Fresh Preps

Perhaps you have heard the apocryphal story about the aged professor who accidently drops his well-yellowed lecture notes and watches them disintegrate into dust. In the version I heard as a graduate student, he slumped to the floor and wept like Alexander the Great over his final conquest, finally being led from the room and into retirement.

When I heard that tale, I thought about one of my own history professors, "Dr. Charming," who used the same lecture notes for our class that he had used Mermaid Wedding Dressesfor students of my father's generation. After class one afternoon, I stopped to ask a question and saw that the pages of the loose-leaf notebook he used were yellowed, crinkled and spotted with age and coffee stains. Since the course was on ancient history and he was fairly curmudgeonly, I'm sure that he would joke that not much had happened to update the subject lately. As a point of fact, though, none of our supplemental readings were published more recently than 20 years previous to the course.

One of the challenges faculty members face as their careers develop is that of stagnation. Most have a core set of courses that are taught with frequency, and it makes sense to develop a fairly stable set of notes and assignments for such courses. Reinventing frequently taught courses is not always the best use of limited time and mental energy, especially when you have research to do, service to undertake, and, of course, families to raise.

There comes a point, however, when those notes become yellowed and the readings grow dated. There is nothing wrong with using older scholarship inLouis Vuitton Galliera  many disciplines (in fact, we probably ought to engage in more 'recovery readings" within our areas; so-called "chronological snobbery" is still snobbery). But when a class's materials date from a time before the birth of the students who are enrolled in it, perhaps it's time to update the materials.

How do you keep your class preparations fresh? Do you follow a system? How might department chairs encourage course updates?

I'm hesitant to change much in a class I've taught a few times. I find a strategy that works to make the points I need to make, and don't like to experiment. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

There are always a few rough edges, but mostly I try to update my examples to include current events, and to get rid of references that are old or losing relevance. Textbooks usually only go through minor revisions, so I figure why should I make major revisions.

Our teaching is evaluated based on student teaching evaluations only. If you get a good number, you shouldn't change anything. If you get a bad number, the chair Louis Vuitton Nikolaimight dig deeper, and if there are student complaints about the age of the material, ask us to update. I doubt most chairs would be willing to invest time encouraging updates if there are no complaints.

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