Teaching Issues: The Course Unfolds

Unfolding of the course

In this portion of the course portfolio you will find a narrative of what actually happened as the semesters unfolded. Because this narrative deals with two semesters and four course sections, what you will find when you read it is a synthetic description of what happened in the various topical modules of the course, rather than a diary of what happened each week in each section.

Based upon feedback I have received from early visitors to this site, some technical parameters of the course that may be useful to the reader are:

1.	The class sections meet MWF for 50 minutes.
2.	Class size was limited to 35 students. Because the conventional wisdom here at Texas Tech is that students shy away from writing intensive courses, I fully expected to lose 10-12 students in each section once I made it clear to them that they would write seven papers this semester (five one-page response papers and two five-page essays). Instead, each section reached its capacity by the end of the first week of the semester. Of course, there was attrition between the first week and the final add/drop date, but in each of the four sections, the rate of attrition (between 12 and 25%) was consistent with the attrition rates I experienced in previous years using a much less writing intensive syllabus.
3.	Although Western Civilization is intended to be a freshman-level course at Texas Tech University, the majority of the students enrolled in my sections were sophomores or juniors.
4.	Students were not told in advance that their section of the course was “wired” or “print.” During the two semesters of this project, only one student switched sections (in order to be in the “wired” section).

Week By Week Summaries

Investigations	Week 1	Week 2
Inheriting the Wind?	Week 3	Week 4
The Rights of Man?	Week 5	Week 6
Criminals and Children?	Week 7	Week 8
Total War	Week 9	Week 10
Right vs. Left	Week 11	Week 12

Investigations: Because my objectives for student learning in this course do not center on the acquisition of as much factual content as possible, the course begins with a two-week investigation of how historians do what they do. Unlike the typical Western Civilization course, the first week of the new semester started off quite well. The first two days of class were devoted almost entirely to familiarizing the students with the course website. During these sessions we discussed not only how to use the site, but walked through the first two assignments for class, the results of which can be found in the on-line discussion forum. Our topic during the first two weeks of the semester, titled "Investigations," is what is often called "historical methods," with a particular emphasis on what sorts of sources historians use, and how being an historian is much like being a detective.

The first example the students had to work with is the great consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, and for Friday they were to read the Holmes case Silver Blaze and then post a paragraph on the discussion forum describing what they could learn from Holmes' method that they think they might use later in the semester when they begin their work as historians. On Friday we discussed their virtual contributions. Given how well this discussion went, I will certainly use Silver Blaze again as an example of how much historians and detectives have in common. Many of the students found it easy to make the leap from criminal investigation to historical investigation, and some of the better give and take in class revolved around how far historians can trust their sources when it comes time to write.

The student work samples listed here are all postings on the on-line discussion forum. The first three samples include responses from me to whatever the student wrote, but the fourth sample includes two student responses to something one of their colleagues posted...the first glimmer of an actual virtual discussion.

Sample #1 Sample #2
Sample #3 Sample#4 (includes responses from other students)

Week Two: The second week of the semester was devoted to a continuation of our discussion of the differences between primary sources and secondary sources and to give the students a good feel for how an historian makes use of such sources, and the challenges these sources often provide. I spent Monday's class walking them through a recent research project I had just completed. We examined various samples of primary and secondary sources that I found in my research and to give them a sense for how difficult archival research can often be, I gave them a sample of a hand-written letter from 1910 and asked them to decode the handwriting. Because the author of this letter, while highly educated, had terrible handwriting, the students found the exercise difficult, frustrating, and even a bit humorous.

Wednesday's class centered on the process of historical writing and how the ways that historians write are similar to other fields, but also on how history as a discipline has its own particular writing conventions. The source document that the students used for the discussion on Wednesday was the Student Guide to Writing a Paper that is part of the course syllabus and they were also to have read the first few chapters in Richard Marius' Guide to Writing About History (one of the two books assigned for the course). I devoted the largest amount of time amount of time to working with them on how to construct a thesis from primary source materials and provided them with a number of humorous examples from previous semesters as a way of discussing what not to do when they write.

