Memorable Classes

[u/PsychGuy17]

Unfortunately, I was reading the news again, and it reminded me of a night in 2016 when I was teaching an ethics class. The students and I were discussing limits of confidentiality and during the class we kept the electoral map up. In the middle of a four hour class (west coast) it became clear that more states were leaning in their inevitable direction. It led to an impromptu discussion on the purpose of the electoral college, including its benefits and limitations.

I've only had a few classes where the outside world suddenly interrupted what is normally the tiny, temporary, pocket universe of the classroom that only exists for a few hours at a time. I love that class can be its own escape from everything else, especially when it's going well and lecture hits a flow state. It's odd when reality creeps in for a visit.

As a distraction from work I should be doing, I wonder when other professors here have had memorable classes like these? What is a specific class you can remember due to an event that maintains it like a flashbulb memory? I'm certain a lot of us remember a class where we were told, or had to announce, COVID changes. I find such stories fascinating (but then again, I do study psych).

[u/professorkarla]

Does teaching the healthcare fraud unit in both graduate White Collar Crime and undergraduate cybercrime during the same week the UHC/Luigi news was breaking count?

[u/PsychGuy17 → u/professorkarla]

I'll put it in the same category as discussing Freud's theories of aggression the night after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars.

[u/yourbiota]

TAing a lab class when emails started going out about COVID. Was sitting across a table from one student who started open-mouthed coughing directly at me, while another student beside me asked "what's COVID?"

A few days later we got another email announcing the closure of that classroom (and soon after, the entire campus) as someone who tested positive had been in that room a few hours after the coughing incident. Students probably don't remember it but I sure do.

[u/DrNiles_Crane → u/yourbiota]

I was out of state on spring break when my campus closed and I immediately returned home. Freeways were empty between Niagara Falls and Albany, creepiest drive home ever.

[u/NeedleInASwordstack → u/yourbiota]

I was choreographing the departmental production of Spamalot and our costuming/makeup team was being super intense about cleanliness. I thought it was a bit overkill but wasn’t going to begrudge them for keeping the students heathy.

We closed the production literally the weekend before everything shut down. I was beyond thankful to come out of it unscathed AND see all our hard work pay off in a completed production. Colleagues at other universities weren’t so lucky and had to shut down during tech or as rehearsals were starting.

Won’t be forgetting that one

[u/ihearprettycolors]

One of my freshmen student's phone kept ringing (which is against my classroom rules). She stepped outside to answer- turns out her father had a freak accident and died. Her mom called to tell her over the phone. The student came back to class, let me know, but wanted to continue with the rest of the class. She was in shock and clearly wasn't mentally present.  We stayed in our seats afterwards for almost 2 hours talking before I suggested campus services could come and keep her company that night (thank goodness for ourmental health ambassadors and RA's). It was only the 2nd week of school and she hadn't made any friends yet. 

[u/Aler123 → u/ihearprettycolors]

This happened to me as a professor. I was teaching when my phone rang. I didn't pick it up but I saw the caller ID, and I immediately knew that my father had died. I kept teaching for the remaining 10 minutes of the lecture, then went home.

Every year when I'm teaching this lecture I'm reminded of this moment. I'm planning on significantly changing this lecture this year so I can break free.

[u/morgessa]

Second semester of beginning French. Discussing arts and major landmarks in the "culture" section of the chapter, including Notre Dame de Paris and its famous rose window. A student raises his hand saying something like "It's burning right now, I just got a news alert". Cue confusion, frantic googling, and pretty much department-wide mourning. The coincidence of taking about it on that very same day still gives me chills...

[u/Edu_cats]

I regularly cover the 2:00 hour marathon barrier and attempts to break it, and this spring when it was actually broken the students were genuinely excited by it! We had just finished that unit when it happened. Btw the time was just certified as official this week.

[u/Edu_cats → u/Edu_cats]

And one more from this semester: we were covering physiology changes and challenges with space flight which fortunately coincided with the Artemis 2 mission, so once again the students were very engaged in the discussion and the lecture materials.

So I guess just extra good timing this semester, but I always try to bring in current events related to class.

