Monday, July 30, 2007

The joke's on me

Because the courses I am currently teaching are usually convened by my supervisor, I inherited a whole heap of notes, lecture material and assessment examples, which I could theoretically reuse to save myself a bunch of work. I am trying to avoid doing this, as much as possible, partly because I think it will be good for my own teaching development if I get to do all the work involved in convening a course, including course design, assessment design, and day-to-day planning.

The other reason I am avoiding reusing much of what I inherited is that my supervisor and I have quite different teaching styles. I try to make everything as interactive as possible, to encourage "problem-based" learning, and to overprepare everything. Even my lectures tend to take the form of me presenting some interesting data that can't be explained with the tools the students have learned so far in the course, and then kind of Socratically guiding them to (a) see why the data is interesting and why it presents a problem, and (b) come up with the necessary extensions of what they have learned that do allow them to account for it. When my supervisor lectures, on the other hand, she lectures. Her questions are purely rhetorical. I wouldn't say her teaching style is worse—she is an engaging and entertaining lecturer, and explains things very clearly—but I can't pull it off. I don't feel I have the sort of authority to stand up as "expert" and give a traditional lecture. And I am not confident enough to do without the constant reassurance that students are "getting it" that classroom interaction provides.

So I am trying to build this course up from scratch. Apart from the readings. I replaced a couple of them with more recent papers, but generally I kept them the same as in past years. Every week the tutorial groups have to read one of these book chapters or articles, and I provide them with four or five questions to answer and bring to class. My supervisor has done the same in past years, but from looking at her question sheets for the first few readings, I got the impression that she was using the questions purely to make sure the students were really reading the material ("What two results does the author mention on page three?" "What is his definition of term X?"), while I wanted to use them to make the students think more deeply about what they read and to apply it to material beyond what was presented in the text ("How do you think the author would use his theory to account for X?" "Why do you think the author included the material in section 3.2? How does it relate to the rest of the discussion?").

So for the most recent reading, I didn't even look at the question sheet I had inherited, but instead spent close to six hours thinking about and preparing questions of my own. It was a really long, difficult reading, and I wanted the questions to be usable as a sort of guide to help illuminate the structure and purposes of what they were reading, as well as forcing them to think about it critically. When I had finished writing up my list of questions, just for shits and giggles, I went back and looked at the questions my supervisor had used.

Five out of the seven were identical to my own.


Moral of the story? Either of the following, I think.

(1) Stop doing more work than you need to, you freak.
(2) Don't be so quick to judge other people's teaching styles. (You freak.)

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Greetings, Everyone!

Since I am a co-author of this lovely blog, I thought I should at least introduce myself to you, even thought I won't start teaching for another few weeks. I am an advanced graduate student at a large research university, and this next fall will be the start of my third year of teaching at this institution. In the past, I've been both a TA and a full instructor for a 100-level history course, but this fall I get to branch out and teach...research methods! I am very excited. Sometimes in the survey course I felt like I didn't have the knowledge or know-how, but since I've written an M.A. thesis and a number of research papers, I feel confident about teaching students how to produce history, instead of only ingesting history. I'm sure that craziness will ensue, but at least I have a forum now to blog about the successes and frustrations!

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Advice sought

Next week one of the topics my grad student tutorial group is meant to be looking at is one that I struggle with myself. I can teach it to undergrads, no problem. But it is complicated, and I haven't read much on it, and what I have read is inconsistent and contradictory. I know that at least one of the grad students in this group has a research interest in this topic, and I have already mentioned to her that it would be great if she share her thoughts on the readings and explain her own research to the group. She is reluctant, though, which I think is a cultural matter, since she is always quiet in class and is very worried that her English is not good enough (which is totally untrue).

Anyway, my question is, do you think I would be better off to read as much as I can on this topic and try to bluff it, or to admit that I don't have much background in this area and take the approach that, as a group, we can discover this topic together on the basis of the readings that I assigned?* Usually I would say that there is nothing wrong with the second approach, but I am already feeling a little inadequate to teach this group (they are all my age or older, and some of them have been studying for just as long as I have). Also, on the course evaluation forms at the end of the semester, there is a question that specifically asks, "How well did the lecturer/tutor know the topics they were teaching?" A bad score here has a negative impact on your overall score.

I hate being a slave to the evaluations at the expense of good teaching, but at this stage in my career, I can't afford to ignore them, so I'm currently leaning towards the bluffing technique. What do you think?

