David Deavel
Like a crooked district attorney who throws as many charges as possible against a defendant, hoping that some of them will stick, I as a teacher throw as many texts and topics at the students as possible without overloading them. Thus, one can see what works and what doesn’t—but never be short of material.

“We come altogether fresh and raw into the several stages of life,” wrote Francois de la Rochefoucauld, “and often find ourselves without experience, despite our years.” This is one of those truths that seems impossible when young. One often assumes that adults “have it all together” and are capable of “adulting” at a high level. Yet the older one gets, the more one realizes how much most of life is improvisation based on previous experiences that are only similar to what one faces now. I rediscover this truth each time I teach a new class.
Granted, it’s true that the teacher who has taught before is not completely without experience. I have been teaching for more than twenty years and know the basics of getting together a syllabus with readings, assignments, quizzes, and tests. Yet, beyond the basic mechanics, a new course is necessarily a bit like testing a cannon. One never knows exactly which elements will cause an explosion. Worse? Which elements will be duds. 
Part of the difficulty is that new classes are often in areas where one has a patchy knowledge at best. My late teacher, Fr. Louis Pascoe, S. J., a cherubic historian of Italian extraction, used to recount how as a young Jesuit, one’s provincial would ask some question about one’s knowledge of, say, chemistry. The correct response, Fr. Pascoe instructed us, was: “I don’t know. I haven’t taught it yet.” Back to the books the young Jesuit would go to figure out how to teach high school students a subject last studied as an undergraduate or possibly as a high schooler oneself.   » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/11/crooked-da-theory-course-development-david-deavel.html