Friday's class gave them a chance to flex their historical muscles. Everyone was told to visit a website that is an archive of material devoted to a real murder case from the past. As they read the evidence available on this site, they were to try to answer not only the question of who killed William Robinson, but also were to use the document analysis chart I provide for them to help record their impressions of and questions about the evidence they found at this site. I use this chart throughout the semester and instruct the students to fill in the first two columns as they read sources. There are two reasons why I ask them to only fill in questions and impressions, rather than conclusions. The first reason is that I am trying to train them to believe that sources contain many possible important (or at least useful) pieces of information and that their task is not to find the most important, or even two or three most important pieces of information. If they are too focused on the fact that there is a "right answer" to be found in a source, they often never consider all the possible implications of what the source may say. Thus, if instead they read the source to find out what they can about what it might contain, and are simply tasked with writing down questions and impressions, my experience is that they are often more careful and creative readers. I am also trying to train them to return to a source more than once, hence the third column on the chart. After we discuss the material in class, they should have at least some resolution to their questions, and they are to then return to the document, read the passage that raised the question in the first place, and then record their resolution in the final column. [All credit for this chart goes to Prof. Mariolina Salvatori of the University of Pittsburgh, whose idea it was and who graciously allowed me to shamelessly copy it.]

Our discussion of the William Robinson case was encouraging. Most of my students displayed not only careful reading of the evidence, but also showed me that they had been able to confront the often equivocal nature of the evidence they found. The Robinson case leaves many questions unanswered and so the students had to use their creative abilities to fill in blanks in the record with plausible conclusions based on the evidence that was available...a task we discussed at length during our class sessions on Sherlock Holmes. I certainly will use this sight again in future iterations of the course.

Week Three: It was in week three of the semester that we dove into the "content" portion of the course, namely actual examples from the European past, rather than examples having to do with historical methods. The big question around which the material in this bloc, which I call Inheriting the Wind?, is the relationship between science and society in modern European history. This particular topic was well-chosen this semester because just before the beginning of the school year, the Kansas State Board of Education decided to remove the teaching of Darwin's work from the list of required subjects in the public schools. As a result, a broad public debate on the relationship between science and society in modern America was already underway before we ever got to the topic and many of my students were aware of this topic. I also knew in advance that many of the students in my classroom bring to class religious beliefs and experiences that predispose them to reject Darwin's in particular as being not only false, but blatantly anti-Christian, so I was hoping that by focusing on the European debate over the coexistence of science and religion, I would elicit more active participation from my students. I was right.

The mechanism I chose for getting the students to engage the source material was to put two of Europe's most famous scientists, Galileo and Darwin, on trial. I chose a criminal trial both because it provided a nice bridge from the previous bloc's emphasis on detective work, and because many (if not most) of my students have some familiarity with trials through popular television dramas or such cultural touchstones as the trial of O.J. Simpson. To get us started and to give the students the opportunity to set our evidence in its proper historical context, I set the stage for the trials with an introductory lecture on the first Monday of this two-week bloc. We then proceeded to put these two men on trial for their supposed heresies. The trial of Galileo came first and for the trial the class was divided into several groups: prosecutors, defense attorneys, jurors, pundits (who would have to interpret the trial for us in the following class session) and "anachronism police" whose role was to keep a sharp eye out for any misuse of the evidence by any of the players in the trial.

On Wednesday we staged our trials. In each class section various of the players demonstrated that they had tried to immerse themselves in the evidence, using such phrases as "having great fondness for their own opinions", "the Bible is meant to be a mirror of the soul, not a manual for the study of nature," and quoting from St. Augustine in defense of Galileo. Others were less historically correct, offering such insights as "the Catholic Church is really pounding on Galileo right now," referred to Ptolemy as "Plutonium," and from their remarks made it clear that they weren't sure just who Augustine was. Despite these gaffes, most of those charged with prosecuting or defending Galileo put a lot of thought into their roles and generally tried hard to convince the jurors. In each case the jury found Galileo guilty and we wrapped up the day with the pundits asking the players in the trial questions that would help them on Friday with their interpretation of what had happened.