__________

* Obviously I have read the readings myself, and understand them as well as most of the students are likely to, but I can see a ton of questions that they are likely to have after reading them, and I'm not currently in a position to be able to answer most of these myself. If I wanted to be able to answer all my own questions that I had after these assigned readings, I think I would have to read at least six or seven of the papers and three of the books listed in the original readings' references. I could probably just manage that (I have 10 days), but at the expense of a lot of other things.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Well I won't be doing THAT exercise again

At the first tutorials this week, I went around the room and got each student to say something about why they are taking this course. Part of this was just to start the first tutes with them talking instead of me, so that they fall into the habit of participating. And partly it was because this course is the stupidest cross-coded mess of no-prerequisite student salad that you can imagine. So I have everything from first years with no background in linguistics, through to graduate students who know as much as I do about some of the topics we cover. So I wanted to get a sense of what sort of make-up each tutorial had, so that I could pitch the discussions appropriately.

Some actual replies from the students:

"I'm just here because it was the only thing that fitted my timetable."

"Well, it didn't sound too boring. At the time."

"I LOVE [lecturer who has always taught this course in the past]. I wanted to take every course she offered! I didn't know it would be YOU."

*giggle* *giggle* "Um, I don't know." *giggle.*

"I love English literature." (Okay, but this isn't an English literature course.)

"I have a grammar fetish." [Class laughs] "No, seriously! I get off talking about syntax."

"My first choice was full."


Next time I'm going to make this exercise multi-choice.

Monday, July 23, 2007

I have a student named after an inanimate object

I asked her to repeat her name a couple of times, thinking it was a foreign name that just sounded, to my untutored Western ears, like an English noun. But no, she even spelled it for me, smiled widely, and said, "It's a good name, yes? I chose it myself."

To my credit, I did not laugh.

In other teaching news, I appear to have been ambushed by a pattern I trained myself into last year, but I am not convinced it is a good one for my current situation. Last year, I was trying to write my dissertation, run a reading group, run a department seminar series, edit a volume of conference papers, organise a nationwide workshop, and tutor three classes. So I made a little rule that I only did teaching prep on the (two) mornings of the days I taught. I allowed myself to use the whole morning, so up to three hours of prep per class, but not to pre-prepare the day before. And marking was restricted to weekends. That way I could ensure that teaching didn't expand to take up time that should have been devoted to more important, but less urgent matters.

This semester I pretty much only have to teach. So my plan was to be super-duper prepared and have all my classes for the week well-planned in advance. Photocopies, overheads, readings, assignments, all were to be neatly stacked and ready to go. Unfortunately, I seem incapable of doing this. I procrastinate mercilessly up until the day of each lecture, and then spend all morning getting things ready. I don't eat lunch, don't take breaks, panic about whether the photocopier will be in use all bloody morning... In short, I work myself into an unnecessary state of anxiety.

I have no idea why I do this to myself, unless it is that my routine from last year has embedded itself deep in my subconscious.

I realise asking questions of our "readership" is kind of dumb when we don't have one yet, but maybe someone will come across this post in the archive and comment on it then. So how far in advance do you prepare lectures, tutorials, assignments, etc (when you teach a course for the first time)? Have you found any good methods for making yourself plan lessons early and often?

Friday, July 20, 2007

Lessons from the first week

So, this being the first substantial post here, I should probably do the expected, "Hello World!" thing and explain why we have started the blog and what to expect from it. But you know, those sorts of posts aren't very interesting to read, and we probably don't have any readers yet anyhow. So I won't. 'kay?

This is a teaching blog, so let's talk about teaching.

I've just reached the end of my first week as a real! live! lecturer. I've tutored before (that's TA-ing for those of you on the other side of the world). But this is the first time I have been totally in charge of a whole course, including course design, assessment, lecturing, administration and running the tutorials as well.

I think the first week went pretty well, considering. There was the brief gasp and whispers from the students at the first lecture as I walked up to the front. "She's the LECTURER? I thought she was a student!" and "Oh my god, I was, like, TALKING to her before class!" Meaning, presumably, that if she'd known I was her lecturer, she would have ostracized me instead, as is right and proper.

I started well, breaking the ice by accidentally removing the cap on the whiteboard marker too quickly and having it fly across the room and hit a student on the head.

And then I made a few remarks in the first couple of classes that, in retrospect, I probably should have skipped. Like the bit where I got carried away and taught them the term "morphosyntax."

"Morphosyntax. Morphosyntactic. Morphosyntactician," I wrote these on the board and explained them. Then, "Actually, you probably don't need to know these for this class. But they are cool words. And you can use them to impress people at parties. Like, hey, I do morphosyntax."

Cue incredulous looks from the students.

"Okay, so maybe I go to better parties than you do."

And then there was the bit where I decided I was doing too much talking, and illustrated my point about syntactic variation across English dialects by writing out three constructions and asking the students to tell me which they found grammatical. "Right, so from your replies, it seems that Australians like the first and third of these, but not the second. If you were American, or Scottish, you probably would have preferred the second over the third." I should have stopped there, but the next bit completely bypassed my brain and came out of my mouth all by itself. "Of course, I knew how you were going to answer. But I wanted you to feel like I valued your participation."

Memo to self: be less honest. They don't need to know EVERYTHING that runs through your head at any given moment.