Teaching the Unteachable
I am getting that prickly feeling after six months of planning to teach a course in late September. I am six weeks away from the first lecture, but I have been through this drill and I know how many hours of preparation is required for each scheduled hour of lecture. Experienced professors will tell you they can get it down to 4-5 hours of preparation. When I started teaching in 2007 at Cornell, I had to formulate the courses from scratch, so I was requiring something closer to 15 hours of preparation. I feel like I am closer to 5 than 15 this time since the course is on project financing and I did teach the course for several years as recently as 2017. That means I have five lectures that total about 400 PowerPoint slides to draw from for my updated lectures. I have also prepared one year’s course from the last year’s course, so I also know what has to be changed and updated from one year to another. The three+ years since I taught this course is certainly an added challenge, but then again, there is the student body I’m teaching.
For ten years I taught at Cornell’s business school. Now the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management is not Harvard Business School nor the Wharton School. It perpetually struggles in a broad field of business schools to get in and stay in the top ten. It once hit #5, but its spot seems most often to be between #7 and #13. Nevertheless, it is a top-ranked Ivy League school with respected research-driven professors. It is also a feeder school for Wall Street and as such, tends to specialize in finance (not exclusively, but heavily). That all means that the students mostly have a financing sort of edge to them, and while that can be a good thing, it also means that they are always very hard to impress…and to teach. The students I will be teaching next month are likely no less smart than the Cornell students, but my guess is that they are less Wall Street centric and less aware of all the tricks of the financing trade. I am gambling that they will appreciate my Wall Street war stories even more than the Cornell students did. At Cornell, my courses were affectionately known as “Story-Time with Rich”. What I do also suspect is that the way I tell those stories might have to change as well. That’s less about the students, and maybe more about the times.
I really do think that COVID-19 has changed the business world in thousands of ways and more of those changes are likely permanent and not temporary. It so happens that the project I will be using as the case study is the one I know the best, the failed New York Wheel. It does not bother me at all that it was a failed project since I believe we learn more from failure than success. What is more interesting is the discussion of what happens to big urban centers like New York City in a post-COVID world, and perhaps especially a city that has spent the better part of twenty years gearing itself to becoming the #1 urban tourist destination in the world (with almost 70 million tourists per year), even rivaling Orlando and Las Vegas for visitors. The New York Wheel was intended to be a world-class attraction that drew over three million visitors per year. The sister attraction on the North Shore of Staten Island (a controversial location to say the least) was to be a large urban outlet mall. Let me think for a moment, the two most COVID-impacted industries would seem to be the tourism industry and the retail industry. If you are inclined to suggest the restaurant business as a third, I would remind you that both the Wheel attraction and the outlet mall planned a good deal of food & beverage establishments as secondary revenue sources. This is going to be one hell of a case study.
I tend to think that the things the San Diego students are best at are those things that connect easily to real estate and entrepreneurship. I believe that is why the Department Chair selected the project financing topic for me to teach. It is the intersection of finance, real estate and entrepreneurship. I’m sure he is like anyone in academic administration and feels that he owes his students an array of courses they will be drawn to. I think about the course I taught on securities lending. It was well-received by Wall Street bound finance geeks since it was the only course I could find in any business school that taught the subject and I claimed that it was the essential plumbing of Wall Street. They tended to eat it up, but I’m guessing it would garner far less enthusiasm in San Diego.
The topic that I am most anxious to weave into whatever course I teach these days is that of ethics. I certainly want there to be goodly components of finance and business strategy, but I somehow believe that the ethics lessons are the most valuable I can teach any student. This is less because I am so high-minded and more because I have seen a lot and I think I can point out the ethical tripwires inherent in the business landscape of all kinds. The students don’t really want to learn about ethics, so it has to be imbedded in more pragmatic topics like project financing. It is the medicine that Mary Poppins thought needed a spoonful of sugar to get down. The New York Wheel project had lots and lots of ethical lessons and I believe my natural storytelling tendency will make it easy for me to weave them into the lectures in the way that I tend to do best. My technique is what I would call the art of the sidetrack. I will warn them that I go off on tangents and I will toss them some relevant and juicy stories that feel very practical. Only after a few of those will I throw in the ethical stories and even those will be well disguised.
My fondest hope will be that the students come away from the course understanding the process of project financing, the importance of financial creativity, the imperative of persistence, the necessity of interpersonal flexibility and, oh yeah…the value of directness, honesty and fairness. If I do my job well their evaluations of the course subject matter and my teaching style will result in the view that they learned a lot about how to put the pieces of a project financing together in a compelling manner and that they will declare my style of teaching through storytelling to be a great way to learn. I know I can do that face-to-face and I’m hoping that I can get that same buzz going over Zoom. I think staying lively and engaged for the full 3-4 hours of each of the four lecture sessions will be the key. I plan to use the next six weeks to prepare the pacing and anecdotes more carefully than ever before. I want this to be a good experience for them and for me. Even though I don’t know how much I want to do this (it is a less productive use of my time than expert witness work), and we’ll have to see how I enjoy it after my three-year hiatus.
I do not consider the students unteachable. I do not consider the topic unteachable. My big issue is whether I can teach this old dog the necessary new tricks needed to succeed in teaching the era of Zoom. In that, I hope not to be teaching the unteachable.