Friday's class was our chance to discuss not only what happened in the trial, but also how our trial of Galileo mirrored what really happened to Italy's most famous astronomer. In both class sections the students charged with being "pundits" were less sure about just what a pundit does (most of them had never seen Meet the Press or some similar television show), but they were able to summarize what had happened and why they thought it happened the way it did. The discussion in each session started out slowly, but in each case turned on the same two questions: why the Catholic Church was so concerned with Galileo's writings at that particular moment in its history; and just how powerful the Catholic Church actually was at that time. Needless to say, I was quite pleased with this turn of the discussion because it showed me that the students were able to move from the specific (Galileo's trial) to the larger questions that Galileo's conflict with the Church raised.

Week Four: In some ways the trial of Charles Darwin was more successful, and in other ways it was less so. Because Darwin remains so controversial, especially in a place like Lubbock, Texas, which has a very large evangelical Christian population, I was hoping to have a high level of engagement from the students, and that is exactly what I got. The format for this week was exactly the same as the previous week, in that we read a set of documents and then various members of the class were assigned to put Mr. Darwin on trial.

During the trials, the prosecutors generally attacked directly, asking the jurors whether they believed in God and the Bible, told them that all they needed to know about human evolution was to be found in the Bible, and so any work like Darwin's that contradicted that account was clearly an attack on Christian belief and the truth revealed in the Bible. Although the prosecutors generally made a strong case, I was disappointed to see that they made very few references to the documents they were to have read, leading me to conclude that they had only perused the evidence. The students charged with the defense of Darwin found themselves fighting an uphill battle and so, by contrast, displayed a thorough knowledge of the primary source materials, citing specific passages from a wide variety of source materials, and using phrases that might have been heard in the 19th century, such as "There is a certain grandeur to Mr. Darwin's thought..." Once again, in each case the jurors returned the verdict of guilty, but typically told us all that they were convinced by the strengths of the defense argument, especially the way that the defense deployed evidence from both those who supported Darwin and those who did not. This statement by one of the jurors gave me the opportunity to then spend a few minutes discussing how important it is for the historian to use all the evidence available, even when that evidence might contradict some cherished theory that he or she has developed. When our pundits asked the jurors how they could still consider Darwin guilty, they said that as God-fearing 19th century Christians, they feared to draw any conclusion that seemed counter to the Bible. Several of them also said that they feared retribution from the Catholic Church, an admission that gave me the opportunity to discuss with them how important it is to read their textbook. Had they troubled to do their assigned textbook readings, they would have found that the Catholic Church had no such influence in 19th century Britain, and so they were conflating Galileo's problems with Darwin's...to which they said, "oops."

The on-line discussion forum turned out to be a place where students could raise their religious views on this issue—views they were reluctant to express in the classroom. The sample provided below is one example of how such views appeared and how I dealt with them as an instructor at a state university.

Samples from the Student Discussions

Week Five: The next two-week module (“The Rights of Man”) focused on the development of constitutional government in European society from the 17^th to the 20^th century. The first week of the module was spent examining three contrasting views of human nature—those of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The second week of the module was spent examining specific constitutional documents that emerged during the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries. Instead of asking all of the students to read all of the documents, I broke the class up into three groups—continuing our process of collaborative effort begun during the previous module—with each group reading primary sources produced by one of these three philosophers. Each group was asked to read their sources carefully and critically, and to be prepared to come to class to answer the following questions:

      1.      What was the author’s view of human nature?
2.      What natural laws did the author believe governed human society?
3.      Given these laws, what should be the proper structure of government?
4.      What was the role of education in the development of human society?

