The best class I took in college

What made it so good?

I’ve told this story a bunch, but I don’t think I’ve put it in print yet. Even though I was in this class more than 30 years ago, it’s stuck with me. I think there are lessons to learned from thinking about what we thought excellent teaching looks like and apply it to our own craft. (It’s no accident that the Ken Bain’s classic "What the Best College Teachers Do,” is titled that way.)

It was my senior year of college, and I had met all of my major and GE requirements, so I just signed up for a class that sounded good. Dr. Rodes was about to retire, and he was going to be teaching his popular “Rise and Demise of Nazi Germany” course one last time. (Here’s his obituary in the LA Times. My memory was correct about the year of his retirement, which was the year I graduated from college).

There were so many people who wanted into the class, and he agreed to let the enrollment cap up and they found a bigger room. It was standing room only, more than 100 people, which is a lot for a college that enrolled 1,600 students. He just let everybody in. They found a room that was narrowish and long. Since he wasn’t keen on projecting so much into this space, they got a little portable speaker that he would wear, strapped diagonally across his shoulder, connected to a hand-held mic. I think it used four D batteries.

Word was generally around that this would be the last chance to take this class with him and that it would be special. They, whoever they were, were right.

Dr. Rodes grew up in Frankfurt as the Nazi government grew in power. He described himself as a “quarter Jewish,” or rather that’s how the authorities would view him if they were aware of the ethnic background of his grandparents. He was enrolled in the Hitler Youth, which was pretty much expected of him. He described himself and his family as being deeply concerned about what was happening around them at the time, and when he was 15 he fled to France, and a couple years later, emigrated to the Americas. If I recall correctly, he left around the time that Germany annexed the Sudetenland, not too long before the invasion of Poland.

It was incredible to have a first-person account from an academic historian of what it was like to be a German growing up with the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany. This course was very much like other academic history courses, and while he was clear about his own identity and history, he didn’t talk that much about himself or his own experiences. But when he was talking about so many of the common questions that people have (regular folks like you and me as well as professional historians), he was able to talk with the authority of having been there, but also with a full awareness that his personal experience could not possibly be representative of the who arc of the German experience at the time. From my perspective at the time, he adeptly pulled together all of the pieces to paint what felt like a rather complete picture. The course had a lot of reading, and a bunch of writing as well. I remember being impressed how he managed to deal with the huge enrollment and still give individual feedback.

The central question in this course, which I suppose you could call an expected learning outcome though that assessment lingo wasn’t in use at the time, was to be able to explain why the Nazi Party established and grew in power throughout 1920s and 1930s, and more generally how and why authoritarian and fascist movements gain fuel in the context of a functioning democracy¹.

With 30 years of hindsight, I could retcon this as the best class I took in college because recently it’s been valuable in helping me make sense of our new reality². But even at the time, and shortly after the class was over, I was like, “Wow, that was the best class that I had in college.” Why was that?

I think there are lots of reasons. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, after all.

First, the professor was an excellent storyteller with deep personal experience in the topic of the course. The standard teaching evaluations at my institution ask students to rate how they perceive the professor’s knowledge of the course material. With notable exceptions, this is one that folks generally get rated very high on, because after all, we have PhDs in this stuff and so to undergrads with less experience, of course we look like experts even if a particular course is somewhat out of our lane. I don’t think the “knowledge” matters per se, but I do think that having some personal experience with the topic does really matter for student engagement, because the professor can act as a more better guide. If you’re going on a walk with a naturalist, you want to be with someone who isn’t an expert in nature in general, but with a person who knows the critters of the exact place where you’re going for a walk. I think the same for college teaching. I think this can go sideways for some instructors rather quickly if they don’t have the humility or perspective to know how and when to insert themselves. I think I steered away from this for a while because of some unreasonably harsh student evaluations. For example, when teaching intro organismal biology, I had a couple students write on their evals that “this guy always talks about ants and nothing else.” Which is really absurd because I barely did talk about ants, maybe a few times at the most over a whole semester, but that was their perception. Now I realize that bringing in my own experience in a natural way made me for a better teacher, and those students just didn’t like me for whatever their reason was. Being a dork for the topic is a good thing as long as you’re not arrogant about it.

