Ever had to do a 50-minute instruction session? It presents more than a few challenges. Academic librarians have written about it , and come up with some pretty good ideas for making the most of their 50 minutes with students. Here is a blog post from a faculty member who just got shifted from T/Th 90-minute classes to M-W-F- 50-minute classes. He’s acknowledging that it can be detrimental to effective learning – and he’s got the students three times a week. Try meeting them one time for 50 minutes in the course of a semester. It ain’t easy.
I taught an FYE seminar last semester and went back to the 50-minute format for a semester-long course for the first time in years (I had been teaching 75-minute or 150-minute courses almost exclusively since around 1995). It is impressive how little one can really hope to effectively teach in that time, and how much work goes into building bridges between 50-minute sessions so that each week (taken as a whole) is a good experience.
Sadly, though, it is not automatic that having an experience like this will make classroom faculty that much more attentive to the challenges we face. I suppose, though, that it’s nice to know that we are not alone.