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Reader Question of the Week: Teaching Assistance, Part I

Here is the question we put before readers last week:

M.R. in Lowell, MA, asks: I am going to start teaching full time at a university this fall. Any suggestions?

And here some of the answers we got in response:

P.C. in Toronto, ON, Canada: I have been a university professor for 38 years, and I have three pieces of advice: First, always speak truth to power and teach your students to do likewise. Second, make in testimonial veritas est your mantra. Third, no matter what your subject is, teach them Martin Niemoller's poem:

First they came for the socialists and I didn't speak out because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came a for the Jews and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak.

And remember that you have been granted a remarkable privilege. Use it wisely.

Good luck and all the best.

J.K. in Portland, OR: It is impossible to answer this question without knowing what and where you are going to teach. How many students will be in your average class? How many courses will you teach? How selective is your school? Where on the Project 2025 hit list is your institution? Will you have teaching assistants to supervise? Will you have laboratories to supervise? Must you publish to avoid perishing? Must you bring in grant overhead money to avoid perishing? How subsiloed is your home department? All of these make a Big Difference.

There are only a few universals: (1) Good luck; (2) If the sh** hits the fan, remember the airline cabin attendants' rules about when the masks come down, and take care of yourself first; (3) Do your best not to bore your students.

C.J. in Boulder, CO: Starting to teach... a big moment. And a subject that easily would fill a thick book. As a longtime mediocre classroom instructor, I'd defer to (V) and (Z) and probably most of the Electoral-Vote.com community, but there are a few things I've learned that maybe are some help:

Steal. There is no penalty for seeing some clever way of teaching a lesson and then using it yourself. In fact, if you ask that instructor for tips or materials, you will almost certainly be greeted with all that you ask for. In general, it isn't a competition—the students taking your class are not going to be in the other class and vice-versa. Most instructors would view such a request as a strong compliment. [But if you write a textbook, be sure to give credit where it is due...].

Observe. If others are teaching a class you will teach, see if you can sit in the back and watch (and, ideally, have access to materials the students get to see). You can learn both from gifted and inept instructors—seeing what doesn't work can be more helpful than seeing something that does that simply is not in your wheelhouse. And sitting in the back, you can see what the students are actually doing, which can be instructive itself.

When available, be there. When not, hide. Many students don't take advantage of office hours with an instructor. Sometimes it is because of conflicting times, but often it is a feeling that a professor's office is some kind of torture chamber. So schedule hours to meet students at a more neutral location—one where your focus is on students—like a meeting room, a library, a table at a cafeteria, or under a tree somewhere. And when it isn't time for students to engage with you, best you not be hanging out where they expect to find you, should you actually be in demand.

Celebrate success, learn from mistakes. Watching as a lecture/class exercise goes off the rails is really disheartening. Figure out where the problem was so next time it won't be as bad, then let it go. And when things click—students are engaged and asking questions and doing work and enjoying it—well, give yourself a gold star and cookies.

"Show them, don't tell them" is dogma for good cinema. It isn't bad advice for the classroom, either. A lecture that is text-bullet-slide after text-bullet-slide is a sure-fire snoozer (unless you are a gifted raconteur, in which case ignore everything I'm suggesting). Along these lines, writing on a chalkboard slows you down more than having things pre-written in Powerpoint. It is awfully easy to be going a lot faster than the class can comprehend. Remember you are trying to maximize their learning, not your progress through material.

More nuts and bolts stuff:

Avoid, if at all possible, hybrid classes. Either teach in person or teach remotely. There are so many booby traps in hybrid classes, you really want to avoid them if you can.

Make sure you have all the rules you want in place from the very start, including exam dates and times, grading rules, expectations on student collaboration, how to deal with absences, how they can use their smartphones, etc. This is stuff you cannot correct later in the term without a big fight with some students. If you neglect to address AI, for instance, don't be surprised if it shows up where you least expect it (an article I read recently described students using ChatGPT within a classroom discussion, of all things). If something really important didn't make it to your syllabus and you have to fix that omission, do it ASAP and make it clear in multiple ways (announcement on course website, announcement and written version at start of class, etc.).

D.R. in Tucson, AZ: After 40+ years teaching and chairing at a reasonably name-brand liberal arts college in New England (that experience is somewhat dated—I retired in 2014), I'd suggest reading the trilogy by Julie Schumacher: Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement and The English Experience They're pretty funny, while yet offering visions of both despair and hope for the later phases of your career (for which, best wishes).

Also, read the career-oriented items in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education. Hope that you have a good department chair or other senior faculty member who can provide helpful advice as you navigate the maze, especially with respect to reappointment and tenure requirements. Have someone who can clue you in to teaching norms. Be polite and non-condescending (collegial!) to administrative staff (don't insist they address you as "doctor" or "professor"); as elsewhere, "please" and "thank you" help make the wheels go around. And don't turn your procrastination into their problem. Make friends with other junior faculty. Have the counseling office on speed dial—you likely aren't trained to deal with the myriad problems students have. Tell students you will respond to texts/e-mails in a timely fashion, but not necessarily immediately. (Their 2 a.m. homework question will have to wait until after your breakfast.) Maintain a certain irreducible distance between you and students—friendly, but not really friends. As (I think) George Washington said, civil to all, but familiar with none. Be prepared up to the gills for class, but retain the ability to know when to change tack. (But you likely knew everything in this paragraph anyway—and this paragraph also reflects the times, early 70s, in which the writer started. It is possible that things are different now...)

