well 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 okay principle number one cast the lecture in a narrative arc and 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 like suppose they were not racist 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 [Music] so i started by telling a story that i had read in a newspaper the week before a man and his family 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 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 finished like this the southern planters were not unlike the man stuck in the cave like were they racist 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 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 like 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 that doesn't mean the example i just gave is the only way to do it like tension can be created in so many different ways like 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 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 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 in another way our students are not just brains on sticks to use james smith's phrase if you ask 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 doritos the normative perspective on knowledge just means the facts of a thing for example hitler put 6 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 and look that's good but even then knowing the normative and the
situational framewood 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 and so in my experience a lecture is a good way to get to the affections like we're not aiming to fall prey to emotionalism where we bypass the students
brains in order just to make them feel stuff like 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 all right well thanks for watching if you want more videos like this one then
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
