Teaching 101

In one of his many wonderful books, Robert Heinlein posited a theory that if you could somehow travel back in time and scoop up a very bright caveman and transport him into a future where you dropped him into the control room and left him to observe the operation for a few years, that the caveman would never understand what was going on.  As the years passed, the caveman would figure out where the employee cafeteria was located and to be wary about a few of the warning signs, but the caveman was far more likely to concoct some bizarre religious meaning to his surroundings than to grasp even the fundamental principles of nuclear fission.   

Perhaps a better analogy would be Mako Iwamatsu, in the movie, The Sand Pebbles.  No matter how carefully Steve McQueen explained the workings of the ship’s engine room, Po-han still understood it only as “strong stim” and “sleepy stim all dead”.

I offer the above as a warning—I’m about to make some suggestions about improving the quality of teaching at a university.  Like the caveman, I have spent a little time wandering academic halls, trying to figure out the meanings of signs.   I mean that literally, for I remember a carefully drawn diagram in a hall at Enema U that would direct you to the fire exit roughly five feet from the bulletin board.  If you are fleeing a burning building and stop five feet from the safety of an exit that consists of a clear glass door to the outside, in order to read a bulletin board, you are either an occupant of the Administration Building or an education major.  

All told, I have close to four decades of university experience at various colleges and universities.  As a student, a graduate student, an instructor, a professor, and now, once again as a student, I’ve figured out how to find the cafeterias, the closest parking spaces, and the best places in the library to quietly read.  And most important, I have learned a few things about teaching and have some suggestions for the university to implement to improve the quality of teaching.

None of my suggestions has anything to do with any particular professor, (certainly not any of my current professors who have quite graciously allowed me to enroll in their classes).  Many of my ideas come from discussions with other students or from my experiences on other campuses.  

Last week, I mentioned that while you need a degree in education and a teaching certificate to teach an eighteen-year-old senior at a high school, all that is needed to teach that same student a year later at a university is a master’s degree in the subject.  Neither experience nor even basic instruction in how to actually teach is required to teach at most universities.  In my case (which is similar to that of many others), I learned by trial and error, with heavy emphasis on the latter.  

High school education would benefit tremendously by simply requiring a content degree to teach a subject and if you coupled that with schools making the outrageous decision to spend as much on math and science as they do on football, most of our problems with public education would vanish.  And while I think that the College of Education should be burned to the ground while its professors are having a faculty meeting inside, I do believe that new faculty members would benefit from a day or two of instruction.  Call it a “boot camp”.

This is far from an exhaustive discussion, but there are several areas where new professors have noticeable problems getting started.  How do you write a good lecture?  How do you prepare your PowerPoint slides to go with a lecture?  While it’s unlikely that any two professors do it exactly the same way, anyone just starting out could use a little help.

How do you time a lecture?  By this, I mean how does someone starting out know how to fit the material they have to teach within the time limits of a class period?  There is nothing more painful than seeing the panic on a new professor’s face when halfway through a class period they suddenly realize they have run out of prepared material.  And what do you do when the screen won’t come down, or the projector blows a bulb, or the instructor’s computer seems to be broken?

I’m sure there are several ways to handle such situations, but in my case, I used to include optional material in my lecture notes, printed in italics, just in case I needed it.  And I always included a list of possible discussion questions.  And most important, all the electronics in a room are there to help an instructor, not as instructor replacements.  The one time I wrote a lecture that absolutely depended on my being able to show slides was, of course, the day I arrived to find that the projector had been stolen.

If you have never been the lecturer in a large room, there are a few things you need to know and most of those are things you can only find out by spending a little time in the classroom before classes start.  How big do you have to write on the whiteboard so someone in the back row can read it?  How large does the print on your PowerPoint have to be to be legible?  How loud do you have to talk so someone in the back row can hear you?  Classroom thermostats are nearly always locked, so what do you have to do to break the lock so you can change the setting?  Depending on the setting, a classroom large enough to hold a hundred people is either going to be stiflingly warm when it is full or uncomfortably cold when your class of thirty students is scheduled into it.

New faculty never seem to know that the university furnishes neither the markers for a whiteboard nor chalk for the few remaining blackboards.  An instructor not only needs to bring their own, but needs to realize that any color other than blue, black, or red won’t be legible under the fluorescent lights for anyone sitting more than ten feet away.  

All universities have a small department of designated faculty whose only job is to help new professors learn how to teach…And new professors need to avoid these people like the plague, as they were not chosen for that position for their ability to teach, but for their ability to please the administration that selected them.  Every year, the university hands out awards to the faculty for whom the students have voted and declared to be outstanding faculty.  These are the people that new faculty need to hear from, but since these people are far too busy actually teaching, you are unlikely to find them at the Learning Center, the Teaching Academy, The Department of Academic Circle Jerks, or whatever cute name your university uses for the aging cheerleaders who couldn’t teach ducks to swim.

Since the university won’t help you find these people, do what most of your students do: consult Ratemyprofessor.com.  Students are far more likely to give honest evaluations to a third-party anonymous online service than they do with the evaluation forms they are given by the university.  Frankly, students don’t trust those evaluations to be either honest or confidential, so they are overly kind and circumspect in those official evaluations.  (And just between the two of us—yeah, those official evaluations are about as honest as elections in Venezuela.)

If you are a new professor, go online and look up the other faculty in your department, read the evaluations the students wrote.  Then seek out the ones with the best reviews and ask their advice.  Anyone the students like is probably a nice enough person to be happy to help you.  And anyone the students really dislike….  Well, the students are always better judges of character than the administration.  

Teaching isn’t necessarily hard and the administration could do a lot to help the new faculty do it well, but since the administration only pretends to care about the quality of teaching, it won’t and new faculty will have to do it for themselves.