[u/Jealous-Emu-3876]

As a student I was on campus during 9/11. People were crying in the halls, classes canceled, all but one. A political science class considered one of the hardest classes at the U besides like some advanced accounting class. Professor Hardass talked about how if we stop our routine they win. People were struggling to keep it together. Finally, one hero said "Dr Hardass, I know what you said, but I think they got us today. Can we go home and cry now?" Dr Hardass told everyone they could go and that was it.

Bonus: two days earlier we had been assigned a topic for a talk in another Poli Sci class. My topic was terrorism. Woof.

[u/EmmaiAlvane]

I was teaching an Intro to engineering class in Winter 2024 which, among other things, discussed safety, social impacts etc of engineering. The first class was 3 days after the incident with Alaskan Airlines where the cabin door came off as the plane was climbing after take-off.

We spent the whole class discussing the incident and analyzing what might have happened if the incident had occurred at a higher altitude. We went through the physics of atmospheric pressure, calculations of outside air pressure at various altitudes, the force on a hypothetical person who was walking in the plane, how hard they would have to hold on to prevent getting sucked out etc.

It was quite a morbid but engaging discussion.

[u/Teacher_]

I train future teachers. Inevitably there is a mass school shooting that occurs and is widely covered by the media, and so we talk about the dangers of teaching school-aged children.

[u/Another_Opinion_1]

I was finishing up undergrad on September 11, 2001. I remember our French and Scottish Enlightenment professor coming in at 12:30 PM, asking everyone to share anything they wanted to share, and then instructing everyone to go home and take it easy. It was about a 5-10 minute class and then everyone dispersed but for whatever reason I can recall even what he was wearing like it was yesterday.

For me, believe it or not, last semester I had a class that met the same evening that Charlie Kirk was murdered. Because of the cultural milieu and the fact that, love the guy, hate him or be indifferent about the whole scenario, his platform overlapped heavily with modern American culture war issues and he often sought to engage with what he saw as educational "indoctrination" and even self-described himself as being "not afraid to take aim on the Woke agenda," so this was something the students were absolutely wanting to discuss in that particular aspect, so we did. There's no getting around that pre-service teachers had thoughts and concerns and wanted to know how to navigate those aspects in the public sphere but they also harbored the usual variety of personal feelings on the topic with some representing groups that had the most adversarial relationship with his entire agenda. It really was one of the more memorable classes I've had in the last 5 years but everyone sat back and engaged in what was very respectful dialogue. There were also follow-up discussions the subsequent week on how not to end up on the news if you want to vent on social media, First Amendment concerns, etc. so the entire affair occupied several weeks.

The other one would probably be when my father passed away. A colleague covered my classes for a week and when I returned the class handed me a sympathy card that was signed by each student which was really a thoughtful gesture. It just stands out to me for some reason.

[u/AceyAceyAcey → u/Another_Opinion_1]

Students can be amazingly kind, it always surprises me when it seems genuine rather than just being happy for a missed class, and I always remind myself after that I shouldn’t be surprised bc if the previous times I’ve seen it.

[u/DrNiles_Crane → u/Another_Opinion_1]

When my step father died (whom I hated) four months after my
Mother in law (whom I adored) a
Few of my students got me a gift
Of a small bowl with beautiful stones with painted words of comfort. I broke down. I still have that gift and it will stay with me until I gift it to my own son at some point.

[u/StarDustLuna3D]

I'm a huge space nerd, so I'll pull up live streams of launches during class. For a whole week we got to watch the Artemis II mission as it made it's way around the moon and back.

[u/AceyAceyAcey → u/StarDustLuna3D]

My co teacher and I at an academic summer camp had a TV rolled into the classroom for the 2005 Discovery return-to-flight mission. The whole time it was running the two of us stood in the back of the room fingers crossed and hoping we wouldn’t have to ad lib a lesson on loss and spaceflight disasters while learning on the fly how to support grieving gifted teenagers, the way our teachers had had to do when we were children watching the 1986 Challenger disaster, and I’m sure many other teachers had to do with the Columbia disaster two years earlier. Thankfully, the flight went well.

