I wrote this a couple of years ago the last time I was in Oxford with Prof. Chapman. Hope you enjoy it, along with the special photo of him.
Professor Allan Chapman is the embodiment of everything British and professorial. From the gold pocket-watch gracefully draped across his woolen waistcoat to his pert bowtie, to his rather well-worn suit, to his feathery silver hair creeping into his shirt collar, he has been likened to Prof. Dumbledore, the Wizard of Oz, and the White Rabbit of Wonderland. He enunciates his words so precisely that he spits when he lectures. He rides his bike to and from work – indeed, he owns no automobile and has never driven, even though he is fascinated with machines. His area of research is the history of science (particularly astronomy) and medicine (pronounced “MED-sin”).
I first met Chapman almost 20 years ago on one of his annual visits to our campus, the purpose of which is to recruit students for our “Eurospring” study-abroad program by giving a formal public lecture. I went to see him out of curiosity and because a few of my colleagues encouraged me with the soulful look of true believers.
It was an astonishing experience. Chapman entered the lecture hall at precisely 3 p.m. (I discovered later that Chapman never lectures before 10 a.m. and drinks cereal-bowl sized cups of tea before each performance.) He held his head high, his chin pointed skyward. His black scholar’s robe and hair flowed behind him like wispy grey smoke. He faced his audience of several hundred, smiled at us all without looking at any one of us, flipped open his pocket-watch, which he laid on the lectern, and began. He called us “ladies and gentlemen.” He spoke in complex sentences and paragraphs. He used no notes or electronic aids. And, best of all, he spun a story so intricate, so filled with character and plot, that I found myself on the edge of my seat until he tied it all up with a neat bow at exactly 4 p.m. with the line, “And so, ladies and gentlemen. . .” He received a standing ovation from my academic colleagues and our students, who are not generally given to such dramatic displays of appreciation.
Since then, I’ve attended almost every one of his annual lectures; and, more to the point, have served as the academic director for the Eurospring program in 2002 and again in 2005, so I had the opportunity to sit in on dozens more of the lectures he gives our students in Oxford during the five weeks they take intensive courses on that campus. The more Chapman lectures I had under my belt, the more inspired I became to try learning how he does it. Lecturing has been given a bad rap ever since the 60s when it probably was abused for my baby-boomer generation. We filled campuses to overflowing and created such disasters as my psychology 101 class, comprising thousands of underclassmen (or a small percentage of those who attended on any given day). We all watched a giant televised head three agonizing mornings each week. On the other hand, some of my fondest memories of my undergraduate education were of the few gifted live lecturers (I could easily count them on one hand) who were able to inspire, teach and entertain with what seemed like ease.
“Gifted” seems to always be the word used in conjunction with a great lecturer, as in a gifted artist of some kind. As a long-time educator, I know better than to subscribe to the theory that “gifts” cannot be taught and learned, at least to a greater extent that we think. What if, I dared think, I could deconstruct his method and, of course, ask him directly for advice? Could I become, if not a great lecturer, at least a passable one? This had become of more than academic interest to me recently, since I had inherited a course from a retired colleague in which such skills would have been quite useful. “Mass Media and Society” often had more than 100 students from a wide variety of majors. My usual methods, Socratic dialogue and its ensuing discussion, did not lend itself well to such a large class. I needed help and I had a unique opportunity to pick the brain of an honored Oxford professor with, by his own count, thousands of lectures under his belt.
In fact, Chapman, being a bit of a showman, was eager to talk about his lecturing, especially when he was told I hoped to publish the article. He loves attention. If that’s one of the secrets, I was already worried. I do NOT love attention, but perhaps I could learn to love it, I reasoned. However, my first concern was content. How does he remember so much information? I’ve heard that he has 100 lectures “memorized” at any given time. “Nonsense,” he said to me laughing. “I’ve never given the same lecture twice.” In a live performance, he explained, his eyes twinkling, things change because one’s knowledge deepens and the context is different each time. It’s like a Mozart composition, he concluded. “I improvise on a musical instrumental tune.”
As to the underlying facts, he admits there is no substitute for knowing the material thoroughly. “It’s through mastery of everything I’m talking about and ceaseless research,” he said. Chapman has written six academic books. His latest is Mary Somerville and the World of Science (2001). He also broadcasts on the BBC and Independent television and radio, including a three-part series entitled “The Gods in the Sky: Astronomy, Religion and Culture, from Ancient Times to the Renaissance,” for English Channel 4 TV. He also authored the book to accompany the series. More recently, he hosted a 2004 BBC special entitled “Great Scientists.”
