Night Classes
Each semester I teach one night class, usually on Monday evenings. In the Fall semester, I will teach my Teaching History class for those students planning to become high school History teachers, and in the Spring semester I teach a History of Kentucky class.
Just now I am sitting in my History of Kentucky class in Room 506, Faculty Hall, watching over my students as they labor over their first examination of the semester. Already we have discussed Kentucky before the arrival of Daniel Boone and others from the east, a Kentucky inhabited by the first Kentuckians, various groups of Native Americans in the prehistoric period.
We have discussed the “contact period,” that ferocious time of conflict between the first Kentuckians and those Europeans and African Americans traveling down the rivers or through the Cumberland Gap. This contact period coincided with the American Revolution, and Boone and Benjamin Logan and Stephen Trigg fought together against the British and their Indian allies at the Battle of Blue Licks, after Cornwallis had already surrendered to Washington at Yorktown.
We discussed the Illinois Campaign of George Rogers Clark, various battles between white and Indian Americans, and the events leading up to America's Second American Revolution, the War of 1812. As Dr. James W. Hammack, Jr. told us in his book on Kentucky and the War of 1812, Kentuckians played a crucial role in the war. Indeed, of the 1,826 battle deaths in the War of 1812, 1,200 of that number were dying Kentuckians. So, we have already covered a great deal of ground in this class that meets each Monday evening.
Night classes are challenging for students and teachers alike. We are to meet for two hours and thirty minutes of class time, so I usually hold class from 6:00 to 7:30, take a ten minute break from 7:30 to 7:40, and then finish out the last hour from 7:40 to 8:40. By the time the last students straggle out of the room, by the time the last question is considered, it is usually 9:00 before I trudge up the stairs to my History Department office, put away my books and notes, and lay out my notes and materials for my 9:30 class the next morning.
Like the settlement of Kentucky, night classes are endurance contests; I don't mean contests between the professor and the students, but endurance contests between the professor and the students together against time itself. We cover a week's worth of class in one long session's time. Professors must carry to each night class an extra measure of motivation, an extra dollop of excitement for the material at hand, and an extra portion of strength for the evening's work. Students must put aside thoughts of which basketball game they are missing, or of the time sacrificed from home or dorm.
One thing that I especially enjoy about night classes are the combinations of students gathered together in one classroom. Ambitious teenagers are there side by side with older, non-traditional students who have come straight from work or families to squeeze in perhaps a single class for the semester. I always learn from my young, teenaged, traditional students, but I learn even more from my older, non-traditional students. They teach me things that I did not know about Kentucky History, but they also teach me about motivation and determination and courage.
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Duane Bolin teaches in the Department of History at Murray State University. He may be reached at duane.bolin@murraystate.edu
Story created Mar 05, 2008 - 12:09:11 EST.
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