On August 24 at 9 a.m., Andrew Torget will take the podium in a University of North Texas auditorium, clad in a suit and armed with 500 pages of notes. Forty-five students will be seated in front of him, notebooks — no laptops! — at the ready.
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Andrew Torget
On August 24 at 9 a.m., Andrew Torget will take the podium in a University of North Texas auditorium, clad in a suit and armed with 500 pages of notes. Forty-five students will be seated in front of him, notebooks — no laptops! — at the ready.
He’ll open his notes, clear his throat, and begin his lecture. If he’s going to successfully teach the longest recorded history class ever, he won’t be able to stop, aside from occasional brief breaks, for the next 30 hours. At least 10 of his students will have to stick it out, too.
Torget, an associate professor of history at North Texas, is gunning for an official Guinness World Record — for longest history lesson. What will the class cover? Texas history. All of it, he says, “from cave people up until last week.”
It’s a crazy idea, though maybe not as crazy as the professor in India who, in 2014, set the current Guinness record for “longest marathon lecture.” (He talked about scientific computation for 139 hours 42 minutes 56 seconds.)
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But Torget is the kind of person who would voluntarily sign up to run a 200-mile relay race — and then do it again, several times. He’s always looking for a new challenge, always looking to push his limits. On top of that, he says, it’s for a good cause.
Last year Torget and his two children, ages 8 and 10, were looking up Guinness World Records. Naturally, the kids were wondering what records they might be able to break. Longest fingernails, perhaps?
He was also thinking about the university’s Portal to Texas History, a vast online archive of digital resources about the American Southwest. UNT Libraries, which maintains the portal, received a $500,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2015. To get the support, the library needs to raise $1.5 million to match the grant, and so far it has collected $768,000.
What better fund-raising tactic, Torget reasoned, than a Guinness World Record attempt? So he came up with a plan: The library could “basically make a spectacle of me as a way of raising awareness and support for the portal.”
30 Hours of Engagement
He’s been planning the class for the past year. Much of his time has been spent on logistics: finding an appropriate venue, lining up volunteers, figuring out how to feed the students.
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He also had to take his teaching materials on Texas history, which is normally a semester-long course, and mash them together “into one long story.” That story runs for roughly 1,600 PowerPoint slides. “I can’t show any videos. It has to be straight-up class the entire time.” He laughs. “No movies for three hours.”
The class must meet a laundry list of conditions from the authorities at Guinness. First, Torget needed students. He recruited most of them from previous courses he’s taught.
The students can’t just sit there and stare at me.
Engagement is a key component of Guinness’s requirements. “The students can’t just sit there and stare at me,” he says. “The witnesses need to attest that they saw the students being engaged.” They must pay attention to what he’s saying, answer questions, that sort of thing. But no, they won’t have to pass a test at the end.
Still, Torget hopes the students will get something out of the lengthy lesson, which will be live-streamed. “They will be the only people on earth that I’m aware of that have taken a class on all of Texas history, straight through,” he says. “They’ll have a sense of the breadth of it that I think you couldn’t get any other way.”
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Torget and the students will earn a five-minute break for every hour of class that they complete. The plan, he says, is to accumulate the breaks and space them out strategically: Every three hours, they’ll pause for 10 minutes, and they’ll take a longer break around 3 a.m. on the second day.
At the 24-hour mark, they will officially set a new record, though Torget says he’ll forge on and try to make it to 30.
In Training
Torget has made some lifestyle changes to prepare. “I’m a big believer in, like, race day, you don’t try new things,” he says. As he teaches, he plans to steadily munch food and sip water and apple juice, so he’s been eating smaller, more frequent meals.
He’s cut out coffee for the past six months, because it’s a diuretic and because it dries out your vocal chords. Instead, during the class, he’ll have a few “flat Cokes” in his stash. Carbonation doesn’t do your voice any favors, either. “If I need the caffeine,” he says, “it’ll hit me the way that I need it to.”
My kids and my dog think it’s really interesting.
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He’s been training his voice, too. “I’ve been giving longer lectures like I would do long runs,” he says. Four hours, then six hours, then eight hours. “My kids and my dog think it’s really interesting.”
But Torget hopes one particular experience of his will carry him through those several thousand years of Texas history: relay running.
As veterans of multiple 200-mile relays, Torget and I are, at least in one way, cut from the same cloth. (Basically, teams of six to 12 people get into vans and take turns running to cover that distance, broken up into shorter legs. It takes 25 to 35 hours. You don’t really sleep.) It was his experience running in those overnight races, he says, that made him think he might actually be able to do this.
During the relays, “you hit a wall or multiple walls, and the only way through it is to mentally push yourself, one foot in front of the other,” he says. “I’m kind of thinking, and hoping, that this will be something similar.”
Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.