With Class
AweStruck

The comment is the full text of
a student evaluation of Classical Studies 200, Peter Struck’s large lecture course on Greek and Roman mythology. “Awesome” comes up a lot in student ratings of the class. The effusion summarizes more sober descriptors— organized, thorough, responsive, effective, passionate—that department chairs, less inclined to exclamation points, used to recommend the awesome instructor for last year’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Struck is an assistant professor of classical studies interested in divination, rites like rolling dice, reading dreams, or consulting stars and oracles, which told the ancients what their gods were thinking. His mythology course has won accolades both for his pedagogical skill and for the class website he custom built. “ Many people think technology in the classroom is a panacea,” he says, “but it has as many limitations as it has strengths. It’s simply another tool that has to be used carefully and creatively.”

In earlier experiments with technology, he used PowerPoint to project lecture bullets on the wall as he moved through his talk. The 150-some students seemed to pay attention only long enough to scribble down the points each time the slide changed. Then they’d drift away again. It became even worse when he started posting the bullets on the class website. “If the idea of the Web or of technology is that you can always go back and get everything anytime you want,” he concluded, “then it takes all the urgency out of the classroom.”

Struck observed that he’d inadvertently created a “passive learning environment” and set about rethinking how technology could heat it up again. This continual returning to experimen-tation, evaluation, and rethinking is one of his strengths as a creative teacher. Instead of using technology to reinforce and review the main points, he considered, why not use it to preview the background material that normally fills the first part of each lecture? The solution is a data-rich class website: http://www.classics.upenn.edu/myth /index.php.

The site pulls together a formidable range of scholarly resources—background literature on Homer, Hesiod, and classical tragedy as well as dictionaries, histories, time lines, interactive maps, audio pronunciation guides, genealogies for keeping straight who’s who among the gods and heroes, and an array of help pages. It’s a gigantic textbook with bells and whistles, and Struck can update it every year.

Students now come to class primed with all the preliminary information, which shortens the formal talk. “The thing technology does best,” notes Struck, “is one-on-one data transfer—in a macro way. I’ve offloaded that stuff onto the website, so that’s freed up time inside of the lecture.” That time now goes to answering or asking questions, probing open-ended issues with students, and spurring class debate.

Jonathan Lubin, C’05, a double major in classics and economics, took the mythology course last year. “Professor Struck showed some wheels moving from student to student with his microphone as if he were Jerry Springer,” Lubin recalls. “He is a master lecturer and did a phenomenal job making a rather large lecture feel intimate and cozy.”

"It’s not because of what the technology itself does,” asserts Struck, summarizing the lessons of his latest experiments. “It’s because of what the technology allows me to do as a traditional teacher.” Technology doesn’t have to deper-sonalize the classroom, as the prophets of doom have warned. For those who know how to divine the secrets of its proper application, the same technology that’s shrinking the world can make a big lecture hall seem smaller. It can move students and teachers together into that close-up, mind-meeting, idea-bouncing space where the best teaching and learning can happen.

Classics professor Ralph Rosen remarks that “many teachers want to encourage and inspire their students, but few have developed as good an understanding of exactly how to go about it as Peter has.” The students seem to think so too. If you sort through the stack of course evaluations, the next most-used adjective describing Peter Struck’s teaching is another a-word: “Amazing.”

— Peter Nichols