I need to start of with an explanation of the title. Over the years I've learned that I'm happiest when I've entirely lost my sense of self because I'm so into whatever the activity is that my attention is fully focused on it. Depth of focus is a source of joy, but one I'm only aware of after the fact. Were I back in college, I'd be talking about coming down from a high, which is when self-awareness returns.
I only teach the one class. That probably matters in what I say. Also, I've been having issues with insomnia the last month or two. When it's a few nights in a row with inadequate sleep, you feel you're a wreck and not up to doing much at all. That's the way I was going into class yesterday. Yet somehow after the session started the feeling of exhaustion disappeared. Then I really got into it.
The first day of class I had the students rearrange the furniture and sit in a horseshoe, with the backs of their tablet armchairs near the perimeter of the room. We had a few too many students to do this well, and enrollments have increased some since the first day, so I have not returned to that arrangement since, yet I believe there was a derivative benefit from doing it. Because the course is on The Economics of Organizations, I told them we were doing a re-org of the class. We then went through a bit of deconstruction on the the benefits and limitations of each seating arrangement. I made a point of noting that in the horseshoe each student could see the faces of all the other students, although that is literally not true. The students with their backs to the same wall can't see the faces of each other. A round table would be better than the horseshoe, for this very reason. But the horseshoe is better able to accommodate the number of students we had, because it takes advantage of the full perimeter of the room, and to enable all of them to see me. I should add that I've been sitting on top of the desk at the front of the room adjacent to the technology cabinet, because there is no chair behind that desk. When I tested technology in the room a few weeks ago there was such a chair. Under the circumstances, you do what you can do, though not what you don't like to do. I am very uncomfortable sitting in one of those tablet armchairs, so don't opt for that alternative.
A sense that discussion was important was further reinforced by surveying the students after class about how the session went. The students get a few bonus points for completing the survey. Those who do (about half of those in attendance) should get the message that a good and effective discussion is an ideal that the class as a whole should aspire to. I had done this sort of thing back in 2009 when I taught a seminar for the Campus Honors Program. I have never previously tried it for a regular class. I was driven to try it again not to promote discussion in the class, but rather to encourage attendance. In last year's class attendance was abysmal and class discussion among those who did show up was also not that strong. This time around I have been getting students to sign in before each class session, the old fashioned way via putting their initials next to their name on a class roster, rather than with technology. I've kept up with the sign in and the after class surveys in our subsequent sessions. I'm taking a wait and see attitude as to whether that practice should continue. But for now, I think it is more important for the message it delivers than from the information garnered in the survey.
Preparing for class when the goal is to have discussion with a lot of class participation turns out to be a lot like the prewriting one does when crafting a blog post like this one. But it is unlike how one prepares for doing a straight lecture, where the focus is on the subject matter only. I do have a PowerPoint presentation for each of the early class sessions. (Here is the one for the first session. In slideshow mode it plays automatically with musical accompaniment. There is also extensive commentary in the notes pane.) The expectation (use of this word is meant to convey the ideal student behavior rather than the predicted student behavior) is that students will view these presentations before the live class class session and then be ready for discussion. Ahead of the first class I had emailed each student with relevant class information, including the link to that presentation.
Preparation for the first class session is different from preparation for subsequent sessions, where the matter of connectedness of the present topic to what came before is important. So the sequencing of ideas requires careful consideration. Textbooks provide their own sequencing but for the the first two weeks we're not relying on the text and instead discussing some seminal work that provides foundation for the rest of the course. Last Thursday we discussed publicly spirited behavior within the organization - being a good citizen, what Akerlof refers to as labor markets with partial gift exchange, and what we at university campuses call collegiality. Yesterday we discussed his evil twin, Skippy. In economics we use the term opportunism to describe this type of behavior in general and then have other language to discuss more specific forms of opportunistic behavior. I learned from last year's class, where I introduced the term in a prompt for a blog post, that many students were unfamiliar with it. Their posts considered it to mean "having opportunities" without engaging at all in the ethical dimension. So yesterday I made a point to define the term during the live class session, emphasizing that opportunism has an element of "screwing others" to it.
