I am reading, currently, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk, a book about randomness. One of the interesting illustrations he has about probability has to do with a question about fraternal (non-identical) twins. Imagine, if you will, that you are pregnant with a set. Many people believe that the odds of having at least one girl are 50/50. After all, one boy, one girl. Right? Well, no, because of course fraternal twins can be of the same sex. So, many other people believe that the odds are 2-in-3 that one will have at least one girl. There appear to be three possible combinations: boy-boy, boy-girl, girl-girl. In two of those three scenarios, there is at least one girl. But the actual answer is 3-in-4. The reason is that there are actually four combinations: there are really two different scenarios in which there are children of a different sex, boy-girl and girl-boy. Having trouble getting your head around that? Just imagine a woman being delivered of the children, as it used to be said. They arrive one at a time. Get it?
So, what does randomness and probability have to do with my class? Well, this is a seminar, in which traditionally I have taught six autobiographies. I handle all the responsibility for the first one, while students get their feet, and then we begin with presentations. (Do not worry, Margaret Wente, I still have to prepare complete material on all of the remaining books even to provide the partial coverage necessary to fill in the blanks.) Anyway, my twenty students, traditionally, had to choose one of the five remaining books on which to present a position paper and one of the five remaining books on which to provide a response. They could not present on and respond to material from the same book, for obvious reasons of "coverage." Each time I did this, the twenty students had enough choice so that they fulfilled the requirement. I was always fearful that the twentieth student, approaching the sign-up sheet, would find only one slot left, though: presenting and responding to her- or himself!
This year, I have changed the course a little bit. There are just too many relevant autobiographies, and there are far too many relevant autobiographies gone out of print. I had to arrange with our bookstore to prepare a Custom Learning Reader for the indispensable Being Geniuses Together, by Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, so we set it up that the second autobiography in the coursepack could be chosen from a longer list and used only for the term paper. When you consider that I am using my book as the sixth text, the result will be that we hear student presentations and responses on only three books. So, now, when I asked twenty people to choose different texts for their work, there were three choices instead of five.
There still was no conflict. All the students signed up for presentations on different books.
I wonder how much I reduced the odds of choosing different texts by reducing the choice from five to three?
What was unavoidable, however, was that this new approach created a slot for an entirely new, three-hour lecture preliminary to actually getting to the first text on the syllabus. For the second week in a row, I am exhausted, and I am looking forward to more student participation when they have books in front of them next week.
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