Second, my participation in the course was low stakes for me. I was really busy doing senior projects as a Biology major, I was applying to med school (really!), and had other stuff going on. It was a cool class to be in but all of my engagement was intrinsic motivation. I was there to actually learn, which is a luxury a lot of college students can’t have, and it turns out that everything that happened the course was interesting to me. I wasn’t so worried about my grade, so I could focus on the actual course material instead of trying to jump through some professor’s hoops.

Third, there was a community of other people who were interested in the course. I talked about this with other people once in a while. This was not designed to be a course involving group work or active learning or anything like that, but something like that organically happened.

Fourth, the professor was student-centered. He was not telling his story about Nazi Germany, he was a historian teaching about historical events, facts, and ideas, and was able to enrich that teaching with personal experience. It was about us, not about him, and he understood this.

Fifth, this topic was very abstract and remote (at the time) and it was made relevant to our own lives. The course was about Nazi Germany but it was also about how everywhere in the world that fascist governments rise and fall, and we were asked to think about the history of our own country and how this might happen here.

Sixth, the professor was personal and personable while also being highly professional. Even though our professor talked about his career as a historian, and his childhood experiences in in Nazi Germany, there were so many things that we did not know about our professor, that he never talked about, that weren’t any of our business, that we never heard about for the entire semester. Where did he live? Who was he married to? What car did he drive? Where did he go to college or grad school? What were his politics? Favorite foods? I have no idea. I imagine that he realized that his own experience and identity were so closely tied to the course material, that he wanted to make sure that he drew a clear line for what it meant to be a student enrolled in his course. I think depending on the identity of the instructor, the course content, and institutional context, this line can be drawn in a lot of different places.

I think that line needs to be drawn in a place where it’s clear that we as instructors are human beings, who also recognize and validate the humanity of our own students. We can do this without getting too personal. Professors who weirdly overshare happen once in a while, but I think what happens more often is that professors don’t bring themselves enough into the course. Since learning is built on relationships, then students need to relate to their professor in one way or another. I think this gets incredibly harder with intersectional identity issues, and I imagine this is part of the structural bias in teaching evaluations. I don’t think the solution is to present oneself as invulnerable, even if students perceive white-guyness as the default for professordom. In the case of this course, the professor was talking about things from his childhood, which were relevant to the course. That was highly impactful. Meanwhile, talking about my own experiences would look very different in a a statistics course, or a global change biology course, or an entomology course. I think we can be deliberate about choosing the line of what we share and what we don’t. I think that an entomology course set in California would still be lacking if the professor was experienced working in tropical rainforests but somehow never ever mentioned the cool bugs from tropical rainforests. I think a statistics course would be lacking if a professor never ever mentioned their own experience with learning or doing statistics in some way, and if a global change biology course happened to touch on sea level rise and glacier melt, it would be weird if the professor had a history of working in Greenland but didn’t mention this whatsoever.

Some of my other favorite courses in college were in field biology from a professor who was an experienced field biologist, and from a physicist who had occasional personal physics-related anecdotes on a regular basis, and a foreign language professor who would share some of their favorite stories and essays with us. Did we know much about these professor as human beings from these courses? No, but we knew they were people and they didn’t hide that humanity from us. That’s an atmosphere where mutual respect can build, which is the foundation of an effective classroom.

1. It’s hard to not think about my experience in this course as I wrote this on the eve of this most consequential election in the US. A corollary to this question was, “Could this happen here? If so, what would be the conditions that would give rise to it?” Dr. Rodes was very clear that it could happen in the US and it could happen anywhere. Now we have the benefit of hindsight to know that he was right. We read fiction and nonfiction about this question, and I remember that there was some division among students in course on that matter. (I suppose this isn’t much of a surprise, because still many people in the US refuse to acknowledge this simple fact, and some fraction of the people voting for a fascist state aren’t even aware that this is what they’re doing.) What did I think at the time? I honestly don’t know or remember. I remember being flabbergasted that Reagan simply got away with overtly breaking the law, and his co-conspirators were celebrated by some as heroes, but I don’t think I could have imagined that in a few decades, we’d would have the sitting president lead a coup d’état attempt with actual gallows built on the steps of the US Capitol and armed militia hunting down the Vice President. And I don’t think I would have imagined that the Senate would fail to convict the president for this, and that he’d be tied in the polls four years later to build an authoritarian white ethnostate with “mass deportation” at the top of the platform. But here we are.

2. No matter what happens on and beyond Election Day tomorrow, this fascist movement isn’t simply going to disappear whenever Trump does. When has such a full-fledged fascist movement been contained and tidily put back in the bottle?