"First Day to Final Grade" has been fun to read, but so far I'm finding that it hasn't told me much I don't already know. The book is tailored to graduate students who are maybe a year or two out of university and don't have any teaching experience. Given my background and age, the advice about how to maintain a professional distance from your students and preparing for class is a bit entry-level for me. In fact, I find myself wishing that I had read this before my student teaching experience during my final semester of undergraduate study. Then I really could have used it, as I was terrified of teaching and was only a few years older than the high school juniors and seniors I was teaching.
The book has helped me recall much from my teacher training days, though. For example, there was a section on establishing classroom rules (generally referred to as classroom management in the primary and secondary contexts) that was useful. As our TA orientation provided similar advice, I was able to include everything I wanted in my syllabus. I also borrowed liberally from the syllabus we received for this class, Introduction to College Teaching, as it set clear guidelines for what is expected in class and how to handle late assignments.
I think the most striking thing that I have learned from the book and my graduate colleagues is how much teaching at the university level differs from teaching at the secondary level. I'm not referring to the increased difficulty of the subject matter or that the average college student is more motivated than the average high school student. I'm referring to the different attitude that university teachers are supposed to have toward their students. In my training as a secondary school teacher, I felt exhorted to be committed to my students in all aspects of their lives, to be willing to help students at any time of day or night. But now, professors and graduate colleagues alike are warning me not to get involved, not to respond to e-mails too quickly, not to give out a home or cell phone number.
This advice ran counter to my years of training and the perception of myself as a Great Teacher. And as we all know from popular culture, Great Teachers are unwavering in their commitment to students. Just look at the John Keating character in "Dead Poets' Society," who succeeded in getting teenage boys (boys, no less) to memorize and recite Romantic poetry. Then look at, say, John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind," whose most notable interaction with a student was to marry one.
I imagine that this dichotomy in teaching attitudes is attributable to the fact that high school students are, by and large, children and university students are, by and large, adults (at least in the legal sense). As a society, Americans believe that there's nothing we shouldn't do for our children, and nothing that adults shouldn't do for themselves, so this sudden cliff-diving of teachers' sense of responsibility should be too surprising. Except perhaps for the students, whose first year of college (and the independence that comes with it) is often quite jolting.
I'm married, have three kids, and am regimented to a full-time teaching and class schedule, so I'm certainly not arguing against a "sink or swim" attitude toward university students, but it has taken me some time to feel completely comfortable with it. As the semester began, my reflexive response to many student requests was something like, "Well, let me see if I can..." or "I'll try to..." instead of "Why don't you..." or "I suggest you...".
I must also say that the admonition against assisting students too much has been tempered by an expression I've heard some say that a teacher should put no more effort into helping a student than the student is putting into the class. This sounds like a fair compromise, but I wonder how easy it will be to implement practically. So far in my classes, I'm not sure I'm able to gauge how much effort my students are putting in, though this will likely become more apparent as we start work on more difficult and time-demanding assignments.
"Teaching Tips" seems geared more to new professors than to graduate teaching assistants. Nonetheless, I found the six biases that the authors share at the end of chapter one valuable, as their philosophy of teaching seems to mirror my own.
Bias (or hypothesis) number 4, which states that one of the most important goals of college education is to equip and motivate students to continue learning after they complete their formal schooling, is my favorite. When I was a student teacher taking my high school juniors through "The Scarlet Letter," I often wondered whether the goal of a high school literature class was to expose students to the so-called canon of great literature, or to help them find the joy of reading. I must say, it's the odd 16-year old that gets joy out of reading "The Scarlet Letter." At the time I believed the time might be better spent reading something more relevant to students' lives, though I suppose one could argue that the ignominy of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and childbirth is certainly not an uncommon experience for American teenagers.
The authors of "Teaching Tips" elucidated this goal of education in chapter two, when they described the process of figuring out what you want your students to be able to do and know by the end of a course. This chapter will be particularly helpful in navigating us through the final project for Introduction to Teaching. The project requires us to construct a course from the ground up.
I have also started "My Freshman Year," an anthropology professor's foray into the life of a first-year college student. The author, writing under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan, goes to great lengths in her preface and, it appears, throughout the book to maintain complete anonymity. The unversity she teaches at and then attends is called "AnyU" and she even declines to use last names of the people she thanks for helping her. But then publisher Penguin Books, in a little "about the author" blurb, writes: "Rebekah Nathan is a pseudonym for Cathy Small...a professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University." Whoops!
Despite that lapse in congruity, I'm hopeful that this book will be able to help me recall at least some of what my students are experiencing. It's been over twenty years since I was a college freshman, after all.
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