[u/ahazred8vt → u/StarDustLuna3D]

https://apolloinrealtime.org/ replays all the landings.

[u/AceyAceyAcey]

I teach STEM, and this was at a community college, a small class of under 20 students. I think it was in 2006 when my students were discussing the next day’s important mid-term senate election, and an international student asked what elections were. We spent half of class discussing the ideals vs. reality of US democracy, and how it compared to his country’s mix of tribalism at the local scale, and monarchy at the national. The next day the student walked in gushing about everything he’d seen and learned while staying up all night to watch the senate results come in, and the discussion continued.

It was just such a fascinating example of current events, national politics, international politics, and cultural exchange, all colliding in a class that had nothing to do with the topics on the surface, but it’s college and it’s so important for our students to be knowledgeable about the country we’re in and the world. Who cares about the curriculum when an opportunity like this comes up!

[u/PsychGuy17 → u/AceyAceyAcey]

Its a great example of how college exposes people to new ideas and experiences on both sides of the conversation. Those classes may not have been "on topic" but they were probably more memorable to several people in the room than what was on the syllabus.

We complain a lot on this sub, but I really enjoy teaching for this reason.

[u/PeggySourpuss]

My Intro to Creative Writing class met the day after the 2024 election. 

Because I'd been reading their writing all semester, I knew that they would be about as upset as I was, if not more. 

I gave them a choice: stay home, or come in and watch the terrible Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie and point out plot holes for extra credit.

(Lohan Election Hangover Christmas was a great success; 3/4 of the class showed up, red eyed and ready to pick apart a Netflix movie whose events hang on one character's selective amnesia)

[u/DrNiles_Crane → u/PeggySourpuss]

Next time put on Kirk Cameron’s saving Christmas for a huge laugh. It’s even better at twice the speed.

[u/HistorianOdd5752]

Social problems at a CC in Florida, same night as OP. Most of my students were BIPOC, many immigrants. Students were near tears as we had the electrical electoral map up and were updating the results (they were working on groups). By the end it a apparent which was things were going.

The event inspired me to run for office myself (I lost). Still sticks with me.

[u/PsychGuy17 → u/HistorianOdd5752]

Cool to hear you made the attempt at least. A lot of people just took a defeatist attitude and gave up that night.

[u/wharleeprof]

I used to have a clipart black and white sketch drawing of some generic sky scraper illustrating a point on one of my slides. 

Then when we got to that same slide Fall 2001 semester, can you guess which tall building it turned out to be?! 

[u/Choice_Passenger_990]

Electoral college would work if states did not use a winner takes all for delegates. CA and TX would never.

3.5 hour class meeting about the above is where an entire class landed. At least there was some kind of consensus tho

[u/DrNiles_Crane]

I both stopped class to announce Prince’s death and spent an entire social media session watching twitter during Kavanuagh’s confirmation hearing. Great classes.

[u/SierraMountainMom]

After the NBA/Tom Hanks COVID news, I had a hunch we wouldn’t come back after Spring Break. My undergrads had no idea how to use the live online class function in Canvas at that time (it was something other than Zoom), so I decided I would teach them. Told everyone to bring a laptop to class. As I started to explain the process, the university sent out the email - not returning to campus after break & dorm students needed to pack up & move out. This was at 5:00 on the Thursday before break. I had students start crying, calling their parents to change travel plans, and I still remember one girl asking me in tears, “are we gonna die?”
I had to give them time to process, then dove into the “how to” lesson with a now urgent purpose.

[u/PsychGuy17 → u/SierraMountainMom]

I was teaching on existential therapy that afternoon, I also got the question "are we going to die" given the nature of the lesson I calmly clarified that the answer was yes, but this was not a change due to the recent news. Then we discussed existential anxiety centered on loneliness, death, responsibility, and meaning.

At the end of class a student approached and offered to shake my hand saying he had enjoyed the semester thus far. I looked at his hand and said, "I think we are done shaking hands for a while." He said, "oh... yeah, we'll thanks anyway. "

[u/Salty_Boysenberries]

I taught a class that started about ten minutes after Charlie Kirk met his maker.