Educators on college campuses across the continent are currently debating the best ways to introduce “active learning” into their large-lecture classrooms. After twenty years of teaching classes with 500 –700 students, the author has concluded that nothing encourages students more to participate actively in their education than having you, their professor, strive to personalize their experience in your course. Yes, that involves knowing your students by name, encouraging and answering their questions in class, challenging them to think and to discuss their thoughts with their lecture-hall neighbors, spending time with your students outside the lecture hall, and crafting memorable lecture-hall moments that enliven your lectures. It is the supreme challenge of the professors in such classes to find ways to “shrink” their classes so that the students can connect to the course and its content. Some of the low-tech means to this end – a good night’s sleep and a keen memory; several thousand colored index cards; 500 quarters; and several rolls of 1000-sheet bathroom tissue.

Many of the students in entry-level science classes at UW are typically math-science phobics. They firmly believe that an understanding of science is hopelessly unattainable. Many are looking for passive learning experience where they take notes from “stand and deliver” lectures, memorize simple qualitative facts and regurgitate them on multiple-choice exams, and remain completely anonymous throughout the course. These students learn quickly that this plan has gone awry when they are called on by name in class, greeted on campus after a three-day weekend, and cajoled and coerced to engage actively in their geology course. How to do these things involves - among other things - meeting with every student in the course individually (a course requirement) and learning their names; offering them the opportunity to write class-ending one-minute essays and query cards about the things that interested or puzzled them about the day’s lecture; and, participating in “whole-class” demonstrations of such geological phenomena as exponential decay, the span of geologic time, P- and S-waves, faults, plate boundaries, and volcanic-flank eruptions.