Three Teaching Things Thursday

It’s the start of the semester and there are lots of things rattling around in my head right now. This makes today an appropriate day for a “Three Things Teaching Thursday”:

Thing the First

I’m very tired. 

One thing that I’ve learned from being an occasional runner (er… jogger… er bouncy walker?) is that how I feel moments before a run and how I feel on a run are completely unrelated. I can feel euphoric and energized and run about 10 steps and feel like something the dog found under the porch. Or I can be dragging my soul behind me as I staggered to the treadmill or out my backyard gate and within a couple of tenths of a mile start to click off reasonable times and settle in for a long cruise.

I try to keep this in mind at the start of the spring semester as I feel as tired as I’ve ever been out of the gate. I’m sure some of it is that I’m a wee bit over extended and my bad habit of making early semester “to do” lists has a tendency to elevate other people’s priorities over my own health and wellbeing.

That said, I’m very tired.

Thing the Second

One thing that I’ve realized over the year is that the number of classes that I’m teaching (or projects that I’m supervising) is more important than the number of students that I’m teaching. Some of this is the simple math of contact hours. Even if the class only has one or two students, it needs to operate on a consistent (if not always regular) schedule and this eats into time that I might spend doing other things (especially on my teaching days: e.g. grading, class prep, staring into the void).

I’ve also discovered that as I’ve gotten older my brain is less capable of switching gears quickly. I am teaching Historical Methods and Roman History back-to-back and on the first day, I found it a bit hard to switch gears from a smaller seminar style class (methods has 15 students and is more ideas based) to a larger content oriented class (Roman history has 25+ students). I’m sure that I’ll become more adept at this switch in the next couple of weeks, but right now, it feels quite unnatural.  

Thing the Third

For the last decade I have generally taught two classes: methods and survey. I’ve taught the former to every history major and minor and the latter to whoever has the misfortune of signing up (and very few majors). These classes have made it so that I rarely teach the same student twice in their academic career. As a result, students have remained pleasantly anonymous to me and I’ve remained a bit anonymous to my students (after all, you can get away with not knowing your professor’s (or you students’) name if you only have them in one class, but after two it just become awkward). 

This semester, I’ve found that I not only have students who I’ve taught before (in a few cases multiple times) but also who are taking methods and Roman history from me back to back. This is a very strange thing for me. It also creates a sense of familiarity both among my students and for me.

This is generally good, but even after just one class, the students who know me have already begun to assert their familiarity in the classroom. They not only are more at ease “cracking wise,” but sit together, answer questions that I pose to the class, and generally seem comfortable in the classroom.

I don’t mind this, of course, but I worry about students who don’t know me as well and who are new to my sometimes casual classroom demeanor (which many students embrace).

I think that I’m going to implement a kind of “reverse stack” policy in this class. To do this, I’m going to ask students who have had me before to wait 20 seconds before chiming in on questions that I’m posing to the group or interrupting what I’m saying with a follow up question. Ideally, after a few weeks, this kind of thing won’t be necessary as I have created enough space for students who don’t know me as well to feel comfortable.