The Basic Psychology course Schiller taught had been the one he had taught longest at Gotham University. Because Psychology Professors were in desperately short supply and the students who stayed on to teach were not skilled enough, Schiller could not focus solely on supervising master's and doctoral students. He had to teach undergraduate classes, from introductory courses all the way through advanced ones. When he said he worked forty hours a week, he meant forty solid hours of teaching.
But that had its advantages too. He could teach the introductory Basic Psychology course with his eyes closed. Writing lesson plans merely meant making minor revisions to the undergraduate plans; the general content remained unchanged.
Basic Psychology was relatively dry. The first few classes covered various definitions, and later classes mostly introduced concepts through great psychologists and the history of psychology's development. At Gotham University, that stage usually required roughly ten to twelve class periods.
The first five periods were used for memorization, the next five to seven for group discussions and presentations, followed by one or two social-practice classes—going out into the streets to conduct questionnaire surveys.
After arriving on Mercury, Schiller discovered after only two classes that allocating five periods to memorization had seriously underestimated these students. They had memorized all the key points from his first two classes after class, so there was no need to repeat them. That section could be compressed to around three periods.
In other words, once that morning's class ended, the definitions review and memorization portion would be complete.
Schiller sat in his office, considering how to arrange the upcoming group discussion and presentation periods.
At Gotham University, Schiller's classes had generally followed a strict, step-by-step format, because simply pushing students to memorize material and complete the basic requirements for presentations had already