Good Idea: Professor Welcomes Parents to First-Year Core Class
WALLA WALLA, Wash. -- The idea came to Rogers Miles a year ago, as he graded final exams. "That's when most of my best ideas come to light," Miles says with a chuckle.
In all likelihood, the concept had been germinating for a decade as Miles, an adjunct assistant professor of religion, led his share of first-year students through "Antiquity & Modernity," the bedrock class for Whitman's Core program.
"There have been so many times when first-year parents, visiting campus, would tell me how much their son or daughter was enjoying Whitman as well as the Core class," Miles says. "In many cases, parents were envious, saying they wished they could take the class too."
That wish came true this past fall for first-year parents wanting to follow along as their offspring tackled the Core class and the ancient texts of Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, and Plato. Parents were invited during fall semester orientation to enroll in Parents Core, a web-based discussion group. Interested parents were given access to a Blackboard site on the Whitman webpage, where Miles posted the same reading assignments, handouts, and daily discussion questions he was using in his on-campus Core class. An email forum allowed parents to "discuss" issues related to the class readings.
More than 60 parents registered for the Blackboard site, and nearly half of those parents accessed the site anywhere from 95 to 1,492 times. "My impression, from talking to parents and looking at the statistics, is that the program was more successful than I could have hoped," Miles says. "I'm certainly going to sponsor Parents Core again next fall. You never do a course just once. That's no way to tell if it really works or not."
The class was successful, in part, because the content was meaningful to parents, Miles says. "It always made perfect sense to me when parents told me they wished they could take the Core class. As someone in middle age who re- read these texts in preparing to teach the class, I understood their interest. To me, these great works of literature now resonate in ways that are far more meaningful than when I was younger. I can remember as an 18-year-old reading Augustine's Confessions and thinking, 'Come on, get on with the story. No more prayers and meditations-- just get on with the story.'"
"Now, I savor the prayers and meditations that begin each book of the Confessions. I see all sorts of points that eluded me when I was younger. Perception among 18-year-olds is so much different, in large part because they have little sense of their own mortality. They understand love, and we certainly emphasize love in Core, but for them death remains just a theoretical entity."
In other, more practical ways, Miles says, the Parents Core class helped first-year parents make active connections with the college, with each other, and with their own children. "Discussions in the email forum might have started with parents talking about one of the texts, but there were also times when parents were simply comparing notes on how their children were coping with their first year in college."
One of the highlights of the inaugural Parents Core program was an on-campus gathering during Parents Weekend in late October. "There must have been 25 to 30 parents there," Miles says. He and two other Core faculty members -- Bernard Fenik, the visiting Johnston Professor of Classics, and Margo Scribner, a lecturer in the English and General Studies programs -- led the parents in a discussion of one of the class texts, the Book of Job. "It was a great discussion," Miles says. "There was no shortage of parents willing to voice their opinions and questions."
In launching his Parents Core class, Miles planned to discontinue his first experiment in "distance learning" after Parents Weekend. "But then I heard from a number of parents who asked if I could please keep it going at least through the end of the semester. That's what we did."
Stuart Lichtman, a first-year parent from Santa Barbara, Calif., is one of the parents who appreciated Whitman's first Parents Core class, calling it a "remarkable experience."
"I had lots of neat discussions with my son Per about the books and issues covered in the class," Lichtman adds. "I grew, I bonded on another level with my son, I met some other, very interesting parents, and I gained a real sense of accomplishment."
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