My first post as a faculty blogger

I’ve never blogged in my life, so this probably isn’t going to be sufficiently clever. But here goes anyway. I’m teaching two sections of a freshman seminar in the fall called, “American Political Institutions.” That’s part of what they pay me to do at the College. I’m a professor.

Well, its mid-June now. My summer research activities are up and going. And the bookstore is bugging me about book assignments for the class for the fall. I always do things at the last possible minute and my preference is to let the class structure and assignments perculate a little more. My best ideas tend to come around deadline time. But the deadline appears to be approaching, so I guess that it’s time to start nailing down the class

There’s a couple of ways to proceed here. Approach one would be to assign the same four books that I assigned three years ago when I last taught this class, have a midterm and a final, assign some short papers, and be done with it. Call that the the standard “big state U” approach.

Approach two is to completely revamp the course contents and orient the content around what is breaking now, for example, the truely remarkable presidential and congressional elections that are shaping up for the fall. And then maybe put together some new, fairly interactive, assignments that will spark a little more interest among these freshmen. Unless someone convinces me differently, the plan is to go with option 2

I’m also thinking about a couple of different assignments. One would be to assign the students (30 in total across two sections) to groups of 10 and have them design, produce, and star in a TV-talk show a la Face the Nation. We can use the superb facilities of the Swem Media Center and actually show the results on W&M TV. Ground the content in material related to the class.

Another approach, less flashy but still promising and maybe better educationally, would be to integrate some individual research projects for the students into the class using large quantities of archival data I am collecting for my ongoing project about whip counts and congressional leadership. It would expose the students to original scholarly research, a little bit of data analysis, and some fairly unique materials that I’ve picked up relating to congressional party leadership. Another advantage is that I could give them some comprehensive feedback on their writing, which can really help a new college student.