Beating The Numbers Game: Effective Teaching In Large Classes

Phil Wankat wrote somewhere—and I agree—that anything you can do in a large class you can do better in a small one. When we find ourselves teaching a mob, it’s easy to throw up our hands, conclude that there’s no chance of getting any responsiveness out of 150 or 300 students in an auditorium, and spend 45 hours showing transparencies to the listless 60% who bother to show up from day to day. We can generate some interest by bringing demonstrations to class, but there are only so many hydrogen balloons we can explode and even they lose their impact after a while.