They were also told to be prepared to discuss with their colleagues which elements of the thought of their particular author seemed more applicable to reality, which seemed to have more practical application to the task of preparing a constitution, and which had the most resonance in the present day.

When the students arrived in class I broke them into groups and asked them to attempt to arrive at answers to my four questions listed above. In general, questions 1-3 posed little difficulty for the students and by the end of class all groups were able to arrive at some sort of consensus. Question 4, however, was a failure. In only one case during the two semesters I taught this course were any of the student groups able to come up with an answer to this question, because they seemed to be having a difficult time making the connection between education and political developments of a broader nature. As a result, we spent a fair amount of our time discussing this issue and the students were generally anxious to find links between these older ideas about the connections between education and citizenship and the situation they found themselves in in Texas. The best part of this exercise was the debate between the students regarding their views on whether Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau had the most accurate vision of human nature and the sort of government that would be best for their various societies. The particular aspect of these debates that made them the “best” part of the module was that the students worked hard to try to understand “their” author in his historical context, not merely as someone who had some good or bad ideas for the present

Week Six: The second week of this topical bloc took the students from the realm of theory to the realm of practice. I broke them up into two groups and gave them the task of analyzing sets of constitutional documents produced in England and France during the 17th and 18th centuries. Those students who read either Hobbes or Locke were assigned the documents from France and those who read Rousseau were assigned the set of English documents. For the first day of the new week I presented the students with a lecture about the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution in which I tried to weave together the ideas of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau discussed during the previous week, and which I hoped would give them sufficient context for the discussion of their constitutional documents. On the second day of the week the two groups came together and discussed their documents, focusing at first on what it was they did not understand in the sources, and only then moving on to what they did understand. Because we had been emphasizing addressing moments of difficulty as a way of arriving at a more complete understanding since the beginning of the semester, by this point in the semester, most of the students (in all sections) were much more comfortable with this approach. The task the students faced--once they had worked their way through what they did not understand--was to chart continuities in these sources. How, for instance, did ideas of individual property rights change or remain the same in the English documents? This task was one of many I developed for the semester to address the fact that I was not providing my students with a sequential narrative of historical events. Throughout the year I attempted to reinforce the importance of change over time, and of setting sources in their proper historical context--and I did not see any sign that my students in this topically organized course had a worse appreciation for the chronology than did those in my ealier iterations of the course which were much more traditional in their organization and delivery.

The discussion on the second day of this week tended to bleed over into the third day, because the students generally proved able to find many different examples of continuities and discontinuities, and wanted to discuss them. Thus, on the final day of this two-week bloc, we spent another 15 or 20 minutes in each section wrapping up their discussion, and then I offered some "closing remarks" designed to provide a bridge to the next topical bloc, as well as later issues we would be addressing in the course. I found that it was very important, not only to sum up what we had done during a two-week bloc, but also to provide these bridges to subsequent (and previous) content. In this way I was able to continue to reinforce the notion that all the events, people, and sources we were discussing were part of a web of developments, rather than being descrete events unconnected to anything (or anyone) else that had occurred.

At this point in each semester, I asked the students in the web sections to tell me why they were printing out all the documents and bringing them to class, rather than working from the texts on the web and coming to class with notes. In almost every case, the students told me some version of the following: they "just liked having the whole thing" with them to work from, or that they had printed out the documents so that they could make notes on or could highlight passages in the sources. During this discussion, I also heard several complaints from students about the cost of having to print out all the documents--with one student even pointing out that the students in the print section of the course had an advantage, because their course cost less (because I had given those students coursepacks)!