S.D. in York, England, UK: Here goes:

Congratulate yourself. Well done on getting this gig. Maybe this was your life's goal; for many it is. Anyhow: well done!

Accept the 80-20 rule. 80% of your time will be taken up by 20% of your students.

Some of your students will not care. Just accept that. You cannot win them all.

Some students want to know "what is the bare minimum I need to pass this class?" Do not be annoyed, and simply answer the question honestly.

Accept that 50% of students are below the average of all students in your class. Do not try to change that statistical fact. You will not succeed.

There is a lot of new pedagogy at the university level (the science of "how to teach"). Integrate some of that to move from teaching to learning. A huge amount of practical pedagogy is available on the Internet, but in brief, get more from student self-learning and group-student activities into your teaching style. Anything causing students to engage themselves with major refreshment and student-to-student engagement will lead to more total students learning something.

Some of my best students were D-performing students who got a high C in my class (in U.K. speak, 3rd-class Honours level getting a solid 2:2). That is, they overachieved relative to their ability. Be excited by every overachievment, regardless of capacity. And let the student know how excited you are at how well they did! You will change lives by engaging with your job with enthusiasm.

As to your mental health, you need to make sure you time balance. So:

Align assessments to learning outcomes. Share rubrics early so there are no surprises.

Make sure the students know early what you expect of them. You will get much higher student assessments of you if you set clear expectations early. Aim for that on Day 1.

Be repetitive on when you release new content. For example: If you release first content at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday for a weekly event, then every week, it's now "Tuesday at 10:00 a.m.". Any deviation from regularity will annoy students. Do NOT release all content on Day 1. Weekly content needs to be released weekly.

Mark fast and fair. Use rubrics, model answers and common feedback snippets. Accept that marking is the worst part of your job. And the most important.

Teach academic integrity early. Explain misconduct consequences clearly. Nobody enjoys ethics reviews of potential misconduct. Get in front of this.

Find an academic friend you can bark at safely when something goes poorly, hopefully one who can bark back at you when they have a bad day. University teaching is stressful. You need a vent valve.

And as this is now your job and any one year does not sum to the totality of your capacity:

Do not take feedback personally. Look for patterns and fix the fixable.

When you teach the same topic over and over, you will get bored and consider redeveloping the content. That can be a huge time sink. You are only boring yourself, as to the students, the topic is new each and every time; they're new students each year, after all. Maybe just leave the content as-is and accept your boredom. I always fail at this and remake all my teaching every 3 years, and I regret it each and every time!

P.S: At least in the U.K., students do not want grand public speakers as their teachers; they want certainty at expectations and consistent, patterned delivery. My student feedback scores soared when I stopped trying to be engaging/funny/interesting, and started being repetitive with clear expectations regularly timed. Wordy slides fail in research seminars, but they are great for University-level teaching.

W.V. in Andover, MN: M.R., if you don't want to lose credibility as a university instructor, don't do as my extremely near-sighted History of Latin America instructor did while lecturing, and stand six inches from the map of Central and South America, and point at some obscure-to-us city in Nicaragua or Bolivia or Brazil and block the view of all eight or nine of us sitting behind him.

D.H. in State College, PA: Assuming you get some kind of retirement package, put the money in TIAA, instead of somehow tying it to the current job. No academic position is permanent, no matter what they tell you, and you need to be prepared to move to another place without much difficulty.

And keep good notes about your students. One day they will make you proud!

J.D. in Cold Spring, MN: From a retired dean:

Teach the students you have, not the students you want to have.

Maintain an active life and friendships away from academia.

Keep a healthy distance from campus politics and faculty governance (at least until you are tenured, but even after).

Don't confuse your responsibility to your discipline and to the Academy with responsibility to the institution that employs you.

Don't be too full of yourself—there are a lot of other very smart people around; but realize that they, like you, probably suffer from a little imposter syndrome.

Be approachable and authentic with students and treat them as the adults they [almost] are; but remember you are not their friend (especially on social media!).

A.S. in Black Mountain, NC: My first response was to laugh out loud! I'm still smiling. I suggest you have a Plan B just in case it doesn't work out. Too snarky?

But, I truly admire anyone taking on that challenge and wish them well.

M.A. in Park Ridge, IL: Just before I began college teaching as an adjunct 15 years ago, the best instructor I ever had gave me this piece of advice:

"Remember: you don't teach a subject, you teach students."

P.D.N. in Boardman, OH: First, congratulations, M.R.! Well done. As you begin your career in education, I'd suggest trying to open up curiosity in the minds of your young people. No matter the subject, I'd assign William Zinsser's On Writing Well. Good writing is good thinking, as he says. And since students don't read much anymore, unfortunately, I'd assign one novel if it's a humanities course. Dante's midlife turmoil didn't mean too much to me when I read the opening of Inferno when I was 19, but he became a very helpful spiritual guide when I went through my own midlife transformation in my 50s. In a class on English history, I still remember Dickens' Hard Times and Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. And if I were teaching the American Civil War, I'd let them choose among Shaara's The Killer Angels, Morrison's Beloved, or McBride's The Good Lord Bird.

As readers can probably guess from the headline, we got a lot of good and useful answers to this question, from people who combine to have well over a millennium worth of teaching experience. So, we are going to run some more responses next week, including responses from the three of us who are teachers.

There's still time for other respondents to weigh in. Submit your answers to comments@electoral-vote.com, preferably with subject line "Teaching Assistance"!

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