Current Events > Anyone ever teach in college? I'm gonna try it for the first time. Any advice?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm being given some classes to teach next semester on the last semester of my masters. Never taught before :^)
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@ThyCorndog

Congratulations. I was an adjunct for about 8 years.

* First, don't overthink things it will only make you nervous.

* Think of the best professors you had. What made them effective? Until you develop your own classroom personality, emulate the methods of successful professors you had.

* Don't try to be too friendly to students. Your job is to teach them. Know both/all sides of every argument. Present them fairly.

* This is kind of touchy but you want every student to feel they have to work hard. That's not the same as being a hardass. It takes time to get a feel for but if you get the balance right, good students will excel, middling students will work harder and become good students and bad students (by which I mean students who want to coast) will either move towards the middle or drop the course (which is preferable to getting a bad grade).

* Remember as the professor you know more about the subject than the student. This takes some of the pressure off too. Handle this responsibility with humilty and try to have fun with it (I used to use funny stories to illustrate points).

Hope this helps. Good luck and let me know if you have other questions.
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One more thing: Hold office hours in an office with the curtains open, doors open etc. or in a public place like a Starbuck or campus coffe shop. You want people around.

NEVER agree to a one-on one meeting at an isolated place. One of the guys I taught with was accused of harrassment when he met a woman behind closed doors in an unusual setting. Eventually it came out the woman falsely accused him but he went through hell.

He was trying to help her out and agreed to meet her at her apartment and created a he-said-she said situation.

As you know time management is part of being a student. Short of serious illness or death or something really extrordinary don't listen to the sob stories. You'll make the student better at time management and you'll save yourself from grading papers coming in late, incomplete, etc.
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@brestugo
thanks for all the advice, I appreciate it. i'll keep all of that in mind. i'm a bit nervous about starting the classes up, but I figure (rationally) that once I get it started, i'll get used to it and know what I want to do on a week to week basis

what did you teach, out of curiosity? I'm being given physics and astronomy courses
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ThyCorndog posted...

@brestugo
thanks for all the advice, I appreciate it. i'll keep all of that in mind. i'm a bit nervous about starting the classes up, but I figure (rationally) that once I get it started, i'll get used to it and know what I want to do on a week to week basis

what did you teach, out of curiosity? I'm being given physics and astronomy courses

I taught Government and then American Foreign Policy.
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your students are adults

so you know

wink
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SterlingM posted...

your students are adults

so you know

wink

Sounds like everyone's getting a D
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only after the semesters over of course
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@ThyCorndog

Just remembered another teaching tool. Part of the job is answering questions of course but not all questions are equal. Sometimes students ask a question instead of thinking through the problem themself. If you get that feeling, turn the question back to the class.

Example: "Why is the sky blue?" Response: "That's a good question; "why is the sky blue?" Have we learned anything that suggests an answer?"

I don't know how things are so much in hard sciences but in social sciences it brings many minds to the problem and forces the student to think.
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yeah that makes sense. getting productive, on-topic discussion going is always good. especially when a class is 3 hours long and you don't really want to just blow through the material so fast they don't actually grasp anything
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bump in case anyone else has got anything else to add
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