- 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.
