In my informal logic class I begin every day by reading a passage from a mystery story. I don’t tell the students the name of the story or the author (and no, I won’t tell you, either).

It’s an incentive to show up to the beginning of class, of course, so you don’t miss out on the next installment.

Each day we also talk about how the detectives are reasoning about the evidence, which always leads into a discussion of informal logic.

It’s probably not how I’m supposed to teach, but I’ve been doing this for 25 years and it hasn’t failed me yet. Some would argue that I should spend more time on logic exercises, get more formal about informal logic, use the precious time to teach the terms and to give examples from a textbook, etc.

I began to wonder recently whether I needed to switch my approach. Do students really want to hear a professor read a story to them? Maybe that’s outdated and childish.

But I have stuck with it because I believe we have been a story-telling species for a long time, and that we often learn best through stories.

Yesterday in class I thought I might finish the story, but I still have a few pages to go and ran out of time. When I stopped on a cliffhanger, the students groaned. How does the mystery get solved? How does it end?

Turns out they’re engaged and eager to see it through.

I doubt that would be the case if I were using a standard textbook.