Memories
This Empty Classroom is Full of Sounds
Do you hear them?
My first classroom as a teacher was 50 years ago. It reined in 44 sixth graders at St. Johns Elementary School in Burlington, Iowa. Today, it is five stalls in a church parking lot.
Fortunately, my last classroom still exists.
For three decades, it was mine until I retired from Luther College in 2018.
Not only mine, of course, but it was in the building, Koren Hall, that housed my office and department, Political Science.
The Registrar’s Office favored me because I loved early morning classes — demand and supply lines for classrooms crossed midday. So, the early bird got the worm to ease the primetime room shortage.
8 a.m. Monday through Friday. Typically, I taught Terrorism and Democracy on MWF and Global Politics on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Usually, all the seats were taken. A small percentage of students loved early morning. First-light classes freed up the rest of the day.
Who would want to start the day with Terrorism? You’d be surprised. I was. I created this course the summer after Al Qaeda attacked America on September 11, 2001, thinking I would teach it once. Word spread and it became a go-to choice. Of course, Al Qaeda morphed into ISIS, so the subject stayed current. Unfortunately.
When I stepped back into this classroom a few days ago and took my usual pole position, sitting on the left edge of the front of the desk, facing the phantom students, I thought Eduardo Galeano was right. Galeano was a Uruguayan journalist and novelist who wrote this about empty soccer stadiums.
Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators. (Source)
This empty classroom was the same.
Full of sounds.
And memories.
Of how much I had changed as a teacher.
The mellow murmuring before class.
I would usually walk into the classroom about 20 minutes before class started. That’s when students would start arriving. I wanted to see the room fill up and, more importantly, if they would talk with each other. A low murmur was a good sign. That meant they were comfortable in this space and with each other.
Typically, on the first day, before class, I heard few voices but my own, “Good morning, welcome to Political Science 335.” Unless they were sitting next to a friend, no one talked — the nerves of anticipation. I felt the same.
My first task in our first meeting was to help them feel comfortable with me, the course requirements, and each other.
This sounds obvious, but it took me a long time to learn. I recall looking out over one of my first groups of college students in 1985 and thinking I must intimidate them into taking the task of learning seriously.
The only sound I heard was my voice. Full of authority. And myself. Standing at the front of the room, behind a podium, looking out over the crowd, seeing only the subject matter I was there to deliver.
That Professor had been fired long ago.
As I introduced myself and took them through the syllabus, I made eye contact with each person. I wrote the syllabus in easily understandable language with test and paper dates boldened. I explained my expectations regarding reading assignments.
And then, I got to the essential message of the first day. In this class, we will talk a lot about controversial topics with each other. I then randomly assigned them to groups of three.
And asked them to discuss this question:
Was American President Harry Truman’s 1945 decision to drop hydrogen bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima an example of terrorism?
The creaking of wooden desks
For the first 20 years of my college teaching career, I put overhead and PowerPoint slides between myself and the students — the words and images became my Holy Grail. I spent hours crafting these slides, searching for the perfect terms, word order, and pictures to express that day’s material. Going into class, I often felt very pleased with myself.
Of course, you, my writer friends, recognize these as sound scribbler habits: choosing the right words, arranging them correctly, and discovering compelling visuals.
These are good learning practices. They helped me to know the day’s material better. For a long time, I was satisfied the slides were a model of good thinking. I had found the proper endpoint of teaching.
And then, 15 years before I retired, I started to listen carefully to the room as I went through the slide presentation. The chorus was unmistakable.
Instead of Edgar Allan Poe’s beating heart, I could hear nothing but the creaking of desks.
Jenna was right.
Jenna, an A student who had been missing class, cued me to this listening when she told me in a private conference that she had started cutting class because she was bored.
All you do is summarize the material. You faculty hide behind PowerPoint.
The squirming, fidgeting, and creaking were symptoms of a different kind of killing than that of the Old Man by Poe’s narrator.
I needed to find a different way.
To get rid of the creaking desks.
The rumbling of conversations
It took me a year or so to develop a different pedagogical approach. The first decision was the most important — no more PowerPoint.
Eventually, I settled into a combination of mini-lectures that set the context for the day’s conversations, followed by small and large group discussions.
I worked diligently to reduce the day’s content to its essence. And then developed questions whose answers would help the students process the material.
When this process worked, the class conversations would produce a continuous, deep sound, like a rumble.
On these days, as I wandered in and around the cohort groups, occasionally offering insight and, sometimes, a gentle reminder to stick to the task, I would think.
What I’m hearing is
The sound of learning.
