Minds on Fire

Minds on Fire is a book by Mark Carnes, a historian, and progenitor of Reacting To The Past – learning history via immersion role-playing in an elaborate game. I’m halfway through the book, limiting myself to a chapter a day. It is very tempting to read more because Carnes is literally “on fire” as he evangelizes how Reacting games have completely changed students in many a class. Just from the first chapter alone, I was sold on his approach. I felt that if I was teaching history, I would clearly incorporate a Reacting game into my class. The gains by the students in terms of critical thinking and oral communication, not to mention the analytical research skills, seem significantly higher than any class I’ve been in. Part of the reason is that the students put in so much work into the class – they are completely immersed and literally inhabit their roles in the game. If you want to be pumped up about teaching, even if you don’t teach history (and might never use a Reacting game), then I highly recommend this book. The author’s writing style is evocative, hard-hitting, and it makes me want to be a better teacher!

The students aren’t a particularly special breed. This approach has been used on many different campuses and in a variety of settings. Some students drop the class early on as they start to imagine the workload, although that imagination is somewhat superficial. They don’t realize that once they immerse themselves, they no longer count the hours and their workload has actually increased more than they imagined. But it’s self-imposed, akin to immersing oneself in video games – and I know a number of students who spend the majority of their free time on computer games, which from what I understand (since I don’t play them) are quite the immersive experience. Gamification is a recent buzzword in education circles, although these often refer to the computer screen variety. Reacting, on the other hand, has the students interacting with each other in flesh and blood, with all the accompanying psychological and physical signals – not just words typed on a screen with an occasional emoji as a supporting character.

There are moments in my chemistry class where students are immersed and suddenly snap up when I announce that class has just ended. This does not happen all that often. That being said, I’ve managed to reduce the number of students who “watch the clock” in my classes over the years by trying to be more engaging. I would like to say that when the students stop watching the clock it is because they are so immersed in an interesting activity, but that’s not often the case. Often it’s simply because I’m trying to tell a spellbinding wrap-up (I’m pretty good at “lecturing”) to what they are learning and they are actually listening with rapt attention. That is, I know how to hold an audience, but are they actively learning? (No, I don’t spend my entire class lecturing – there is a fair bit of discussion and working on problems.)

Reading Carnes’ book made me think about whether I could incorporate a mini-Reacting experience into my class. It would be less effective because it takes several weeks for students to start inhabiting their characters and being immersed in the game. At first they are suspicious that any of this would work, and think it strange that they are doing all the “talking” in class (while the instructor recedes into the background as the semester progresses). Carnes actually goes into the psychology, sociology, and speculates (quite reasonably I think) on why Reacting works so well in many cases (sometimes the experience falls flat – he dissects these too). I had previously designed a one-week (three class session) experience on the Periodic Table. Students pretended to be 19^th century scientists in an alien universe trying to construct a scheme to organize the elements. I had sneakily designed the elements to seem quite alien (I enjoyed making up names!) but retained many of the issues/problems that Mendeleev and others would run into in our world. I’ve run this exercise on a number of classes and it has proved quite the immersive experience for students. The problem is that in an introductory chemistry class, there’s much more than needs to be “covered”. Or maybe the problem is that I haven’t come up with a good creative solution to do both simultaneously. Perhaps the inklings of my previous post’s Imagining New Elements final project might be a road to some sort of immersive experience.

Our chemistry curriculum is rather traditional and there’s quite the wait before one’s turn comes around to teach a special topics class. (I’ve taught one about once every 5-6 years.) This is because our department runs very lean, and there are so many core areas to be “covered”. Besides the introductory year of General Chemistry, there’s organic, analytical, physical, inorganic, and biochemistry. So I don’t see being able to run a long Reacting type game in one of my classes. (Maybe I just need to think about this more.)

Where else could our students get an immersive experience in our department? Undergraduate Research! (It’s a strength of our department.) Are there different ways I could run my research group so the students simply want to work on their research projects as much as they can? I have some students in my group who do this. My most productive student, unfortunately, simply lost interest in classes and stopped going (and then dropped out) but not before he had contributed to several papers. Most of my students are in the 18-22 age range, and college is many things to them. Academics aren’t always the most important thing on the list. Nor is research. Most of my students enjoy research, but it’s just one among other things that they do, and they are not immersed in it as much as the students Carnes describes in Reacting history classes. Perhaps the way I run my group doesn’t lend itself well to immersion. Because I was trained to essentially work independently (and computational chemistry is a rather solitary activity), my students seem to have adopted the same approach. I hadn’t consciously thought about changing my style, but reading Carnes is prompting me to think about how to consciously and actively build camaraderie in my group. Some years it just happens organically, but other times it does not. However, I think I should make some changes to my approach. I’m not sure what exactly I’ll do.

In any case, I’m looking forward to reading the second half of Minds on Fire. Carnes has made me, a non-historian, think carefully about my classes and my students, and what I can do to help them acquire the “science bug” that I have. Not forcing them to do something they don’t want to do, but providing a conducive environment so that those who choose to immerse themselves in chemistry learn deeply and that work in fact seems like play.