For many students at the University, large lecture classes are considered the meat and potatoes of college learning. But a number of professors aren’t content with traditional teaching techniques and are spicing up their lectures with a wide variety of unconventional teaching methods.
The creativity to teach old stuff in a new way isn’t confined to any one department. Professors from different departments all over the University are taking risks and daring to do things differently.
In the anthropology department, Dr. Frances White sprinkles her Evolution of Human Sexuality lectures with sex jokes, while at the law school Professor Tom Lininger teaches his students the principles of legal ethics with clips from “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live.” In the School of Journalism and Communication, Professor Bill Ryan is famous for varying the volume of his voice in erratic patterns during lectures, speaking softly one moment and yelling the next.
Almost every student has a story to tell about a crazy professor they have had, but White said some of the unusual things professors do, like telling jokes in class, are a great way of keeping students’ attention.
“You’ve got to do something different — you can’t just stand up there and talk,” White said. “I need to use every avenue possible to get into students’ brains.”
She added that she only tells sex jokes that have an important connection to the biological concept she’s trying to teach in class.
Junior Mili Wilkinson is currently taking Evolution of Human Sexuality, and said she appreciates White’s effort to make the class more bearable by injecting humor into the lecture.
“Sometimes you’re just like ‘make it end,’ but when she tells jokes it refocuses my mind,” Wilkinson said.
Ryan said maintaining students’ attention in class is a constant struggle for many professors, but the most important thing to do is walk around the classroom and not just be “a talking head at a lectern.”
Lininger said also that interacting with students is a vital part of helping them to learn and understand course material, which is why he uses so many gimmicks to make his classes interesting.
Besides showing clips from TV shows, Lininger teaches students about ethics by letting them play a law-focused version of “The Dating Game,” and he also gives out special chocolate bars as a learning tool. They’re called “Hearsay” bars and they even have the “ingredients” of hearsay printed on the back of the label.
“This course has been notoriously dry in the past,” Lininger said. “It needed to be livened up.”
Mark Gall, head of teacher education at the University, agreed that a lot of these techniques can be effective in maintaining student interest, but he cautioned that they won’t necessarily help students learn more.
“Students often judge a professor on whether they’re entertaining, but they’re not in the best position to judge how much they learned,” Gall said.
However, Wilkinson said a little humor is a welcome relief for non-majors who take courses just to fill general education requirements. She added that more professors need to lighten up.
“I think it’s cool that a teacher can make the class humorous when we’re talking about serious stuff,” she said.
White agreed that it’s important to have a sense of humor about things.
“Here I am, I’m the age of their mothers and I’m talking to them about animal sex,” she said jokingly.