How would my class be different if I were a professor? by Cheyenne

How would my class be different if I were a professor? by Cheyenne - August 2017 Scholarship Essay

If I was a college professor then I would choose to be teaching a fun class like Architectural Drafting and Design. It sounds complicated and boring but it’s not actually. In all reality it would be the best class ever and all of my students would love it. I think that they would all love it because I would find interesting and innovative ways to make drafting easier and not have my students just sitting there at their desks with a pencil in one hand and a drafting ruler in the other with a piece of paper in front of them.
The first way I would make my class different is I would have dual monitors at each work station so when I let my students use the Chief Architect program they could have two screens going at once so they would be able to see the blueprint and the on screen 3D model that the program rendered at the same time. I would do it this way so that the students can adjust their blueprints and see how it would affect the design of their house or whatever it may be that they are planning. Having dual monitors is an awesome and youthful but still helpful idea, but that’s not the only difference from a regular classroom setting.
Another thing as a professor that I would do would be to not have conventional chairs at my workstations for my students. It has been proven that when a student sits on a bean bag or a yoga ball chair or even an oversize pillow it makes their creativity flow better. Now, creativity is what I’m trying to get out of my students so I will have a selection of all sorts of unconventional chairs on one wall of my classroom and the students can choose which one they would rather sit on just as long as it’s not a normal desk chair. But that’s still not everything I would do to make my class fun and interesting.
I would also implement a technical and hands on element to my class so that my students are not always at their desks, sometimes they would be in the lab. In the lab they would take their blueprints of whatever they may have been making that week and then create a scale model of them. They would not be allowed to use a 3D Printer, they would have to do it by hand and take their hand drawn blueprint, redraw it in Chief Architect so they have a computer rendered model to look at if need be, and then build a real life 3D model out of the provided materials. The materials I would provide would be baltic birch plywood, balsa wood, gatorfoam, bookboard, paper clay, paint, scissors, saws, a lathe in the lab in case it is needed for anything, glue of course, and pieces of real wallpaper so my students know exactly what the house or whatever they are building will look like, no substitutions unless a suggestion to do something different is made and then they should make their model match the changes as well.
My class would not be boring and I would find new and innovative ways to keep my class interested if I was a professor at a college and I taught Architectural Drafting and Design. I would have different ways to get my class to pay attention and to keep their creative juices flowing. They wouldn’t be sitting at a normal desk with a normal chair and they would also not have just one monitor when working on Chief Architect because a dual monitor is easier to work with. Also they would have a technical hands on element to their coursework so they are not always at the computer or their desks.