No single week, and no single lecture, can do right by roughly three hundred names carried in one continuous breath. The course does not try. Instead, the poem's own four named venues — A Nice Dream Parlor, The Cabaret Around The Way, Nubian Revue World, and Kim Fields On Lauryn Hill — become the course's own room-by-room structure, with the opening invocation and the closing aviation-and-space passage serving as frame. Coverage is distributed across seven content weeks rather than crammed into one, at a pace of roughly thirty to forty-five names per session — enough for genuine research, not a scroll.
The names themselves are not lectured at students. They are assigned, researched, and returned to the room — every student "adopts" a small cluster of names each week, builds a short annotation (who she is, what the poem's line is doing with her name, and which of the fifteen catalogued devices is at work), and the class's collective annotations accumulate week over week into a working, student-built index of the entire poem by the term's end. This solves the coverage problem and the pedagogy problem in the same motion: the roll call gets completed by the people actually taking the course, which is exactly the participatory model the poem's own blank #300 slot was already asking for.
Every week follows the same four-part rhythm, so the rhythm itself becomes familiar and the content is what changes:
| Component | Description | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Adopt-a-Name Annotations | Weekly research entries, accumulating into the class index | 30% |
| Device-Spotting Worksheets | Weekly in-class identification exercises | 15% |
| Midterm Paper | Week 5 — one device traced across three venues | 20% |
| Recitation & Participation | Read-aloud, ventriloquism exercise, in-class workshops | 10% |
| The #300 Capstone | Week 10 — written entry and live performance | 25% |
The class-built index this course produces should be understood as a working scholarly document, not a final one — a number of the poem's references are deliberately ambiguous, built to evoke more than one woman inside a single line by design. Where a class's research reaches a confident answer, it stands. Where it doesn't, the index should say so plainly rather than guess with false certainty, and instructors are encouraged to treat that honest uncertainty as its own teachable moment: even a roll call this thorough cannot fully close its own archive, which is the argument the poem has been making from its very first line.