19th Century Cartoon Showing the Introduction of "Baby Electricity to Older Forms of Energy

Many years ago I was sitting in a meeting of a group trying to plan the Wells Program, when Professor Craig Nelson, of the I.U.B. Biology Department, suggested that most of what we call teaching is really sorting. Instructors sort the students on the basis of what each of them knew how to do before they entered the classroom. Those that had been "pre-educated" and understood the rules of the game, generally did well, if they put a reasonable amount of time into the course. But those who had been denied such preparation, often found that they did badly even when they really tried hard. It was as if they were trying to play hockey on a basketball court. And both groups emerged from the course in essentially the same state that they had entered it. This statement rang true to me. I was a first-generation college student, myself, and I went to a very bad high school As a result, I floundered for my first year and a half in college. I knew what poor performance in college can do to one's self-esteem, and I also realized that the game was not fair. I did worse than some of my fellow students, not because I didn't work hard or was stupid, but rather because no one had let me in on what I needed to do to succeed. I was determined to try to break out of this pattern. I wanted to create a course in which even students with poor backgrounds could succeed if they worked hard. But I wanted to do this without "dumbing down" the course. By the end of the semester I still expected students to be thinking about history in a sophisticated

manner because I deeply believe that such thinking will crucial for your generation when it deals with the problems looming ahead. But I wanted to be sure that the steps to get to this kind of complex thinking were available to everyone in the class, not just to those who had been lucky enough to go to a good high school or have well-educated parents who automatically modeled such thinking for them.

To do this I first defined the steps that historians themselves use to think about particular kinds of problems. This has been a demanding task, since many of these have become so automatic to me as a professional historian, that I am not aware that I even do them. Then I saw to it that I modeled each of these clearly and explicitly and that I gave my students an opportunity to practice these steps and get feedback on them. Then I organized these steps in an ascending order of difficulty and intertwined this work with content that I thought students would find interesting and thought provoking, whether or not they had already been introduced into the ways to succeed in history classes.

The result, I hope, is a course that can give students a real jump-start in college. While every academic field is different, nonetheless, I would expect that the ability to think in new ways that students derive from this course will be transferable to many other kinds of courses. And, I would hope that the way that this course is organized should help all students, those who have been "pre-educated" and those who have not, to become more aware of how they use their minds and how these strategies have to be readjusted to succeed in different contexts.