What if Kant had a B-Roll?

In Manfred Keuhn’s biography of Kant, he noted that Kant rose in the morning at 5:00 AM, drank tea and smoked a pipe (while meditating, of course) until 6:00, and then prepared lectures or did other writing until 7:00 or 8:00. Kant then spent the next few hours of his day giving lectures.

It is somewhere between preparing lectures and giving them that I want to pause to consider what the preparation and delivery would look like if Kant used a PowerPoint or a b-roll (in television news, supplemental footage running behind the news reader).

The immediate answer is that he would choose not to use either. Or, upon turning around during his lecture and noticing the b-roll behind him, he would cringe and go back to his pipe and tea and meditation.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting thought experiment to consider what events or people from an author’s time s/he would choose to help make the lecture more accessible, more powerful.

What would be running on the b-roll behind a feminist or post-colonial scholar lecturing on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice?

“IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

or behind Marx while he read:

x commodity A = y commodity B, or
x commodity A is worth y commodity B.
20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or
20 Yards of linen are worth 1 coat.

The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this elementary form. Its analysis, therefore, is our real difficulty.”

Could teachers use this thought experiment to ask students to contextualize the works of writers they were studying? To critique them using one school of criticism or another?

Post your thought experiments here. What if Kant had a b-roll?

“Natural” Classroom Arrangements

What is the “natural” state for a classroom of tables and chairs? The answer, according to some in authority, is tidy rows, much like the arrangement Laura Ingalls Wilder endured in her one room schoolhouse. And that wasn’t last century, but the century before.

I received an email from above instructing me that after I finish teaching, I should return the chairs to their rightful places. Now, before I teach, mind you, I have to arrange the room into a suitable learning environment. Now it would seem that I have to move the chairs twice, once to set up a classroom that disrupts the power structure abiding in a room full of tables facing the front (whence the professor is to pontificate), and then again at the end of the class so that status quo-ers who teach after I do don’t have to trouble themselves to set the room to rights.

Transmission model teachers assume that their way is the proper, rightful, ordained state of affairs. All classroom arrangements are socially constructed and therefore can be de- and re-constructed. I just might start a movement–Circlular arrangements of chairs are more normal than rows. Want to join me?