grad skool rulz #16 – about teaching

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Here’s all you need to know about teaching as a PhD student: Don’t teach in graduate school, unless you are targeting the liberal arts college market or it’s a requirement for the degree or financial aid. If you teach, do it well and commit the smallest amount of time and resources.

Shocked? You shouldn’t be. Ask yourself the following question: what justifies a professor’s position in a university?Teaching the subtleties of Attic Greek or Durkheim’s social theory to 20 year olds? No, you justify your position with your research reputation. No research university has built its reputation by finding the best intro French instructors around, though some research faculty develop exceptional teaching skills. If you are serious about the faculty track, research output is the name of the game. Teaching is a bonus and departments often assume that if you can do research in an area, you can usually teach it, even if you have never done it before. Actual teaching experience is usually not a major factor in hiring, aside from the liberal arts schools. In most cases, teaching is inferred from research.

What about the liberal arts colleges? Well, if you look, top liberal arts faculty usually have distinguished publication records, especially in the humanities and social sciences. It’s the international reputation that motivates the $30k+ tuition at these schools. Teaching skill compliments research output, it doesn’t displace it.

The question is: how do you teach well but efficiently? Here’s some tips:

• Students care that you deliver real content; treat them nice; are speedy, fair, and reasonable in grading; and provide a good classroom experience. Therefore, your work is a waste if it’s not addressing these points.
• Students don’t care how much you prep the class. They can’t tell the difference between a person who spent 5 hours and 5 minutes on a test. Once you get the hang of lecture notes and hand outs, write them quickly and efficiently. Make sure all lectures have one or two solid take home points. They care about class time experience, not how hard you work.
• Spend a little time thinking about at least a few fun and memorable topics in your class. Good evaluations are based on people’s positive memories of learning.
• Spend a little time thinking about the context of the class and what you can do to make it work for both you and the students. An intro soc and senior seminar are way different and you’ll run into problems if you treat them the same. You’ll save a lot of time if you invest a little in figuring what students are looking for and how you can efficiently meet that need and deliver quality content.
• Optimize grading. If the department can provide a grader, that’s great. If you have to do it yourself, optimize. For example, I can’t find out what a student has learned in 5 questions, but I can usually find out with about 30 questions. Therefore, I never write exams that are longer than 30 questions. The students also feel better that I am not wasting their time with endless tests or assignments.
• In the humanities and social sciences, you can usually mix in some speakers, project presentations, and films. These free up time and they actually help students learn if they are well chosen.
• Provide as much as you can online. Personally, I put everything online such as lecture notes, answer keys, syllabus, assignments, and announcements. Helps reduce the # of students who eat up time with mundane bureaucratic matters.
• Grant all reasonable student requests. If you are efficient with class prep and grading, it will be easy to accommodate the occasional student request at almost no extra cost to yourself. You will also buy good will with all those folks and reduce complaints.
• Shift all basic skills students to appropriate units in the university. If the person does not have basic English or math skills, don’t take it upon yourself to teach them (unless it is your job). Simply tell them that you aren’t qualified as a basic skills teacher and it is their responsibility to go to office X and sign up for remedial skills tutoring. Most universities have offices now addressing such issues.
• Re-use and recycle. Borrow other people’s syllabi and other materials. Use old class materials for next semester’s class. Sure, you will be bored once in a while, but that hour spent writing new lecture notes after class can be spent doing research. Once you are tenured, you can try new and creative ideas in class.
• Time budget: Once a week, have class prep time where you complete any teaching work that was not done in class or in office hours (which are often empty). If you do teaching work outside that time slot, then you have to be more efficient.

In a nutshell: prep and grade quickly; deliver real content and create a positive class experience; and do anything reasonable to create good will among students, long as it doesn’t make more work for you. Once you master these ideas, you’ll see that you will enjoy teaching more. You can spend that hour with a student talking about Foucault instead of worrying about grading that marathon 85 question short answer exam.