Justin Reich now teaches digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but his first job was teaching a short wilderness medicine course. It was a hands-on course where a volunteer pretended to have, say, a broken leg — complete with stage makeup blood and bruises to heighten the effect — and students had to improvise a splint from available materials.
Reich says he taught the course 40 or 50 times a year, and every time he’d make some small adjustment to see if moving a joke sooner or later, or updating a diagram he showed, would get to ah-ha moments for students faster.
“And people would often say, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re the best teacher I’ve ever had,’” he remembers. “But I think the secret weapon that I had was that I just taught these lessons over and over and over again and could really refine them, so that they really worked for my students.”
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