In-my-discipline courses are the common practice at PC. Some professors, however, broadened their horizons in teaching fall freshman seminar classes. Doug Daniel from the Math Department, for instance, shared his love of music and popular culture, one he indulges on his WPCX radio show "Freaking Out" every Tuesday from 4 to 6 p.m., in his seminar "The Lost Highway," based on the book by Peter Guralnick.  Daniel's syllabus describes his freshman seminar as "a road trip into the lives and defining experiences of some of the people who developed a distinctly American popular music and culture," musicians such as Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard,Charlie Rich, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Jr., and Big Joe Turner.

Besides teaching subject matter different from linear algebra and calculus, he assigned writing other than proofs. One objective of the course for Daniel was to help students learn to think and to communicate those thoughts effectively.
 
"The more I could get them to write, the better"­­Doug Daniel

For most class periods, students wrote short reactions on the assigned biographies. "The more I could get them to write, the better," he says. His goal for the short assignments was both for students to practice writing before they wrote their longer essays and for them to start thinking critically about the reading before class discussion.
 
Each of these responses, no more than one double-spaced page, received a 0, 1, or 2 depending on the amount of thought the student put into the assignment. Together the reaction papers made up 40% of the course grade. Freshman Claire Hann said she enjoyed writing the reading responses that helped her think about and put together information from the book.

Students also wrote two argumentative papers of about three pages. In the first they explored how the musicians' lives and music reflected and affected American culture. These two papers were worth 55% of the grade with class participation counting 5%.

Content was Daniel's main grading criteria. Did students support their argument with sufficient examples from class and the book? His repeated advice to students was to "take the writing seriously." With musicians and their effect on our culture as the focus of the course, students learned that good musicians are serious about the lyrics they write.  Daniel encouraged the freshmen to take their writing, a mode of their own expression, as seriously as the musicians did theirs.
 
Richard Parmer, Jill Frey, and Laura Knowles