon).

Despite the title it isn’t mainly about archaeology. I have to confess that I retired from proper “dirt” archaeology when I was 21 – when the pleasure of spending a fortnight in a field, sharing tents (and more) with a load of other late-adolescents and consuming vast  quantities of alcohol suddenly seemed outweighed by the hard work, the hangovers and the sheer discomfort of a soggy campsite after a week of rain.

The course does include a bit of dirt. But it is more literally about the History of Roman Britain…and how it has been represented from the Roman world right up to now. Tacitus rubs shoulders with Asterix, Cassius Dio with Manda Scott and Rudyard Kipling.

One of the highlights is watching some well chosen clips from the dreadful Channel 5 drama-doc of Boudicca made a few years ago, in which the Romans are cast as some ersatz American, Halliburton-style, corporate capitalists smooth talking the noble (but dim) Brits into parting with their valuable natural resources. Actually not a bad analogy, some of us may think.

“Launching” a course demands a lot more than just writing the lectures and checking that the relevant books are in the library (new books on Roman Britain come out almost every week). There are documents of all sorts to be prepared, boxes to be ticked, risk assessments to be carried out.

Another highlight of the term will be a Saturday visit to the Museum of London to look at the Roman displays and talk to the curator about the practicalities of museum organization. (The moment when the students discover how much a museum case actually costs is always a good one. . . ) But, in order for a few academics to join forces with a group of responsible 21 year olds in a museum 50 miles away, we have to go through all kinds of health and safety procedures, listing their email addresses, checking mobile phone numbers, uncovering their secret disabilities. No – no-one does this for them when they go clubbing, but this is education and different rules apply.

But at the start of term, the real work is getting the “handouts” together.  In fact, over the last week, I suspect that more time has been spent by me and my fellow course organizers – not to mention a long-suffering secretary – slaving over a hot xerox machine, than thinking about the intellectual point of the course.

We get judged on our “lecture handouts”. Mine are usually very much below standard. One sheet of passages from ancient texts, xeroxed, stuck and pasted and re-xeroxed – plus some of the best or most out of the way bibliography, and a couple of fuzzy images – is my norm. I don’t usually do badly on student evaluations, but on “quality of handouts” I am afraid I often score  “nul points”.

This term I am, however, turning over a new leaf… with loads of beautifully typed (by me) bibliographies, course descriptions etc etc . I counted up that at the first lecture we had handed round to the 50 or so students taking the course, more than 1000 sheets of paper altogether (oh yes – at a large font size, just in case there’s a partially-sighted person taking the course; that’s another rule).

Pretty soon, I guess, we’ll be doing all this electronically and running course message boards, blogs and such like. But until then the forests of the world are underpinning the education of the young.

Comments

[Zareen P. Bharucha]

Lots of students don't rely solely on their handouts throughout the course: and the ones that do, usually fail. The idea of a handout is to provide an overview of what happened in class - what happened to taking notes yourself!? Lecturers very often say - don't bother taking notes, just listen to me, it's all on the handout. I can't think of a single thing that kills concentration in class like this one - it just MAKES you lazy. You end up doodling on the back of a notebook. Scribbling nonsense on the handout, filing it and never looking at it again (no offense to those that do - I know I should read mine more, but I'm sorry, I prefer my own notes.) So maybe online notes or .ppts ARE a better idea. When they're posted AFTER a class, students know that just printing them out is never going to give them a good idea of everything that was said. Students would be less inclined to skip class (or doze through it) and the forests of the world could get on with Being.

[Oliver Nicholson]

We regularly have impressed on us that the course syllabus has the force of a legal contract with our students and that we need to include important information such as what we will do if we catch them cheating and the heartening intelligence that an A is better than a B, which in turn is better than a C. It is hard to bury this sort of stuff in more palatable information and so prevent it having a 'chilling effect' on those we teach. The United States - a government of lawyers, not of men.

