Inspired Change

Inspired by the Ukrainian sniper, I decided to take charge of my own life. Because of a snowflake colleague, I’m forced to teach a course in the Fall that I really don’t want to teach. I hate everything about this course. Advanced Spanish, really? It’s so stupid. But I have to teach it.

So I decided to get creative. I threw away the multi-stage placement test, the syllabus, the textbook, the digital workbook, the composition, the tests, the “oral presentation” – all that sorry, outdated crap.

Instead of dumb multiple-choice clicking in a digital workbook, lab will mean discussion groups and one-on-one conversations with a native speaker. Zero staring at a screen will occur. Instead of the textbook, we are reading literature. The exam will be conversation-based. People wanted me to teach Advanced Spanish which I don’t believe should be an actual course, well, that’s what it looks like when I do it.

This course will be epic, and when the snowflake colleague deigns to come out of her huff, she’ll be sorry she left it in my hands.

In 15 years at the very least, nothing changed about this course. And then people complain about low enrollments. I’m surprised we got anybody at all to participate in this charade.

And before people say, “of course, you can do this, you are a department Chair”, I did an identical thing with another course in my very first semester at this university. An older colleague who had lovingly designed that course back in the 1990s almost had a conniption fit when I refused to use her VCR tapes (really, I kid you not, actual VCR tapes). And it was fine, everybody survived. Instead of the 15 students she normally attracted to this course, I got 70. (It’s a content course, not language).