Week Seven: The next two weeks of the semester followed a pattern just like weeks five and six, and although the topic was related--because it dealt with constitutional issues--our focus on the changing status of women (Criminals and Children) in European society had some different elements as well. As with each of the topical blocs, I opened the two-week module with a lecture that framed the topic in both theoretical and specific terms, and touched on various significant events and people. For the next two days the students worked their way through a series of primary source documents drawn from the history of women's lives and of women's rights in Europe. Instead of breaking them up into groups based upon the writings of a particular author, or on the basis of documents drawn from a particular country, this time I broke them up first by topical group (women's lives or women's rights) and then by chronology--asking the various groups to be prepared to discuss not only the most important findings in their sources, but also to be prepared to discuss why those findings made sense in the historical context of their particular sources. During their group discussions, they were to arrive at an agreed upon presentation to the rest of the class, and much of our discussion on the final day of the first week centered on why they chose to emphasize certain aspects of a source over others. At this point, it seems worth noting that each student was expected to read and be familiar with all of the sources from a particular week. He or she needed to be prepared to respond to a discussion of any and all of the documents, but was expected to be expert in a subset of the total. In the subsequent discussions, most of our time was spent on two sources--Emmeline Pankhust's description of her work in the suffrage movement (My Own Story) and Olympe de Gouge's Declaration of the Rights of Women. The former of these because the students were appalled at the treatment of the Suffragettes in Britain, and wanted to understand what had happened in more detail, and the latter because de Gouge was executed for her beliefs and the students wanted to understand why men seemed so threatened by her beliefs. I found it interesting that our discussions in class tended to emphasize violent male responses to women demanding expanded rights, and that student interest in these responses by men was fairly universal from section to section. Against their better judgement, I managed to induce the students to discuss William Acton's report on prostitution in France. Instead of focusing on sex--the thing they did not want to talk about--we tried to make sense of Acton's views in light of what we had learned earlier in the semester about Liberalism. Then we attempted to understand how Liberal ideas might be applied differently to women and men.

Week Eight: During the second week of this two-week bloc we changed our approach to the past. Instead of reading a wide variety of sources produced by different historical actors, during this week we turned to the life of one woman, Milada Horáková, the most prominent Czech woman executed during the purges in Czechoslovakia during the early 1950s. Because we were looking at one fairly obscure person and asking what her life might tell us about the history of women in Europe, I spent the first day of this week not only giving the class more background on what happened in Czechoslovakia (and Eastern Europe in general) during the first decade of communist rule, and in a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of biography as a form of historical scholarship.

The sources the students then read were letters written by Horakova to her family on the night before her execution by the communist authorities. These sources are particularly hard to read, given their emotional content, and several students complained to me later that they had been quite upset after reading her letters--as though perhaps I ought not to have assigned sources that were disturbing. The emotional content of the sources also made it difficult for the students to focus on their assignment, which was to try to make connections between this specific moment in the life of one woman and the discussion the previous week of the changing ideas of women's rights over several centuries. Instead, students wanted to lash out at Horakova's husband, whom they saw as abandoning his wife, or at Horakova herself, for choosing to be executed (rather than seeking clemency) and thereby abandoning her teenage daughter. As you can see from these two issues, students tended to personalize Horakova's experience, and once they had done so, found it difficult to read her life as an historian would. My reponse to this difficulty was to allow them to vent their anger and frustration first, then to call their attention to their personalization of the issues raised in the sources, and to use that as a way to discuss how an historian maintains critical distance from his or her sources. I also asked them to consider how their responses to the choices Horakova and her husband made were conditioned by their own notions of gender roles. In their end of semester evaluations, a number of students wrote that they found this particular week the most interesting or stimulating of the entire semester.

I set aside the final day of this two-week bloc for a mid-course evaluation, conducted by a representative of the Teaching Learning and Technology Center. You can read for yourself what the student reactions to the course were in each of the sections by following this link to the evaluation reports and reading the Small Group Instructional Diagnosis reports.