[Monica]

Nicholas: It is, indeed, very well-established in English. The OED accepts both "syllabi" and "syllabuses" as correct pluralizations. "Syllabi" seemed easier to type. But yes, it is quite a muddle.

[k]

There's something to be said for a virtual learning environment. It's possible to provide access to a wider range of material and students with visual handicaps etc. can reformat the material in a way that works for them (white print on black, cream paper, preferred font, etc.) I don't know if the electricity used for computing and for students' printing (as opposed to xeroxing) saves the planet; there are problems with power cuts, and some minimal paper handouts may be necessary but I'd go for the VLE any time, especially since it's so easy to link to good web resources (such as pictures, complete texts, etc.).

But even if it saves the planet, it doesn't save time. Nothing does.

[Nicholas]

Syllabi? Hmm. Seems to be a well-established form in English. But Cicero mentioned (already plural) sittybas (or σιττύβας) to Atticus, which got misread as syllabus. So syllabi can be seen as a pseudo-Latin plural born of a muddle.

[Monica]

Nicholas: The course syllabi are mostly just dates on which we had class and homework assignments (which is generally a lie anyway, as most of the time these change). Often, they outline an instructor's policies so that students won't ask them ten times and so that students can't claim that they "didn't know."

We still take our own notes with paper and pen. ;-)

[Neil Murphy]

Don't understand this; haven't you people heard of email, or image scanning and optical character recognition? Given that all students have laptops these days why do they need paper at all? (unless they choose to print it of course).

I did a thesis at university on Roman Britain, specifically the period of the Roman withdrawal, roping in the Arthur legends for good measure. Long time ago but fascinating.

Enjoyed the research, and my friend enjoyed typing it all up in exchange for copious quantities of alcohol the night before it was due to be handed in.

I suppose everything I 'knew' has been superseded by modern research.

[Nicholas (BA Natural Sciences 1964)]

Course syllabus, Monica, course syllabus? Luxury! When I was a lad, we got no handouts whatsoever. Not one page. Took our own notes. (Yeah, we did have paper and pens.) The lectures I remember most were Sidney Allen on the pronunciation of Latin, (later published as Vox Latina, of course). And Russian for scientists. Main lecture theatre at Lensfield Road packed for the first. Down to a dozen by the fifth.
As for museum cases, since Rothstein's website coyly says "Preise auf Anfrage", my guess is £25000.

[Xjy]

Come to think of it, my daughter's name is Boudicca (Boudi for short). That's her British name. Her Finnish name is Kirke, after the Greek goddess who gave Odysseus the key to the underworld and turned his men into swine.
And of course, two favourite mustsees in London are the statue and the museum exhibit. "That's you, darling!" "Ten thousand! Really??"...

[postblogger]

Well, I'll leave the price guessing to a better commenter than me. However, in the light of the fuss currently being made about air travel, how about carbon offsets for degrees?

My guess is that medics would have to plant the most trees...

[Monica]

I actually did have classes in undergrad where the handouts were also put up on a blog (using blogger). Other courses substituted some assignment hand outs with a message board run through the school.

It also seems like handouts are a bigger expectation in the UK than in the US (at least where I was). I thought you had very lovely and very useful handouts, but I didn't realize that was actually the expectation to have so many.

Many of my undergrad professors gave out a course syllabus (as little as two pages) at the beginning of the course and nothing else. But I don't think their course evaluations had any specific rating area on handouts!

[Mary]

Postblogger is not correct..but I'm not going to give it away quite so quickly.

[postblogger]

Oh, go on then. How much DOES a museum case cost? My guess, based on a coffin-sized box with a couple of glass sides would be, I dunno, £500+? Maybe £1000, tops.

My favourite example of museum case arranging, incidentally, is at the Ashmolean in Oxford, where the lower, visible-to-seven-year-olds-on-school-trips shelves have Greek vases showing scenes from Classical mythology, but the upper, visible-to-anybody-over-5-feet shelves have vases detailing various outlandish sexual anatomy and practices.

Goodness, I learnt so much...