Jim Amidon — It’s early on a Tuesday morning and I’m gazing blankly at my daily schedule that lists an endless series of meetings with visits to five classrooms dotted between.
The classroom visits are part of the Public Affairs and Marketing Office’s all-campus photo shoot. We first tried this two years ago, essentially choosing a week (or two) and inviting ourselves to as many different classes taught by as many different professors as possible.
See our growing number of photo albums: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. And check back for new additions through next week.
Two years ago we logged about 3,000 photos from about 45 classes. This year, while we won’t get in every professor’s class, we hope to photograph about 70 by the time we’re all done.
The five I shot on Tuesday (and four on Monday) are part of 20 or so I have scheduled over the next several days.
Back to Tuesday morning: My mind is racing with thoughts of all the work I’m missing by going to class (strange thought at a college, huh?). I trudge through the Fuller Arboretum with my 20-some pound camera bag up to the Fine Arts Center. When I get to the Theater Green Room in the basement, there are three guys playing video games projected on a large screen.
The room is pretty dark, and of course I’m worried that I won’t get any decent shots in the near darkness with flickering video game light.
Freshmen file in and toss their backpacks on the floor. The video game continues. A few minutes later, Professor Mike Abbott comes in, says hello to the students, and stands at a computer station dialing in posts from the Moodle site. He doesn’t notice that I’m there.
I come to find out that Professor Abbott has his students do almost all of their work online through the Moodle system — it figures, this IS a Freshman Tutorial about the narrative of video games, a high-tech universe in which our students live… and, come to find out, learn!
Minutes later, the gaming stops and the professor strides to the other end of the classroom and begins to ask the students about their latest assignment.
Assignment? They had been asked to play a new video game (maybe a Beta version, not sure) and to analyze the narrative of the game and how both the features of the game and the narrative itself compared to previous versions of the same game.
Unlike some of the classrooms I visited on Monday, the conversation was electric and passionate. I think on Monday, the students saw me, saw the camera, and clammed up. Not the freshmen in Professor Abbott’s class. They jabbered on continuously, speaking a language completely foreign to me.
“I shot that guy,” one said. “I blew up the bomb,” said another, as the students talked about the choices they made as they worked through the game. The discussion was open, honest, and raw. And I loved every minute of it.
At some point, I dropped the camera and thought to myself: This might be the perfect Freshman Tutorial subject. Imagine taking something the freshmen love (video games) and asking them to probe deeply into the subject matter, ask questions, understand not just how the games work, but the stories they tell.
Freshman Tutorials are designed to introduce Wabash to what we do and how we do it — take a subject, get as much primary source information as possible, study and analyze that information, discuss it at an intellectual level, and write about it in clear, concise papers.
If you start with political theories of the 1800s, you may have a hard time igniting the passion. Start with something like video games (or baseball or survival horror, as some professors teach), and the students dive in with the energy and passion necessary not just to learn, but to learn the “Wabash way.”
I left the Tutorial to spend some time with James Gross in his scenography class, where students were building models of theater sets, many choosing very different styles. Each was working independently trying to figure out scale, size, and shape. Professor Gross walked the room, leaning in here and there to help the guys understand what he does so brilliantly for Wabash theater productions.
Minutes later, I’m in a tiny music classroom with two senior students and Professor Vanessa Rogers. I often mention to prospective students (and I’ve written about it, too) that at Wabash, it’s not uncommon to have classes with a half-dozen students or fewer. This was a classic example of how that’s not hype, it’s real and wonderful.
I ended my Tuesday on the familiar third floor of Center Hall in Professor Marc Hudson’s creative writing poetry class. The guys write poems and submit them for “workshopping,” which means they read their poems aloud, the other students study them, and they talk about word choice, phrasing, structure, and beauty.
It was a great way to end the day — and to keep me fired up about the other dozen or so classes I’ll visit over the next several days.