Week Nine: If the students were upset by the emotional content of the sources from the previous week, then our discussion of Total War in European history must have seemed like going from bad to worse. As with each topical bloc, I began this two-week module with a framing lecture, the theme of which was the changing nature of European war, especially as a consequence of two intersecting developments--the advent of modern industrial society and the creation of governments based upon popular, as opposed to royal authority. Becuase I framed my discussion of European war in these two contexts, I was able to draw explicit connections to the earlier topical blocs in which we examined the relationship between science and society and the establishment of constitutional government. I also laid out for the students the structure of the debate among historians about the Holocaust (functionalists vs. intentionalists) to give them a sense of how historians begin to group themselves according to interpretations or methodologies.

In the previous week's discussions we focused our attention on one individual. During the second and third days of week nine we focused our attention on one historical source--protocol of the Wannsee Conference--produced during the Second World War. The task the class faced was to read Adolf Eichmann's notes of the Wannsee Conference (at which the mechanisms of the so-called "Final Solution" were agreed upon by leading figures in the German government) and to ask as many questions as they could about what they found and especially what they did not find in the source. Because most of the horrors of the Holocaust were unmentioned in this document--the words "kill", "murder", "execute" and so on do not appear--students had to develop their abilities to read between the lines of a source to determine its true meanings. Moreover, they had to learn the historian's skill of beginning with one source and then working outward from it by asking as many questions as possible based upon conclusions drawn about and from the source. Our discussions ranged over many different topics, all of which were informed by the students' prior knowledge (or lack thereof) about the Holocaust. Often students wanted to know more about why the Nazi officials present thought that the French would be so compliant, or why the Hungarians were expected to resist turning over their Jews. Other students focused in on the seeming banality of the discussion--how bureaucrats could hash out details of railroad cars, etc., when what they were really talking about was human lives.

For the next session of class, the students faced a different sort of assignment. Prior to this moment all of their choices about sources of information had been made by me--either in their printed course packs or via the class website--and I saw little, if any evidence that they were going beyond the limited set of sources I provided to them. In an attempt to break them out of this passive mode of learning, I told them that their assignment was to "go forth and find" sources about the Holocaust that would help them answer pressing questions they had following our first week of work on this topic. For the students in the print section of the course, I provided a short list of the "greatest hits" of Holocaust scholarship in the Texas Tech library and I took them to the library as a group to assist them with the task of beginning their search. For the students in the web sections I took them instead to the computer lab and pointed them all to the United States Holocaust Museum website and to the Cybrary of the Holocaust as starting points for their search for answers. Each class was warned that I was not asking them to produce a research paper. Instead, what I wanted them to do was "poke around" in the available sources, either in the library or on-line, and to try to develop a partial answer to at least one of the questions vexing them after our previous week's discussion. On the second day of this week the students came back together to report to one another in small groups (5-6 students) what they found in their research. As I report in my conclusions about this project, most of the students in all sections did the bare minimum of research--a surprise to me given the animation of their in-class discussions of the Holocaust. To be sure, a few students engaged in extensive research, and almost everyone found at least something worth discussing in class, but I did not see any evidence that even an emotional topic like the Holocaust woudl encourage them to do much more than the minimum. Whether this disappointing outcome was a result of the nature of the assignment (no paper required of this research), or if it was a consequence of the fact that Western Civilization is an introductory course with few history majors enrolled, or if it was a consequence of the way I framed the assignment is difficult for me to determine. As a result, I intend to pursue answers to this particular question of mine in subsequent iterations of this course.

Week Ten: For the second week of this topical bloc we turned to assessing blame. Over the weekend I had them read various documents from the Nuremberg Tribunal. Their task was to consider the process of the Tribunal, and to decide whether it was a sufficient means for doling out punishment for the Holocaust. Further, we discussed the setting of legal precedents at Nuremberg and what this has meant for international law since. One of the topics from earlier in the semester that we wove into our discussions during this week was the problematic relationship between science and society--by discussing German eugenics policies and practices, and how scientific ideas of race influenced European thinking about the Jews and others.

