By Rick Vacek | May 9, 2024
There’s a buzz in the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College about its Readings Courses, the one-hour-a-week, discussion-heavy classes that are not major specific.
Students love them because they get to learn about subjects far afield from their majors.
Instructors love them because they can stray from their area of expertise and teach subjects that simply interest them.
But the buzz is loudest for Honey Bees and Society, taught by Dr. Christina Thompson and Dr. Scott Rippel. Its 15 spots have filled up quickly every semester for nearly a decade.
It’s familiar territory for Rippel, a University of Texas at Dallas professor of instruction in biological sciences who also teaches Honey Bee Biology for the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
But Thompson, named the 2024 non-tenure-track winner of the UT Dallas President’s Teaching Excellence Award in Undergraduate Instruction, is an organic chemist who was drawn to the study of bees when her parents bought a small farm, put bees on the property and asked if she knew how to maintain them.
“I said no, but the best thing about working on a college campus is there is someone here who is passionate about that,” she said.
That someone is Rippel. She found him in the University directory and emailed him, and soon she was helping him in the UT Dallas apiary, managed by Bee Campus USA.
Thompson was so taken by the experience, she started talking it up before her classes. When she saw that students loved hearing the stories about the bees as much as she loved telling them, she had the germination of an idea for a Readings Course and took it to former Honors College dean Dr. Edward “Ted” Harpham, who retired last year.
Harpham began the offbeat courses, which include two or three hours of reading per week, about 15 years ago as a means to help students meet their degree requirements and add an interesting bit of variety to their knowledge base. He got the idea from teaching a graduate class, Medicine, Politics and Philosophy, based on William H. McNeill’s book Plagues and Peoples.
“This is what Honors can do. You sell excellence plus experimentation,” Harpham said. “The second question should be, ‘How does this fit into my degree plan?’ The first question should be, ‘What’s interesting?’ If it’s interesting, we’ll find a way to get it into your degree plan.”
But when Thompson brought the bees idea to Harpham, he didn’t have such an open mind.
“When I heard that they wanted to teach a bee course for Honors students, I said, ‘This is stupid. This isn’t Homer.’ And then I heard them lecture. ‘OK, it doesn’t have to be Homer or the ancients or contemporary political philosophy. It can be bees.’”
Thompson and Rippel prepare students for the class by asking them questions in advance, such as what part of queen bee rearing interests them or what they want to know about the multibillion-dollar industry. Then they take students to the apiary, let them do a hive inspection and teach them about the bee business and what bees do for agriculture and the environment.
“Sometimes we get into what it means,” Thompson said. “A lot of students don’t realize that most of what bees do is pollinate their food. The conversations go wherever the students take them.
“Most of them come because they want to meet the bees. Most of them tell us they’re afraid of bees, and so they want to go and get over their fear. Some are concerned about bees disappearing.”
Dr. Donal Skinner, dean of the Honors College, is among the Readings instructors. This semester, he taught Love, Death and Hormones, which explores the intersection among our hormones, environment and society, and he loves the discussions.
“I get really energized by the students,” he said. “I look forward to hearing what they have to say.”
Dr. Douglas Dow, the Honors College associate dean, has worked at UT Dallas since 2000 and sees those conversations as critical to students’ development.
“This is something that was important to Ted and is very important to me: We require our students to talk,” said Dow, who has offered his Readings class, Foreign Film and Political Culture, for more than 10 years. “We require our students to talk in class, at least in the Honors classes, we encourage them to talk to each other and we give them forums.
“One of the most important purposes of the Honors Lounge is to allow students who wouldn’t otherwise be hanging out with each other, because they have very different majors, to share space in a relaxed environment, to be able to talk and engage with each other.
“We have roundtables and workshops and Honors Nights Out in which one of the major goals at every one of these activities is for students to talk – to talk to faculty, to talk to staff, to talk to alums that we bring in, our outside guests, and, most importantly, to talk to each other – to figure this out together. It is a lesson that we are constantly hammering away at.
“Some people are comfortable at talking, and it’s just natural. Others are not comfortable. But it is one of these skills that are essential for whatever a student is doing. The Readings classes are a really great place for that because it’s not like there’s this lesson, this body of knowledge, that we’re imparting to them. It’s really all just about conversation and is a great place for students to practice.”
By all accounts, Honors students are on board with the idea.
Senior Aryan Verma loved the Readings class called Excellence. He learned a lot from the assigned book written by retired U.S. Admiral and former UT System Chancellor William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life, which teaches how to build discipline and continue to grind.
Sophomore Giana Abraham enjoyed her Readings classes on happiness, medical humanities (her goal is to become a family doctor because she likes talking to people) and excellence. Now she wants to take the bees class and the other one Thompson teaches, Science Fiction.
Thompson sees that a lot. If they like one, they stick with that instructor for another. It’s contagious.
“I have the best job at UT Dallas, and I tell everybody that,” Thompson said. “I get to do research, and I love it. I get to teach organic chemistry, which is what I am and what I love. It’s my absolute favorite class. And then I get to teach all these random, whatever-I’m-currently-passionate-about Readings classes.”
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More Honors College stories:
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The Story behind Collegium V’s Name? Just Ask Aristotle
National Merit, Terry Scholars Are Game for Opportunities