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As you may be able to tell, our class has now reached the era of the #RussianRevolution
So, continuing our exploration of student #cultural #literacy (as always: descriptive, not prescriptive!):
1) As I expected, "Battleship Potemkin" was something completely new to them. They were suitably moved by the famous scene on the Odessa steps
https://archive.org/details/BattleshipPotemkin
(but why I did I first have to admonish a couple of them focused on their laptops or phones to turn toward the screen? WTF)
1/n
If "Battleship Potemkin" meant nothing to our students, then they were certainly not aware of Eisenstein's great "October," either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k62eaN9-TLY
I hinted that, when their cultural tastes had further matured, I might at last introduce them to
"Aelita Queen of Mars" (1924) 
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014646/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_pl
3/n
But back to issues of students' cultural literacy, for lack of a better term (as noted, always descriptive rather than prescriptive)
Today, re: Bolshevik Revolution
One had an idea of housing blocks & monumental architecture
The rest: pretty much: 0
I noted opinion polls showing that students/young people had more positive views of socialism vs. capitalism--which I found interesting insofar as they had 0 knowledge of Marxism, socialist theory, revolutionary history
All instructive!
4/n
@CitizenWald
I’m curious what the composition of this class is—e.g. is this upper-division history majors or first-years in a gen ed class?
But I do find that even history majors don’t necessarily come in with a good background in the history of political ideologies (socialism, fascism, or even liberalism).
@tkinias Short answer: small seminar with students at various points in their studies. Our course numbers reflect general levels, and this one is classified intermediate, but there is no set sequence, and few courses have prerequisites, so anyone can take pretty much anything. All but one are in their first year (counting spring-semester transfers)
And as I've said: I am not criticizing or testing them: just need to know what they know or don't know so that I can pitch my explanations correctly
@CitizenWald
Oh yeah, I know you’re not “kids today”-ing!—just trying to calibrate to what I see with my own students.
@tkinias Right, that was just for the benefit of anyone jumping in here in midstream.
And what do you find?
(I have taught a large gen-ed lecture course at UMass but that was via Zoom during COVID and TA's had all the direct contact with the students, so it was hard to draw too many inferences from that)
@CitizenWald
I find students vary quite a lot in what kind of knowledge they bring in—but that I can’t really make any assumptions. (E.g., when I taught modern Britain last year, I wound up taking a class period in the early 20C to explain what socialism and Communism are, because I realized students didn’t have the background to understand the significance of the rise of Labour).
@CitizenWald
But things vary quite dramatically between the lower-division courses which are mostly nonmajors taking their general education courses and the upper-division courses full of history majors. Our history majors are very good at synthesizing material from different courses, so by the time they’re juniors & seniors they’re building a network of good background knowledge.
@tkinias I would say the same. However, not only are we small: with a greatly shrunken faculty and a student body just starting to grow again after our near-death experience and the decision not to take a new entering class in 2019, we are being asked to teach more courses at intermediate or lower level, so in effect we need to teach more to generalists (fine with me)
@CitizenWald
that makes sense—we haven’t been through that kind of crisis, but history has shrunk to the point that I am one of only two T/TT historians on campus, so there’s similarly not a lot of opportunity for narrow specialization!
@tkinias Ah, not so different, then. I enjoy teaching beginning students or those otherwise not specialized, but I do think/fear, that, for this reason and others, our courses are going to have to change a lot in the next few years. I think I'll be able to do what I need to, but the curriculum may lose a lot
@CitizenWald
Yeah, our curriculum is going to wind up being very different from what we had when I was an undergrad in a department with a few dozen faculty. But letting go of the old way of narrowly slicing things up by nation-state is probably a good thing anyway.
@tkinias Sure, the national organizing principle is a relic of the 19th century. What I worry about it just a new thinness of the curriculum, a situation in which we tackle things eclectically and superficially. One advantage here is that we have a consortium with a fuller range of course offerings. But that places more stress on good academic advising, which in turn requires faculty who are both broadly and deeply educated.
@CitizenWald
Yes, exactly. I think we need to have more conversations in our discipline about how we organize curriculum in small departments.
@tkinias seem viable, and pivot (as we say nowadays) more toward those (+ new ones I'll need to create) that are somewhere between "special topics" and "methods": in practice, find some themes and readings that really interest me, and use those to illustrate what it means to "do history" and at the same time impart some general sense of the broad sweep of history or a particular era. I can live with that. If they let me. 
@CitizenWald
an example of where I’m trying to be creative with this is a “1914” course I’m teaching in the fall—it’s basically a survey of the world just before the Great War
it’s a snapshot in time, but the idea is just to give students a taste of how vast and interconnected and dynamic the world was a century ago
@tkinias @CitizenWald A friend told me he realized only very recently that various 19th-century cultural icons (the "old West," Sherlock Holmes, samurai [in certain settings], etc.) were or would have been contemporaneous. A lot of people only ever learn history as totally disconnected "time periods" that turn everything into a kind of mystical totem rather than a thing in (or a piece of fiction pretending to be in) a real and interconnected world.
@jnthnwwlsn @tkinias @CitizenWald making a timeline and stacking random events across the globe on it is always informative.
@lizrdeb @jnthnwwlsn @CitizenWald
I’ve been talking with my honors HIST 101 students about how when the textbook is like “Greeks chapter, China chapter, Africa chapter” it breaks our ability to keep things chronologically lined up.
@lizrdeb @jnthnwwlsn @CitizenWald
I’ve been doing a lot of synchronizing in my East Asia class this semester, trying to help students keep what we’re discussing in China, for example, lined up with what they know about European (and later, US) history.
@tkinias @lizrdeb @jnthnwwlsn As a kid and student, I always loved a nice big comparative chart, whether in a book on one of those subjects, or as a standalone document or book. Even the old Time-Life history volumes did that, as I recall.