On Teaching

I have taught professionally for thirty years. I started in January 1978. That hard to believe; I started at 22. I'm pretty good at it (but have lots of room for improvement), and I teach something difficult for people to like: public speaking.

Interestingly, for the last year I have been serving as the Coordinator for the college's Teaching and Learning Center and will be doing the same in the upcoming academic year. I know much more now about teaching and learning than I did a year ago, and part of that, of course, is learning how much I do not know. It would be best if I had a doctorate in the field; perhaps one day I will, but the motivation is not there, nor the money right now. Probably in twelve months someone else will take over the Center and it will be my legacy; I'll get my promotion and fade into the background.

Therefore, some of these posts will also be about teaching, which to be honest I see as a subset of public speaking anyway. (Maybe more like a Venn diagram). College teachers should be good public speakers; public speakers do a lot of teaching. Not all college professors would agree with me, and I am woefully aware that college professors (myself included) can be very sensitive about anyone intruding into their classrooms or classroom actions. As I have often said, college professors are like gods in their classrooms--at best, dictators (if usually benevolent). And of course, there is the old bromide, "The reason the battles in academia are so bitter is that the stakes are so low." We sometimes put a lot more value on what we do than anyone else does. However, I do not do research; I work at a teaching institution; I care about good teaching. Good teaching may be an obvious entity, but, alas, it is not.

What is good teaching? Is it discipline specific? (i.e., what's good teaching in English is not good teaching in biology?) Is it largely affective, or cognitive? Can a teacher do everything right and still not really teach the students anything? Is good teaching only measured by how much is learned? and where does the student responsibility to dig and study and work come in?

Good students think I'm a good teacher. Bad students do not. My goal is to get the poor students to think I'm a good teacher and see the fault lies not in their stars, but in themselves.

All this being said, the first sign of good teaching is organization. Organization of individual lectures and organization of the course as a whole. The students I work with simply don't have the skills to organize for themselves yet; I see it as my job to do that, to give them structure and underpinning for future college learning.

The first sign of good learning is being there. The myth remains that college students don't have to attend class. The only truth to that myth is that there are no truancy laws in college. No one will come and bring your parents before a judge. Otherwise, students who miss class are putting a gun to their grade.

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