October 07, 2003

The Principles of Chaos

Let's just say that for whatever reason, hypothetically speaking of course, I wanted to teach a class that was the most chaotic class ever. So chaotic in fact, that it would teach the principles of chaos by the way it was administered. How would I go about doing this?

Well, first of all, I would make sure that it was a huge class. Huge! So big in fact, that it would fill up all of Wheeler Auditorium and still not have enough space. Next, I would hire a staff of all undergraduate students to administer and facilitate the class. Having done this, I would next pick a fairly interesting, if not controversial topic of study - medical ethics for instance - and then advertise the class as fulfilling an obscure breadth requirement. Let's just say, theoretically of course, that it were to fulfill the Philosophy & Values breadth requirement for the College of Letters & Science. My initial preparation would be complete, and I would be ready to begin teaching the fundamental principles of chaos.

To make my class special, and to add to the chaos, I would next add a completely superfluous and ridiculous component known as a discussion section, create homework assignments that neither benefit in the learning of the material nor test understanding, and create a poorly designed, ill maintained website to distribute the aforementioned, useless homework. To add an element of chaotic rage from those who chose to enroll in the class, I would only make my class worth a mere 2 units, but have enough work to seemingly compete with many classes on campus worth 4 units. I would also add the notion of pop quizzes, administered at the whim of a teaching assistant, and instead of passing out quizzes, I would force the reading of questions out loud as if it were a 3rd grade spelling test. Furthermore, I would ensure that my quizzes did not test knowledge such as what the speaker said in their presentation but instead obscure details from the course reader, such as which herb out of the ten described was most likely to kill you.

At this point, my class would be fairly chaotic, but not nearly enough for me. You see, I'm a very motivated person and I always try to be the best at whatever I do. To take my class to the proverbial "next level" I would hire a coordinator staff that looked about as enthused about being present as a person about to clean the latrine after a diahrreic incident. In addressing audience questions at the end, I would make sure that the microphone would be passed in a manner that best confused the speaker and threw off his or her flow. I would further ensure that speakers would cancel their presentations at the last minute and that no audio/visual component ever worked. The videos I chose to show would be grossly outdated and often times mind-numbingly boring, and also, as an added bonus, I would make sure that the lights in the hall never got dimmed and that the sound never worked.

As a final component to chaos, I would administer a huge exam every four weeks, but not prepare adequately for this endeavor. I would spend about 20 minutes of class time setting up the projector and then force students to sit by section. I would leave every other row empty for no reason whatsoever and force students to sit nearly in each other's laps while they try to take an exam. Similar to the pop quizzes, I would chose not to focus on general themes of presentations and what speakers had to say, but instead on more pressing matters like "who are the course coordinators." To wrap up my design for the class, I would require all course coordinators to go through a training session that taught them how to put on airs of superiority and pretension so as to make others believe that the reason students took this particular class was because of the coordinators rather than the subject or the presenters.

Having prepared my class so immaculately, I would then take my proposal to the College of Letters & Science, which given the number of subjects my class touched upon, would probably list it as an Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS) course. They would probably leave the actual course number up to me, and after giving it some thought, I think I would choose the number 130. Why? I guess I've always just liked that number for whatever reason. What does it really matter anyway? This was all a hypothetical situation anyway. Why would I really want to teach a class on chaos?