The Two-Year Track

Pimp My Course

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By Rob Jenkins

I've always considered myself a pretty good teacher (don't we all?) -- a comfortable assumption more or less borne out by two decades of student evaluations. Imagine my dismay, then, when I came across a recent entry on RateMyProfessor.com ripping me as "not a very hard grader" and "pretty boring."

I didn't take the first description too seriously, having received numerous end-of-term e-mail messages from students in the same section who clearly disagreed with that assessment.

It was the second label that really got to me. "Boring?" Me? No way. I'm too young, too hip, too cool, too cutting edge.

OK, would you believe mildly engaging?

The truth is, as far as today's students are concerned, I'm not a "young" professor anymore and haven't been for at least a decade. Nor am I particularly hip or cool. Most days I don't even wear jeans in the classroom, 12 years of administrative duties having decimated my graduate-school wardrobe.

Worst of all, I'm hardly "cutting edge." To be honest, I'm doing pretty much the same things in class I was doing 20 years ago. For Pete's sake, I still illustrate some of my favorite points by using anecdotes from MASH, that favorite sitcom of my generation that few of my current students have ever heard of, much less watched.

Clearly it's time for a major teaching makeover, in the spirit of TLC's Trading Spaces or better yet MTV's Pimp My Ride, in which cast members take old cars and update them with new paint jobs, ground effects, stereo systems, and so forth. In the end, the cars may be only marginally more functional, but they sure look a lot cooler.

Resolving to "pimp my course," then, I went straight to the experts, colleagues who really are cutting edge. Under their tutelage, the first thing I learned is that I definitely need to use the computer a lot more during class. And I don't mean just to check my e-mail while the students are writing essays.

Because, as we all know, students love computers. They regard any information that comes to them via computer as being, by definition, more reliable than information from any other source. College professors, on the other hand, are way down the reliability scale. As a teacher, I've got to find a way to harness that "Computer? Sweet!" mentality.

So far I haven't done a very good job. Though not exactly a neo-Luddite, I never fully signed on to the electronic revolution, despite the fact that, like many two-year colleges, mine is mega-wired, with at least one computer in each classroom. Most also have overhead data projectors, many have Smart Boards or Sympodiums, and a few are even dedicated to computer-assisted instruction, with 24 stations each.

I confess that in the past I've grossly underutilized those resources, frittering them away in such pedestrian activities as projecting students' sentences onto the whiteboard (where I, of course, proceed to rip them to shreds with a red Expo marker) and allowing students to use their computer workstations to edit and revise rough drafts in class (when they aren't looking at MySpace).

But there's so much more that can be accomplished with these marvelous devices: captivating Web sites to be visited, live audio and video to be streamed, potent PowerPoint presentations to be projected onto the Smart Board and then read aloud in class. I can hardly wait to begin.

Besides using the computer more in my classroom, the experts tell me that another way to transform my teaching persona is to put more of my course materials online. I can create a course that's more user-friendly and appealing to today's students by incorporating more Web-based elements. That could be as simple as placing my syllabi, lecture notes, and other course materials on my Web site -- which would mean that I first have to get a Web site.

Or, the experts tell me, I could direct students to one of those online tutorials provided by the book publishers, where students can complete additional grammar and sentence-structure exercises. It's true that they don't do the exercises I already assign from the textbook, but I feel confident that, if those exercises were online, students would view them much differently.

To make my "Web content" more dynamic and original, I can record my classroom lectures and link the audio to my site in the form of "podcasts," which students can then download into their MP-3 players and listen to while jogging or playing video games. Why any student would actually want to do that is beyond me, especially when it seems they would rather shove bamboo shoots under their fingernails than listen to the live version. But my more wired colleagues assure me this is the wave of the future (podcasting, that is, not bamboo shoots).

Better yet -- and this is definitely one of the coolest new strategies I've come across -- I could create my own Internet "chat room" dedicated solely to a particular class. Colleagues who do that tell me students will say things in a chat room they would never say in class. Given what students do say in class, I'm not sure that's a good thing, but hey, I'm willing to experiment.

But, by far, the best idea anyone has given me is that I should start my own class blog. I've never actually had a blog, but I've read a few, and what strikes me most about them is that the writers -- excuse me, bloggers -- can say anything they want, apparently without repercussion. In academe alone, we have right-wing kooks, left-wing kooks, anarchists, and openly unapologetic jihadists, each with his or her own blog.

Just like my students, there are things I would never, could never, say in class. Clearly, I've got to get myself a blog.

In the end, with a little luck, all this body trim and flashy paint (so to speak) should help make my Honda Civic of a course look more like a street racer. Otherwise, I may just have to try connecting with students using less sophisticated technology. Better not toss those DVD's of old M*A*S*H episodes just yet.

Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College. He writes occasionally for our community-college column.