What I Wish I knew: Graduate Student Teaching
posted by Sybil Vane
A friend of mine is leading a session in our school's "training grad students to be teaching labor for slave wages in under 2 weeks" program and has been assigned to the "What I Wish I Knew" segment. He asked for some thoughts, and I figured I would share mine here, in the service of Bitch readers who are about to embark on their first semester of teaching as graduate students. Caveat that these are likely humanities skewed:
- If you are designing your own syllabus, ABOVE ALL, err on the side of less reading/fewer assignments. Many of us tend to really overdo it, thinking we have something to prove. We don't; lighten up.
- You can change the syllabus en route. If you need to drop a book or reduce an assignment midway through the semester, it's no big deal.
- The texts/issues on which your scholarship focuses can be the hardest to teach to undergraduates, if the most tempting. If you have written 2 chapters on some poems or events or whatever, it can be much harder to translate that to undergrad speak that it is with something you've on which you've not done extensive research. That is, you shouldn't necessarily try to teach your dissertation.
- Don't worry about being un-grad student-like, whatever that means. A portion of your students every year will be thinking about grad school, and they will all know you are a grad student. By and large, they appreciate knowing the reality of what graduate school means/is/looks like; it is a service you do to them when you don't pretend that there is no different between you and a tenured professor.
- Very few graduate students will get into a situation where they embarass themselves in class; when it comes to knowledgeability, graduate students are over-achievers by nature. That is, you can spend way more time on your teaching prep than you need to. Not because teaching isn't important, or is subordinate to research, but because it can be more immediately rewarding than the other shit you have to do. Don't overdo it. You won't embarass yourself, because really you know a lot. A lot.
- Class participation has as much to do with the accidents of the class (time of day, demographics, room shape) as it does with you. Don't internalize.
- Eventually, being in charge of your own classroom for the first time feels totally awesome.Enjoy it.
- If you are designing your own syllabus, ABOVE ALL, err on the side of less reading/fewer assignments. Many of us tend to really overdo it, thinking we have something to prove. We don't; lighten up.
- You can change the syllabus en route. If you need to drop a book or reduce an assignment midway through the semester, it's no big deal.
- The texts/issues on which your scholarship focuses can be the hardest to teach to undergraduates, if the most tempting. If you have written 2 chapters on some poems or events or whatever, it can be much harder to translate that to undergrad speak that it is with something you've on which you've not done extensive research. That is, you shouldn't necessarily try to teach your dissertation.
- Don't worry about being un-grad student-like, whatever that means. A portion of your students every year will be thinking about grad school, and they will all know you are a grad student. By and large, they appreciate knowing the reality of what graduate school means/is/looks like; it is a service you do to them when you don't pretend that there is no different between you and a tenured professor.
- Very few graduate students will get into a situation where they embarass themselves in class; when it comes to knowledgeability, graduate students are over-achievers by nature. That is, you can spend way more time on your teaching prep than you need to. Not because teaching isn't important, or is subordinate to research, but because it can be more immediately rewarding than the other shit you have to do. Don't overdo it. You won't embarass yourself, because really you know a lot. A lot.
- Class participation has as much to do with the accidents of the class (time of day, demographics, room shape) as it does with you. Don't internalize.
- Eventually, being in charge of your own classroom for the first time feels totally awesome.Enjoy it.
Labels: academia, graduate school, teaching
Posted at 5:00 PM
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