by Berkley Hudson, University of Missouri

The jack-of-all-trades writer Carl Sandburg famously and poetically described his beloved Chicago this way:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders

As we gather this summer for our annual convention in Chicago, one History Division session will focus on classrooms with “husky, brawling…big shoulders”—and how best to manage that for everyone’s benefit.

We will convene for that panel on Friday, August 10, from 11:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. The History Division and the Graduate Student Interest Group will serve as co-hosts.

So, with appreciation for and in the spirit of Sandburg, we will address those who would cry out about bigness. We will respond to those who would quote Sandburg and say of these classes with 50, 100, 250, and, yea, even with 500 students in a cavernous auditorium:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them…
And they tell me you are crooked…
And they tell me you are brutal…

As a faculty member or as teaching assistants, the panelists have taught large classes or will teach one, and will offer strategies to deal with the wicked, the crooked and the brutal.

To that end, we will consider suggestions such as these made by panelist Mike Sweeney, associate professor at Ohio University:

• Play to your character strengths. Being a teacher, especially in front of a large class, is like being an actor on stage. When you are comfortable, your students will recognize that. For example, be funny — if you are a funny person.
• Break up the two-hour class into two sections, with a five- to ten-minute break in between. If you show a video, show 15 minutes or so, break, talk a bit, and then show more. Don’t ever show an hour-long video without stopping, or you will turn on the lights to find half your class asleep.

Panelist Patrick Ferrucci, a doctoral teaching assistant at University of Missouri, offers a different take on videos:

• Use many short (no more than two minutes) videos to break up a lecture to a large class.

From a certain viewpoint, say a departmental budget one, perhaps large classes provide a beneficial economy of scale. But as we think about whether a class could be too big to be effective educationally, we will pursue a provocative notion from panelist Marjorie Kruvand, an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago:

• Might a class be too small?

I will moderate the panel, and it likely will be a bit less formal than some. I would delight in getting panelists to address your problems and solutions with giant classes.

We will welcome telling anecdotes about huge classes when things went awry and when they went swimmingly. And I will re-tell the story about the time I threw a tennis ball into a classroom with 500 students and hit one student in the head when she did not adhere to my admonition for everyone to close their laptops and look up—because I was going to be tossing some tennis balls for them to catch.

On another occasion, during football season, I brought a spongy football to an auditorium-sized journalism class that included first-string players from the Mizzou football team. I did not dare throw it to the starting quarterback, James Franklin, to single him out. But I did throw it to one of his teammates who easily caught it and then threw the ball way across the auditorium to a friend.

Why all the tossing of balls? I use them as a kind of “ice-breaker” that Mike Sweeney will discuss. When the students catch the ball, I have them introduce themselves, say where they are from and then have them introduce the seatmates on either side. Remarkably, sometimes they do not even know the person sitting next to them. After that, I ask them to throw the ball to someone else that they may know or not know.

In Chicago, I may even bring some balls for us to toss around for practice, too. Regardless, we’ll all learn from one another about what works and what does not work in the classes with big shoulders. And maybe then, in the spirit of Sandburg, we will be so delighted by what we have learned that we will be

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter…

Please direct ideas, comments and questions to HudsonB@missouri.edu.