Speaker 1: Hey there and welcome back to Heimler's History Teachers. In the last video I took up the question of whether or not lecturing is a good use of our time in the classroom. And in this video I'll suppose that the answer to that question was, at least in some cases, yes, and so I'd like to give you what I think are the best principles of constructing and delivering a lecture. Principle number one, cast the lecture in a narrative arc. You can get as complicated as you want with this, but ultimately a narrative really comes down to this, tension and release. We are story-craving creatures, and if you can create tension in their minds, they will demand that you release it for them. I think the best example of this that I ever accomplished was in a lecture about the economics of the institution of slavery. My students, probably just like your students, come into the classroom with certain judgments about white plantation owners in the antebellum south. They were just racist and therefore deserving of our judgment. And yeah, that's true, but as you know, that's a very narrow understanding of the whole system in which economics played a larger-than-average role. So I began by asking them, suppose they were Do you think they still would have perpetuated the institution? To which they say, no, it would be dissolved. Okay, I say, let's talk about that. So I started by telling a story that I had read in a newspaper the week before. A man and his family had decided to go caving on Thanksgiving day. And why anybody would decide to go caving on Thanksgiving and frankly any other day is beyond my reckoning, but whatever, that's what they decided to do since this was their annual tradition. Now, in this particular network of caves was a very tight passage called the birth canal. I kid you not, it was the birth canal. And there are videos of people going through this passage, basically inching their way through with great difficulty. And look, I would show it to you, but I have to edit this video and I can't even handle watching it. It is terrifying. Anyway, as the family split up to explore, the father decided that he was going to attempt the birth canal. So he went over to where he thought it was and he got his arms in and then he got his head in and he managed to squeeze one shoulder through and then he got stuck. No matter how hard he tried to dislodge himself, he could not do it. And there he was alone without any ability to call for help and his oxygen was rapidly depleted. And that is where I stopped the story. And at that point I began talking about the economics of slavery and showing them charts and graphs about how devastated the southern economy would be if slavery was abolished. And all the while, hands are going up everywhere and I know what they want to ask. It's probably the same thing you're wondering, what happened to the guy in the cave? But I don't call on anyone. I try to help them feel what it would be like to lose more than half of a nation's GDP and now we would do anything to stop that from happening. And I can tell that they're hearing it, but they're about to come out of their skin. Just tell us what happened to the guy in the cave. The tension is just too much. For them, they think, I just forgot to finish the story and they can't handle it. But once I've gotten all these ideas about the economics of slavery into their heads, I finish like this. The southern planters were not unlike the man stuck in the cave. Were they racists? Of course they were. But there were many other realities pressing in upon them that ultimately made it impossible for them to even entertain the notion of getting unstuck. The tragedy is that the man in the cave ultimately had a heart attack and died and left his family without a husband and a father. And nothing but a wrecking ball could have freed him from those pressing rocks. And yes, racism was a key factor in southern slavery. But even if you could magically take the notion of white supremacy away, the sheer economics of the thing would have ensured its continuance. And only a wrecking ball could destroy it. And the wrecking ball came in the Civil War. And years later, my students would still mention that lecture. It really stuck with them. And why? Because of the tension and release. And all that information that I loaded into that tension about the economics of slavery, that stuck with them. So a good lecture is cast in the form of a narrative. And that doesn't mean the example I just gave is the only way to do it. Tension can be created in so many different ways. You can do it just by starting with misconceptions. Like you can ask your students, what do you know about the first Thanksgiving? And they'll surely tell you all about the buckle hats and the cornucopias and how the natives and the colonists prayed together and gave each other a big interracial hug. And then you say, what if I told you that none of that is true and that most of what we as a nation believed happened on the first Thanksgiving actually came from a novel called Standish of Standish published in the 19th century? Ooh, all of a sudden I have their attention. What do you mean everything we know about Thanksgiving was made up by a novel? There's the tension. And then over the lecture, you release it. So that's first. Good lectures have tension and release. The second principle of a good lecture, in my humble opinion, is to rely on kinetic energy to make a lecture more engaging. I learned this from Disney World. Like when you walk into the Magic Kingdom, for instance, there's movement everywhere. You've got parades going down Main Street. You've got rides circling overhead. And they do that intentionally to create the feeling that there's life in this part. So when I lecture, the very last thing I want to do is stand at a lectern and never move. I'm walking across the classroom. I'm riding on the whiteboard like a madman. I'm moving everywhere. And I very rarely use projected slides. But if I do, there are very few words, or even better, just images. Let me just say, there is nothing, nothing more abhorrent to a student than a lecturer who is just reading from the slides. Like, I can read that faster than you can say it, so just give me the slides and make it stop. Anyway, kinetic energy is vital to an engaging lecture, in my opinion. And finally, third, a good lecture aims for the affections, to use an old Puritan word. Learning, as you know, is not just an affair of the mind. Or to put it another way, our students are not just brains on sticks, to use James Smith's phrase. If you asked the epistemologist John Frame how a person comes to know something, he would say that there are three requisite perspectives on knowledge. The normative, the situational, and the existential. I always tell my students about the three perspectives on knowledge, and they have lovingly dubbed it the epistemological Dorito. The normative perspective on knowledge just means the facts of a thing. For example, Hitler put six million Jews to death in the Holocaust. That is the normative perspective on knowledge. But Frame would say that if the normative is all that you have, you don't really know a thing. So next, there's the situational, which has to do with behavior. I think we would all agree that knowing the metrics of the final solution ought to affect our behavior. Like, it ought to wake us up to oppression and the dangers of authoritarian leaders, and it ought to make us do what we can to avoid both. That's good, but even then, knowing the normative and the situational, Frame would say, you still can't say that you know the thing. What's left is the existential, or to put it another way, the affections. You may know all the metrics of the Holocaust, you may even change your behavior in response to those metrics, but you will never truly know anything about this atrocity until it moves you, until your guts are wrenched by the tragedy of the thing. So in my experience, a lecture is a good way to get to the affections. We're not aiming to fall prey to emotionalism where we bypass the students' brains in order just to make them feel stuff. That's what advertisers do, and we are not advertisers, we are historians. Instead, we aim to stir their hearts through their minds, not apart from them. So when I'm lecturing, I'm doing everything that I can to make sure all three perspectives of knowledge are being imparted to my students. And if I can meet all three of those criteria I just laid out, I lecture. If I can't, then I don't. Simple as that. Alright, well thanks for watching. If you want more videos like this one, go ahead and subscribe, and that will be the signal to me that I should keep going. If you want to watch more videos, then the YouTube algorithm has determined that this video right here is for you. Thanks for coming along and let me know your thoughts down in the comments below about good lecturing and bad lecturing. Heimler out.