I’m back in the office after the long weekend.  We’re into our final two weeks of the semester.  Folks are returning to campus this morning in various stages of mid-holiday exhaustion, anxiety, and satiety.  Few times of year in the academic calendar are as potentially frantic as the two weeks of school that remain after Thanksgiving and before the Christmas holidays!  ‘Twill be a busy time.

Once again, I have failed to get as far as I had hoped in my Western Civilization courses.  My ancient history class (History 1A) will, as it has every semester since I started teaching in the fall of 1993, stop well short of the mandated "end point."  According to the catalog, History 1A is designed to cover, in one semester, all of Western Civ from the Mesopotamians up to the death of Louis XIV in 1715.   1B, the modern half of the sequence, merely covers the remaining 290 years of recorded time.

When I first started teaching here at Pasadena City College, I asked one of the older profs (long since retired) if he ever "got" to 1715.  "No", he said thoughtfully, "I never have.  I made it to the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) once, but that was a rare year."  He told me to try my best, and accept that "falling short" (chronologically speaking) was part and parcel of what it meant to teach history survey courses.

When I first started teaching, I covered far more ground than I do these days.  Fresh out of graduate school in the early 1990s (and still writing my dissertation), my knowledge was thin indeed.  That first year of teaching at the college, I composed my lectures out of a few old textbooks, particularly this one.  I was usually only one week ahead of my students.  What I lacked in depth, I made up for in enthusiasm; I had learned early on that a good lecturer is not necessarily someone with a profound grasp of details, but rather someone who can weave a compelling narrative. 

Still, in those early years, I worried about "filling up" my teaching hour.  My greatest fear was of running out of things to say.  I needn’t have worried — in the dozen years that I’ve been teaching, I’ve never run out of thing to say (though that may say more about my personality than my erudition.)  Today, my biggest task is choosing what not to say!  Especially in these final weeks, I ruthlessly cut out entire lectures, trying to decide what my students absolutely need and what they can do without.

For example, in my Monday/Wednesday History 1A course (the one that is supposed to get to 1715), I have four lectures left.  One of those days is devoted to preparing them for the final, so really, I only have three lectures.  And I’m just now reaching the fall of the Roman Empire.  I’m a millennium short of where I ought to be.    What must I say about the Middle Ages?  The Renaissance?  Do I cut out the Vikings?  The Black Death?  Feudalism?  The development of the Western Church?  So many vital topics, and simply not enough time.  This is not unusual; in the last five or six years, this is where I usually am two weeks before the end of the semester.

Yes, I was absent a couple of days this fall.  But even if I had given every lecture I had planned to give, I would still be centuries away from the prescribed goal.  And it’s not as if I’ve wasted time in the earlier weeks of the course!  I’ve whipped through Hammurabi, the Hittites and the Hebrews; I’ve given only cursory (if, one hopes, entertaining) treatment to Sappho and Socrates and St. Paul.  I tell stories and relate anecdotes that consume time, it’s true — but if I didn’t, I would simply be spitting out a litany of facts and dates that would vanish from my students’ minds as soon as their finals were finished.

I know I "covered more ground" when I was a novice teacher.  I covered more ground because, frankly, I knew a hell of a lot less about the subjects I was lecturing on.   Though I don’t read new material vociferously, I do continue to explore the subject matter on my own time.  Today, for example, I know infinitely more about the struggle between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the early first century of the common era than I did in 1995.  I have more detail, and better stories, to share with my students.  And I’m not going to sacrifice all the good stories for the sake of fulfilling the impossible demand of making it to the building of Versailles and the War of the Spanish Succession in the same semester in which I’ve been lecturing on the religious reforms of Amenhotep IV!

I’m not blithely disregarding the seriousness of the catalog descriptions.  When my students transfer on to four-year institutions, those institutions will have the right to assume that the "History 1A" mentioned on their transcript covered all the material the college catalog promised.  Transfer credits are awarded based on certain assumptions, and the assumptions are based on written descriptions that we who teach are pledged to follow.  The easy answer to the problem would be to add an extra semester, dividing Western Civ into three terms (History 1A covering the West until the fall of Rome, 1B covering the fall of Rome to the Enlightenment, 1C covering Modern Europe.)  But I’ve been told many a time that that idea is a complete non-starter.  Community colleges are interested in getting students through quickly; complaints about how long it takes to transfer are already rife.  Anything that might slow down the process (like adding another semester) is unthinkable. 

So even as history itself expands with each passing year, and even as our knowledge of the human past grows, we must continue to teach this ever-expanding body of material within the same short two semesters.   If I honor the letter of the catalog and rush to 1715, my students will be deprived of all of the stories, the anecdotes, and the details that make history "come alive."  If I focus on keeping the narrative at a reasonable pace, and if I continue to include those fun tidbits that I know students enjoy, I will invariably fall well short of the required destination. 

Sometimes, I think of my job as being like that of a tour bus driver, hired to drive folks from L.A. to San Francisco and show them the sights along the way.  I’ve been given one tank of gas, and a prescribed time limit in which to get my passengers to their destination.  But I’ve also been asked to keep the passengers awake and entertained, and I’ve also been told that my passengers need to see as many points of interest as possible.  If I honor the commitment to get them all the way to San Francisco on time and on that one tank, I’ll take them straight up I-5 through the Central Valley.   No Santa Barbara, no Big Sur.  We won’t wander into any small towns; there will be no time for sight-seeing.  We’ll push on when we’re tired, and we’ll get to our destination on time.  My passengers will have seen nothing but flat farmland, and they won’t have had a chance to get a picture of the state in their minds, but they’ll get where they paid to go.  On the other hand, if I drive up the coast, and stop in the little towns and cities, encouraging my passengers to walk on the beaches and in the redwood forests, we’ll be late.  We’ll probably run out of gas.  But my passengers will have had a hell of a more memorable journey. 

As a teacher, my job is to make the past interesting; my job is to stimulate curiosity about the all-too-easily forgotten human story.  In the time I’ve been allotted, I can either be effective in this task of making history come alive, or I can cover all of the required material, but after my best efforts for lo these dozen years, I’m absolutely convinced I cannot do both.