Advice to former self #2: Don't be a drill seargeant

• Remember: It is NOT your responsibility to bring students to some predefined point B. You give an opportunity, not a guarantee. Make sure this opportunity is good, fair, inclusive, but don’t be a drill sergeant (pointless, painful). Have fun, and limit, contain your time and efforts.

Well, this one is easy, and probably even less controversial than the first one, but it took me a while to believe in it, and the realization was rather painful. Wasted a few semesters in needless bitterness and anxiety!

As a zealous neophyte, I binged on books and articles about pedagogy and teaching techniques: active learning, spaced repetition, concepts transfer. I designed my syllabi, and then my classes, with the highest impact in mind, and the effect was rather peculiar: students learned A TON, and, based on my internal “before and after” tests, their progress was quite astounding. But they were also angry, bitter, and overall unhappy.

Now, there are several communities online where jaded sad professors rant, under the veil of anonymity, about how students are ungrateful, and how the over-reliance on course evaluations spawned an inflation of praise, good grades, participation prizes, “the coddling of the mind”, and what not. “In our times”, they say… And I don’t really buy that. For one, I think it is unfair for older people to berate modern students for their “weakness”, as the “real world” that meets college graduates these days is so different from what it was even just 20 years ago: more competitive, less predictable. And also, the memories we have of our own past are shaped by the survival bias, and creative reinterpretaton of facts. Just because we came to peace with memories of a tough course that we hated back at school, does not mean that this course was any good. It just means that we grew older, and forgot just how unnecessarily painful it was.

It is really easy to concoct an image of oneself as a suffering hero, a self-sacrificial teacher whose true effect on young lives will be evident only in 10 years from now, and only by the selected few. One day they will stop in their tracks to suddenly realize: yes, this class back in college was hard and painful, but now I see how my professor truly taught me some Calculus! And now I’m so grateful for that!

But this would all be complete and utter nonsense. It goes beyond saying that course evaluations are a horrid way of evaluating faculty, but it does not mean that, as a professor, you should not care about whether students like your courses; about the emotional effect these courses have. In a way, nothing is more important than this fleeting emotional effect. If your students don’t like math while in your class, why would they ever return to math on their own? They will never use it, they will run away from it, and all your supposedly “efficient” teaching will be wasted on them, wasted completely. And because of that, there is nothing wrong with being lax and forgiving, if it makes students more engaged.

It all sounds so obvious, and maybe it was always obvious to you, dear reader; maybe you see it is a straw-man argument, but for me it was a tough realization. I spent two years or so working as a drill sergeant, prepping students for battle, as if a race of evil aliens was just about to descend on Earth in a few weeks’ time. And it totally did not work. So these days I’m trying to be as lax as I can get, without having them students completely spoiled (I’ll later describe some practical solutions in a separate post). I am sure that with my Russian heritage and upbringing, even the most chill and kind version of me is still reasonably scary and unnecessarily intense, but hey at least I’m trying!

So here’s my current approach: I downplay extrinsic motivation to bare minimum, and make it very clear from the very beginning. Here’s the class, my goal is to be here for you, and to provide you with a nice set of opportunities. I will also regularly remind you about best practices, but I will not attempt to punish you for not following them. I don't think it is my job. My job is to open the doors for you, and to show why I think the topics we are studying are fun. But it is up to you to decide how much you want to get from this class. What are your goals? Of all the options on the table, which ones are you planning to use?

I think it is a win-win. Easier, more pleasant teaching, which is also much more effective in the long-term.

Advice to former self: #1 - Contain teaching within 4 days a week

A week ago I posted "10 pieces of advice to former self", or "10 things I wish I knew when starting my TT position", as a Twitter thread. It turned to be a double failure: it didn't get any traction on Twitter, and yet it worried some of my colleagues, who thought that some of my statements “might be misconstrued”, and who were kind enough to reach out to me and say that. Basically, my “advice” sounded too negative and controversial.

I am not quite sure what to make of it: maybe I’m just not good in Twitter, or maybe indeed these topics just don’t project to Twitter format well. After all, any “advice to new faculty” is bound to be at least somewhat counter-intuitive, and thus, potentially, controversial, just by virtue of being a piece of advice. If something is obvious, it doesn’t get a chance to become advice, as everybody know it and agree with it to begin with. There’s no need of reminding people that they need to work more. However sometimes you may have to remind people to work less, or to shift priorities in some not-so-obvious way. Maybe Twitter is just not that good for that sort of nuanced provocative controversy.