For the final day of this bloc I assigned the student one chapter from Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, in which the author describes the massacre of the Jewish population of one village in Poland by a German police battalion. Browning's account took them from the macro discussion of the Wannsee Protocol to the reality of the deaths of hundreds of innocent Jews. Our discussions this third day focused on the unanswerable question of why average Germans (and others) would so willingly murder innocent people. Not surprisingly, the emotional content of this discussion was very high, but unlike previous years where the discussion was all about outrage, during this year many students were able to express their outrage and to try to come to grips with ways to analyze these events as historians. I would argue that they were able to do this because we had spent so much time focused on historical methods during the semester that by the time we got to this especially upsetting topic, the students had acquired at least a small set of reflexive responses conditioned by historical methods.

Week Eleven: For this final topical bloc of the semester--Right vs. Left--we returned to political ideology. This final bloc gave us the opportunity to try to pull together much of what we had learned about political ideas in Europe during the four centuries of our course, and the students seemed to enjoy being able to display a fair degree of mastery, both of the content and of the methods of historical analysis we had worked with. In the first week we returned to Liberalism, but rather than revisiting Locke, we turned to other Liberal writers such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. Because many students in Texas have a strong libertarian bent, the writings of both of these authors resonated strongly with them. Once again we broke up into groups, with one group considering Malthus and the other considering Smith. Both had several questions to answer and they came together in class without difficulty (they had lots of practice with this level of collaboration by now) and hashed out their questions and opinions. On the third day of the bloc we discussed as a class how the ideas they found in these documents seemed to be products of the Enlightenment, and what relevance they seemed to have for later economic, political and social developments--most of which we had already touched on at some point in teh semester. It was gratifying to see the students pull out documents from much earlier in the term and try to explain how these documents seemed to show the influence of the ideas of one or both of their authors.

Week Twelve: In this the final week of our semester (although the semester was a fourteen week term, various days were eaten up by holidays and other matters that left us with thirteen weeks. The days remaining in that thirteenth week typically were used for review, summing up, etc.) we turned to a document the students knew a great deal about, without actually having had any contact with--Marx's Communist Manifesto. I say they knew a great deal about it with tongue firmly in cheek, because only one or two students in each section had ever read any portio of the Manifesto before, but all but one or two of my students knew in advance that Marx had written it and that everything in it was wrong. Because they approached the document initially with such firmly held convictions, it provided us with a perfect opportunity to test their progress as historians-in-training. Before they sat down to read the Manifesto, I reminded them of all we had learned about historical methods, all we had learned about European political ideas, and that as historians they had to try to make sense of the Manifesto in its historical context, not in the context of Texas in 1999-2000. One last time we broke up into groups to discuss the text in detail and each group had to report out their responses to a series of questions I posed about the work, as well as their own remaining questions. During the final day of class I spent the first 20 minutes or so lecturing about the legacy of Marx's work and the students then discussed that legacy in a very animated fashion. As with the previous week, it was very gratifying to see them discuss Marx in the same breath as Hobbes or Rousseau, and to ask questions about why various European (and the American) constitutions incorporated portions of Marx's ideas and portions of Locke's in the same document.

My assessment of what was happening in these final two weeks is that by repeating the process of collaborative learning, maintaining an intense focus on a small number of texts, and by offering the students various options for historical analysis, they slowly achieved sufficient mastery of historical methods to feel confident enough to engage in the sort of debate we too rarely see in introductory history courses. From this debate came a type of learning very different from that displayed on a final examination that requires students to recount names and dates memorized the night before. At the same time, I must say that this type of learning is much more difficult to quantify--in fact it may not be susceptible to measurement at all in the conventional sense. Nevertheless, as the students' final essays (and survey responses) demonstrated, many of them were able to integrate source materials from throughout the semester into a final essay on Marx. Too often essay assignments such as this one result in papers focused entirely on the text at hand, with no sense of its importance to a continuum of development. A significant portion of my students--and more in the web sections than in the print section--reversed this formula, setting Marx's work explicitly in a historical narrative that was much more complex than one often sees in a course of this type at an institution like Texas Tech University.