I’m teaching sophomore-level “Modern Physics” this term, which is my third year in a row doing this particular class with basically this set of notes. I do little tweaks of things here and there, but the general topics to be covered and the order in which to cover them is pretty well set.

And, you know, three times through this is probably about enough. Once is definitely not– putting together lectures is a significant enough effort that it’d be a shame to do all that work for a single term of classes. Twice is probably also not quite enough– the second pass gets some bugs out, and smooths off some rough edges, but there are still things that could go better. Four times, though, would probably be too much, and five, as they say, is right out. Around the fourth time through the same material with the same approach, I start to get bored, and if I’m bored with it, odds are good that the students will be, too.

This isn’t too much of a problem with fairly standard major-track courses like sophomore “Modern Physics.” If I bow out next year, there are several other folks in the department who could take my place and do a great job. I’d happily pass on the notes and assignments that I’ve used, for them to do with as they will. Or, if I get assigned this course again, I can fairly easily blow it up and re-do my notes enough to make for a fresh approach that would keep me from burning out completely.

That’s a harder problem for courses that are more unique, though. My fall term course was another one on its third pass, and that’s something I pieced together myself to fit in our “Sophomore Research Seminar” program. The semi-joking title is “A Brief History of Timekeeping,” and that’s not a topic for which a set book exists (though it’s on my list of potential next-book projects). I had to make all the materials and assignments up on my own, and it’s a lot harder to change gears with that.

The Timekeeping course, though, is not a course topic that has to be covered in the way that sophomore “Modern Physics” is. That is, if I get bored with it, and don’t want to do it again, it’s not something that anyone else would be obliged to take up. I could just walk away, and not do it again for several years (in fact, the three times I’ve taught it have had a gap of at least a couple of years between them). Or ever, if I was sufficiently bored.

At an institutional level, though, that’s a bit of a problem, because the course does fill a curricular requirement for sophomore-level courses that introduce research without being tied to a specific discipline. Every student at the college needs to take one of these, which means we need to offer a whole bunch of these every year. So if I walk away from offering one of these, the specific topic might disappear, but somebody else needs to pick up a course in that same category.

And those courses are a ton of work to put together, particularly for someone coming from the sciences, since the modes of research explicitly called for in the standards for these courses are not the kind of thing we usually do. Even for folks on the other side of campus, though, coming up with a sufficiently general topic is a ton of work, and not something that’s easy to switch from one person to another.

Staffing these kinds of requirements thus becomes a bit of a headache for the college as a whole. The courses can be fun to develop, so when a requirement like this gets introduced, it draws a bunch of interest from faculty looking for something novel to do, but making it a requirement means that those courses have to get offered and staffed long past the point where the initial cohort of faculty have grown bored with their original topics. Those faculty might not easily be able to come up with a second good idea, and the faculty who didn’t jump at the initial round likely aren’t all that interested in taking their place. But somebody has to teach something that checks off the necessary box for students who need it to graduate…

This has been on my mind a bit, as we’re in the process of discussing changes to our “common curriculum”/”general education” program, the set of required courses that all students have to satisfy in order to graduate. There are a lot of general ideas being kicked around that sound really innovative and exciting, courses where I think “Yeah, it could be fun to be a part of that…”

But as I head toward lecturing about solutions of the Schrodinger equation for a finite step potential for the third consecutive year, I wonder what happens to those innovative and exciting courses after the first couple of years, when they stop being quite so much fun to teach. The problem is further compounded when you consider interdisciplinary or team-taught courses. I might have fun putting together a new course together with a faculty member from another department, but for more specific and interesting topics, that seems difficult to modularize in a way that would let somebody else easily take my place. But the prospect of locking two people into teaching the same material every year in perpetuity seems pretty unappealing from the faculty side…

Of course, it’s possible that this is mostly a problem specific to me– that is, I may just be unusually easy to bore. I don’t think that’s the whole story, though, given some of the issues that are driving the aforementioned revision of the Gen Ed requirements. And I wonder what methods are out there to get around the staffing problems that come up when fun new courses start to seem dull to the professors who have to teach them.