A big element of teaching is getting students to make personal connections to the theoretical ideas they are exposed to in class. As a result, a lot of my planning before class comes in asking where those personal connections might be found. For yesterday's class, a very matter of fact example presented itself. As it turns out I teach two different sections that are cross-listed. While my course is aimed at Econ majors, an upper level undergraduate class, Masters students sometime take it. They register for a different section of the course. (Why? I don't know. It's just the way things go.) As it turns out the undergraduate section is at capacity, while the graduate section, with much lower capacity to begin with, has a few seats left. For the last 5 days or so, I haven't experienced the normal adds and drops that I am used to getting from prior offerings of the class. So I wondered if there was some overall capacity issue across courses like mine which might explain what I was observing.
I queried the students about this by asking how crowded their other Econ courses were. They reported the classes were just as crowded as mine. We then segued into a particular form of student opportunism - students registering for more classes than they actually intend to take. One student openly admitted to the practice and then several students confirmed it was quite common to do. When there are no capacity limits on classes, the practice is merely self-insurance against not liking a course; better to sample all the class at the beginning than to pick up a course on day 10 of the semester without having previously attended a class session. It is having binding capacity constraints on classes that makes the practice opportunistic. Then the over registering precludes other students who might want to add the class from doing so. The students could readily see the harm done to those who might add the class so it offered a good illustration of the issues.
We kept to the issue but then segued to whether there was also faculty opportunism that explained the outcome. In particular, why aren't these classes scheduled in larger rooms, to accommodate more students? We talked about about predicting demand for these courses based on enrollments from prior offerings of the same classes. We also briefly considered how many students are Econ majors, but neither the students nor I knew the facts on this. Then we talked about the faculty predilection for teaching in the same building where they have their offices. The Economics department office is in David Kinley Hall as are Econ faculty offices. Not surprisingly, our class also meets in DKH. There are a few larger DKH classrooms. I really don't know if they are scheduled at the same time or not. I simply assumed they were already in use and asked - what about moving some Econ classes to larger classrooms in some other building? Why doesn't that happen? I believe the students got the message. We concluded by asking whether students are inadvertently trained to be opportunistic in this manner by experiencing being closed out of classes when they are freshmen and sophomores. A couple of students verified this to be the case.
During the live session there is quite a lot going on cognitively for me. The aim is to keep the class discussion moving in a good direction, to be responsive to students who raise interesting points or who challenge what I say, and to have an eye for how the sequencing of questions should happen within the overall discussion. It is very easy to get wrapped up in all of that. Then, too, I'm beginning to know the students. It is much easier for me to be aware of a student who repeatedly answers my questions or who sends me an email that requires a follow up thread. These little bits of personal connection add to the intensity of the live session. There is obligation to do as well as possible, because these are people whom I already know. I want them to benefit from knowing me.
I used to be able to get lost in thought quite regularly while writing a blog post. I find that happens less now. Multiprocessing surely is one big reason why. Another is that I have fewer prior intense experiences that I need to reflect on and work through. When I was the campus Assistant CIO for Ed Tech, those experiences were abundant. So I may be more conscious now about teaching being the place where this getting lost happens, though I've been well aware for at least 30 years that teaching creates an adrenaline rush for me.
There remains the question of whether one can make some identification between getting lost in this way and what Csikszentmihalyi has termed Flow or what Maslow and others call self-actualization. In my mind getting lost would be flow if these periods where there is lack of self-awareness always proved to be productive in some way. I'm sure that sometimes they are. I wonder, however, if other times things come to naught, where while it is ongoing I am deceived to believe the activity is productive which is why the bubble doesn't burst then and there, and which otherwise would lead to self-awareness returning.
Unable to resolve that puzzle now, it is good to have a sense of teaching as a place that produces a losing oneself sort of experience. That gives a reason to keep at it.
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