Also, any attempt to give advice to “former self” may sound bitter. Revisiting failures, even relative, even perceived, is never pleasant. There’s a saying in Russian: “to bite one’s own elbows”, which means “to obsess about past decisions that can no longer be changed”. I’m guessing it is some sort of a meta-joke, at a folk linguistic scale, as obviously biting one’s elbows is physically impossible, making it into an awesome metaphor of anxiety-driven internal struggle. And casting bitterness and anxiety into 280-character sluggets just does not sound right.

So, here comes a take two: I’ll try to post same unsolicited “pieces of advice” as a series of blog posts. With more background, and more thoughts on the topics.

  

* * *

The piece of advice number one:

• Don’t obsess about teaching. Remember that teaching occupies all space, time, and heart available. Fight it! You cannot make everyone happy, and you WILL get better with time, provided that you collect feedback and reflect. Fight to contain teaching strictly within 4 days a week!

Let me begin by saying that, of course, I heard this advice repeatedly when I started at Bard. it is, I believe, an integral part of any honest orientation for new faculty in a teaching-oriented institution. It may sound counter-intuitive, as aren’t faculty in a teaching institution supposed to care a lot about teaching? But that’s exactly the problem: they care about teaching a lot, they are chosen for this job by this very criterion, they are obsessed with teaching. If you, dear reader, have started in a SLAC this year, it means that you are obsessed with teaching!

Moreover, if you are in a STEM field, the chances are that you’re coming here from a postdoc. As a postdoc, you always wanted to teach, but probably could not dedicate enough time to it, and also, probably, you didn’t have the freedom to develop your own courses the way you wanted. So now you feel exhilarated; drunk on freedom. At least in my school, one can craft their syllabus pretty much any way they want, within some very reasonable limits, which is awesome, and scary, and awesome!

But the trick with teaching is that while it is fun, it is also a trap. For two reasons. One, it is a very open-ended task. You cannot be “done” with teaching on any particular week, you can always do more. You can read a bit more, develop a few more assignments, provide some personalized feedback, rework your next class, so on and so forth. There is no natural arc to your activities on any given week: there’s only the law of marginal returns that gradually fades your efforts into the fog. First hour of preparation is critical, the second one matters, the third adds some polish, the fourth takes care of details… There is no logical end-line to it, yet at some point you need to stop.

What makes it even worse, is that while teaching what you love, and especially when teaching it for the first few times, you cannot see this line clearly. You don’t have enough experience, and also you are blinded by the swarm of possibilities in your head. So the only trick I know is to set very hard, and very artificial limits on time periods you allow yourself to spend on teaching and prepping. These days, I have a target, trying to fit all teaching in 3 days, leaving 1 day for service, and 1 day for research. I also have a hard limit, in which teaching is restricted to 4 days, while for one day all teaching-related activities are forbidden. I have to admit that I failed to stick to my own plan on two weeks this semester already: during the mid-ways, and now, as the semester is ending. But at least I’m trying.

Another aspect of teaching that turns it into a trap, I guess, would not apply to all, but it does apply to people like me: those with a narcissistic streak, and high anxiety. Teaching is about interacting with people (students). The only way to get better in it is to listen to feedback: formal and informal, verbal and behavioral, solicited and spontaneous. Which means that you are sort of supposed to care about what other people think about you. Well, technically you are supposed to care about 1) how good your teaching is, and 2) what other non-student people think about how good your teaching is, which is not exactly the same. But because attitude towards you affects attitude towards your teaching, and because at this point you probably identify with your teaching, and because you are constantly “plugged into” this stream of feedback from students, it is a breeding ground for anxiety and impostor syndrome. Which makes you spend 150% of your time on teaching. Which is, again, a trap, and does not even help you with becoming a better teacher, necessarily.

Of course I was told all that. I wish somebody was more tough with me though, when I was only starting. Some people told me that “having 1 day for research is a good target”, but some said: “forget about doing any research during the semester”. These conflicting messages made me really confused about whether having a research day is even possible. I’ve seen it on some people’s calendars, but not on others. I wish somebody had pulled me away, shook me a bit by the shoulders, and told me in a no-nonsense way: fight for this day! Keep one day sacred. Don’t do any teaching on this day. If you start prepping in the morning, you won’t be able to stop. You day will be gone. Don’t do it. Contain it! I’m not sure I would have listened, but maybe it would have helped ;)