photo credit: mandyxclear
Each year, as the spring semester comes to an end, my thoughts inevitably turn to the whims of summer in New York City: long bike rides to Coney Island, rooftop parties and, unfortunately, two-and-a-half hours in a classroom at least three days a week. I am a summer adjunct!
It might seem counter-intuitive to the whole concept of, you know, “enjoying your summer,” but I actually kind of look forward to my summer courses. The main difference, of course, is one of time: In the summer, you only spend five weeks with your students, though the actual class time is usually double that of fall/spring classes. This means that the class becomes effectively super-concentrated; material must be adjusted to fit the new time parameters, and this can often present something of a challenge. After all, two-and-a-half hours is a long time! Without diversifying classroom activities, the experience is going to be grueling for everyone involved.
One of the reasons I enjoy the summer schedule is because of the longer class time, which I find allows me much more room to experiment, improvise, and develop the pedagogical techniques I’ve encountered as a Writing Fellow at Baruch. While I might not have time to do so in the fall or spring, in the summer I feel freer to break my students into groups and have them work on oral presentations together, or to show brief movie clips and “scaffold” low stakes writing assignments from the discussion that ensues (an example can be found here). Either way, the extended class time provides an opportunity to practice new teaching methodologies while staving off the beasts of boredom and exhaustion.
In contrast to the longer class time, the summer session itself is exceedingly brief. How much can a student really absorb in only five weeks? Should a teacher automatically reduce the scope of a class during summer sessions? Since I teach American history, does this mean that I should cut out a few decades, to have the class cover less material in the interest of time? There are of course, different philosophies on this, but I would like to suggest that “covering less material” is not necessarily the best solution to the five-week course problem.
In fact, just as the longer class time provides room to experiment, the shorter overall semester can also be employed to distinct pedagogical advantage. This summer I am teaching a course on the Vietnam War, whose fall and spring permutations contain a much wider “survey-style” approach to all the varied aspects of the era. I plan to have the summer version focus on just a few aspects of the war, in much greater detail, hoping that the students will have an equivalently useful experience through their deeper engagement with smaller bits of material. This way, I can shape the course to the imperatives of the summer schedule without (hopefully) shorting students in the process.
What are your tips for getting through the summer?
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