Interestingly, Chapman is the first to point out that he actually is unable to memorize lines, which he discovered when he first started working in television. “I can’t learn scripts,” he said. “Prompts work, and I can ad-lib for any specified length of time, but I can’t memorize. If you need to fill 40 seconds, put the clock up and I can do it. I can talk to a clock. I can sit down in advance, take a topic and think of what points I want to get out. It’s all about pacing.”
And he worries about how the visual representation of history affects how we think of the past. “Images make history manipulable,” he said. “We mistake what we see on the screen for the reality of the past because popular history is concerned with mythical elements. We use the past to define key things. WWII is mythic, as is 9/11, which will define who we are in the future.”
When it comes to the nuts and bolts of actual presentations, he said he prefers a live audience to a televised one. “I always watch them,” he said. He avoids PowerPoint, videos and slides like the plague, but favors using a whiteboard with a variety of colored markers with which he writes squeakily at random points during his talks. He might draw stick figures being beheaded, a piece of machinery or a map, all of which are impressive, and possibly accurate. “I need the light,” he said, “so I can see my audience.” But it doesn’t seem to matter to him if it’s 100 or 1000 people. “My style is the same,” he admits. He rarely looks at individual faces, but slightly above them. He prefers a long narrow lecture hall to a wide room.
Chapman said he thinks in triangles, and there will be 2-3 of these triangles of thought in each lecture, each of which will have one or more triangles of thought of its own. That way, he explained, he can adjust his lectures to particular time constraints, as long as he completes the main triangle. Any given triangle, for example, might comprise three people, three major events or three theories. But, he emphasized, it’s all centered on story.
Indeed. One of my students said she loved going to his lectures because it was like “story time.” The young woman in question said she’s in love with Chapman and would like to marry him for his mind. Never mind that she’s 20 and he’s 59 and happily married. But Chapman thinks he inherited his storytelling skills from his family of humble origins.
“My grandfather Albert and my mother were born raconteurs,” he said. My mother was a mill worker and Albert had no education, but read widely. He told ghost stories. Lancashire is one of the most haunted shires in England. “Spooky stories are in the air.” History, he added, is about stories and about people doing things. “Narrative is at the heart of history. Story is in every culture we know.”
Chapman’s personal story is fascinating. He was a high-school dropout and would spend his time riding along to the docks with his father, a lorry driver. He said his teachers used to think he was “a bit thick,” and one told him he’d be lucky to become a bottle washer. Nevertheless, he eventually made his way to Oxford on a full scholarship. Those early experiences made him sensitive to humiliation and he doesn’t want any student to feel belittled by him.
Chapman doesn’t like what he calls “excessive use of analysis,” especially with people who have no background in the area of one’s expertise. “You need the bricks and mortar before you critique the architecture,” he explained. He likes to link ideas and theories to the lives of the people who had them and tell their stories. He believes that enables people to remember the ideas better and understand their significance. “What doesn’t go out of fashion,” he concluded, “is human achievement – that muddy human beings are pushing and shoving out there. That’s reality.”
My own reality required that I see what I could extract from Prof. Chapman’s inspiring rhetoric and his example. After my series of conversations with him (some while consuming great pots of tea and king-sized hamburger with a knife and fork), and paying more careful attention to his technique during his lectures, I extracted what I thought were a list of simple guidelines for improving my lecture skills. I’m eager to implement them this during this academic year and will monitor my progress, as will my students. So, does anyone know where I might buy a gold pocket-watch?
[Break]
How to Improve My Lectures in Four Easy Steps
1) Know my material. Sounds basic, but sometimes I feel as though I spend too much time on the administrative and technological aspects of my courses and not enough on reviewing and even having fun exploring new aspects of the content so I’m excited about it. It’s okay to have a script if that’s what makes me more confident (it does), but perhaps I will find that eventually I don’t need it anymore.
2) Don’t be afraid to be dramatic, quirky and enthusiastic. This doesn’t mean I have to compete with fast-paced mass media entertainment or exaggerate anything for effect. I just need to enjoy conveying the interest and excitement I have for the material rather than focusing only on the seriousness of the facts on hand. Speaking of facts brings me to the next guideline:
3) Don’t ever forget the importance of story to convey theories, ideas and to help students retain facts. There was a reason pre-literate cultures used story, along with rhyme, to store facts (and myths) in the collective memory. The plot, characters and setting of any academically significant set of facts are the links in the chain that hold it all together in our minds and help link it to other sets of facts.
4) Don’t worry quite so much about “covering all the material.” With Chapman’s method of working in sets of three, material can be compressed or expanded, depending on the time available. Be realistic about how much is possible and focus on that rather than what is not possible. My job is more to plant seeds than to force-feed more than can be digested at any one time.
