The particular incident I wish to write about occurred in Spring 1994, in the class The Art of the Book in the Computer Age. The course is a ``topics'' course, which means that students can get credit towards their general education requirements by taking the course. There are no prerequisite courses, though I do ask that students have some familiarity with computers-at least to the point where they can learn to use a new Macintosh program and edit files on a Unix system primarily on their own.
The course attempts to bridge the cultural gaps between the sciences, the arts, and the humanities while teaching a marketable skill in desktop publishing. As a result there is a wide range of backgrounds, motivation, and academic culture for the students in the class-very different from the fairly homogeneous mix in most engineering classes.
The classroom presentations include many styles that are unusual for an engineering professor, including 35mm slide lectures, workshops in which the students critique each others' work, and classroom discussions analyzing work done by others, as well as more familiar lecture/discussions using the blackboard or overhead projector. Although I created this class, and this was the fourth time I taught it, I am still not entirely comfortable teaching what is primarily an art class with no background in the visual arts.