When you play role-playing games, there’s an unofficial rule: if it’s cool, your character should be able to do it, even if it’s not exactly in the rules as specified. I feel the same way about teaching—and about life, I guess. (As long as it’s not hurting others.)
I had to employ the Rule of Cool early this semester. Back in June, I became enthralled with the second season of The Bear, a Hulu TV show about a restaurant. I teach Service Design, and a look behind the scenes of a service can really illustrate some of the concepts we talk about, as well as give the class a common point of reference to talk about a service.
Luckily, the show served up (see what I did there?) a perfect episode: S2, E7 “Forks.” In “Forks,” one of the characters goes to work at “the best restaurant in the world” and learns about respect, service, and the importance of details. It’s an incredible episode, even removed from the context of the show. It could be shown stand-alone.
But now the problem is: how to show it? It’s a 40-minute episode, so it would eat up half a class to show it during class time, and I have too much other material to cover to lose half a class. Could I stream it over Zoom one night? Ummm, that seems like it would definitely break some kind of rebroadcasting laws. You can’t buy an individual episode, so couldn’t have students do that.
The solution was to get a big theater-style room and have a mini-movie night, complete with a giant bag of popcorn. About a third of the class showed up to watch. How the other ⅔ got their hands on the episode to watch it? I’m not going to ask.
Footnote: I really want to incorporate more different kinds of media into my classes. I feel like we over-index on reading for classes—which this being a university after all, is natural. But a lot of information these days, especially in my field, is not written down. It’s in podcasts, YouTube and TikTok videos, and conference talks. Those can be just as valuable as papers to convey a concept. Class “readings” should be able to be any of these, as well as in-class bits as part of lectures. I use a clip of Tim Gunn from Project Runway to demonstrate critique and it conveys the concept way better than reading about critique does. Plus, it breaks up just me talking, makes the students look up from their laptops, and helps out people for whom reading is not their primary mode of learning. I’m not sure if this would be better or worse for students for whom English isn’t their first language (possibly a majority of my students), but it feels more fresh and modern than articles alone.
I reacted the same way to that episode - really excellent and Tim Gunn provides an incredibly effective model for critique. Glad you found ways to incorporate them!