By Bill Henk – This semester served as a huge reminder to me that you’re never too old to learn, particularly when it comes to teaching. So, what’s made a veteran educator like me consciously vocalize that foregone conclusion?
Some readers may recall a post I wrote in August about getting back in the saddle to teach again. At the time the prospect of taking on teaching responsibilities in addition to my regular workload seemed daunting at best and more likely outright crazy. Even so, I agreed to tackle the course thinking I could handle it. After all, as far as college teaching goes, I’d been there, done that many, many. many times before.
Sure, I’d been out of the classroom for the full eight years I’ve been a dean here at Marquette. But, I figured the old teaching “magic” I enjoyed for more than a quarter century would simply reappear. Unfortunately for my students, I was mistaken.
How’d That Teaching Thing Work Out for You Anyway, Dr. Henk?
Now that the fall semester is officially in the books, I’m free to blog about my recent teaching experience. It’s been something I’ve been itching to do almost from the outset of the course, but I held off in deference to my students.
Now the urge appears to be therapeutic in nature. Blogging about it is something I just need to do.
In short, my teaching experience ended up being something between an adventure and an experiment. Teaching the course did indeed prove to be a hardship, but one that I enjoyed, although not thoroughly.
Fact is, I felt enormous stress going week to week trying to be as prepared as possible. It weighed heavily on me, much more than I would have thought. In the end, my misgivings about the course centered on my own performance, which I regarded as less than stellar. More importantly, by my standards, I let my students down – even if they didn’t know it!
The story goes like this. On one hand. I had clearly forgotten the incredible amount of work it takes to create a new course. On the other, I had also forgotten how dearly I loved teaching. It’s the reason I got into this profession in the first place, and I always prided myself on being a first-rate instructor. That’s why, as I moved up through the professorial ranks, I NEVER lost sight of the importance of my teaching. My devotion to its art and science resulted in consistently excellent ratings from students and peers and even in teaching awards.
In hindsight, loving teaching made me excel at it. What I learned this semester is that NOT truly excelling at it made me love it less, so to speak.
Not “All THAT” After All
Fact is, I still cherished everything about orchestrating the classroom and shaping the way my students thought about the content. But my ability to teach came into question in my own mind for the first time since student teaching more than 35 years ago. The discomfort rocked my professional pride nearly to its core. It had been so long since I thought of myself as anything besides a master teacher that I didn’t know what to do with my newfound vulnerabilities.
Setting the bar so high for myself is why, more than anything else, the past semester proved to be such an emotional struggle. I imagine (or at least hope) that my students felt they “received” a good course overall. Relatively speaking, it probably did qualify as respectable enough (although I still can’t bring myself to look at my evaluations).
You see, in both my mind and my heart, I know that my students’ educational experience fell short of what I’m capable of delivering. Frankly, living with that reality hurt. It threatened my very identity as an educator.
For the record, the shortfall can NOT be attributed to a lack of effort. I tried very hard in the weeks leading up to the course and throughout all 15 weeks of its duration. I spent practically every spare minute developing materials for the class or giving thought to how I could make it better. The work started with constructing a thoughtful and rigorous syllabus, and it evolved into creating several professional Powerpoint presentations, generating ideas for group activities, providing detailed assignment descriptions, and forging in-depth scoring schemes.
Those elements of my course were as tight as they’ve ever been, maybe tighter. So that wasn’t the problem. Regrettably, high quality course materials will only take an instructor so far. It turns out that I was second-rate in other important respects.
Bucked From the Saddle Big-Time
First of all, I was not as facile with the content as I’d normally be. Developing new material also means developing new “scripts” for talking about the concepts. As a result, my lectures didn’t flow as expected, and the discussions that I directed felt clumsy to me on balance. Once again, both were handled competently, but were nowhere near being masterful. Knowing the difference caused me plenty of self-doubt.
Second, I never quite found my overall rhythm for the course as a whole. Because I had not taught this particular course in this particular way before, it amounted to trial and error. Pacing the course generally, and managing topics to conform to the length of the class periods proved challenging.
My biggest gaffe was misgauging how my instructional time would play out over the semester. Specifically, one assignment required students to make a 15-minute individual presentation to the class. That would have been fine with the 12 students I originally heard I’d have; however, when the number swelled to 21, I should have made an adjustment and didn’t. Consequently, I surrendered a large amount of direct instructional time. I still don’t know if I maintained the assignment because it was my only opportunity to see my students teach, and I thought that was important, or because my arrogance made me think I could still cover everything – or both.
Anyway, that miscalculation set up a situation where too much of the burden for what needed to be learned fell to my students. In some respects that might not have been so bad. I wanted to take the course in a student-centered direction way back when I first planned it (even though that would be quite a departure for a lecturer-type like me). But the course shifted too far toward self-instruction by the end. Thankfully, my students’ test performance and assignments suggested that they rose to the occasion and ended up learning a lot on their own.
Back in the Saddle Again?
Let’s just say that I won’t be mounting up any time soon. In addition to my regular administrative work, my community service, and blogging, the course just plain exhausted me. Still, I have every intention of teaching again, probably in a summer session down the road. In particular, I welcome the opportunity to show how much I’ve learned from this semester’s missteps. For that matter, I’m determined to regain my full facility as an instuctor, so I can take pride again in excelling in the classroom.
For the record, there were moments during the course when I felt positively exhilarated. In those instances, the “magic” did reappear, and I reveled in it. To me, those were remarkably gratifying episodes, and I look forward to many more of them in the future.
Yessir, when the time comes to teach, I might not be ready for bucking broncos, but I”ll be ready to pony up again.
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