Prof. Ethan Hollander (Associate Professor of Political Science), presented at the 2016 Ides of August on his sabbatical work, and also his experiences as a student during sabbatical (in Prof. Jane Hardy’s Modern Linguistics course, and several online courses). Below, he describes his experiences, and speaks to the value of seeing the classroom again from a student’s perspective.
Confucius said that “There are three paths to wisdom: Reflection, which is highest; imitation, which is easiest; and experience, which is bitterest.” I’m not sure if a year of sabbatical experience cured or enhanced my bitterness. But it did give me ample opportunity for imitation and reflection, and this is my report on the wisdom acquired thereby.
I spent part of my sabbatical as a student of Professor Jane Hardy’s course on Modern Linguistics (MLL 122). My only expectation was to satisfy a curiosity I had in the topic since college. In practice, the experience did much more. If you’ve got the time and you’re open to new ideas, taking a colleague’s course can be a valuable thing indeed.
First, Jane’s course provided me with a catalog of methods, ‘tricks’, and “good practices” for teaching and learning. By the time we start our teaching careers, many of us have spent at least a couple years buried in an archive, laboratory, or simply behind a computer screen. Our best classroom teachers – the models we would imitate – have, by that time, receded in our memories. For most professors taking leave, it’s been at least a decade since we sat in someone else’s class. (And besides, at the time, we probably cared more about learning the message than emulating the messenger!) In any case, sitting in on a colleague’s class provides ample opportunity for imitation, emulation, and theft of approaches, techniques, and habits that are rusty, overlooked, or forgotten. Taken individually, many of these practices are almost too petty to list. (Jane did things with Canvas that I didn’t know Canvas could do; and her practice of asking students if they needed to use the restroom before handing out a midterm exam is as helpful as it is simple.) But in the aggregate, these seemingly simple lessons represent time well spent.
But there’s also something to the reminder of what it’s like to learn – of how frustrating and even painful it can be to master difficult material at someone else’s behest and on someone else’s schedule. Note taking is hard. Textbooks are boring. Exams are menacing. And learning isn’t always fun. Students may not always share our infectious enthusiasm for the arcane minutiae of academic discourse. Even the best of us – I learned from watching someone who really is – are occasionally unclear, incoherent, or just boring. Taking a colleague’s course – and I mean “taking”, not “sitting in on” – is a reminder that, even when done well, teaching and learning are difficult. We would do well to bring a fresh awareness of that difficulty to our classrooms and to our profession. Nothing will inspire more sincere empathy with our students than being one of them for a while, sitting on the other side of the lectern and seeing the classroom from their perspective.
Sabbatical also gave me the opportunity to take a number of MOOCs – these Massive Open Online Courses we’ve heard so much about. I must admit that at first, I wasn’t worried. I didn’t know there was anything to be worried about. I was sure that nothing – not even fascinating, slickly produced videos taught by the world’s greatest teachers and taken, for free, from the comfort of your own couch – could rival the serious, scholarly, authentic (and expensive) experience of a small liberal arts college. What they did was fake. What we did was real. Scientiae et Virtuti. Truth and Beauty. And all that.
But now sometimes, I wonder if I was too quick to dismiss them. The courses were good. Very good. And they were seductive. Before actually taking a MOOC, I was an academic snob. I passed off these imposters as cheap imitations. Like Cinderella’s step-sisters, I didn’t realize that these unkempt, inelegant, cheap reproductions could threaten us for the glass slipper. And maybe they won’t. But if a liberal arts college adds real value to an educational experience, we have to make sure that potential students, their parents, and their employers know about it. We have to be clear about what our ‘added value’ really is. And we have to meet the standards for excellence that we profess. Let’s not be caught flat-footed.
