In my first semester as a graduate student I taught introductory programming to around 25 undergraduates. This was just one of many, many sections of the same course. The hundreds of students enrolled were divvied up into small sections, and those sections were assigned to graduate student teaching assistants, many of whom (like me) had little or no teaching experience. I guess the reasoning was that if one section didn’t go well, only a small fraction of students would be affected. There was a weekly session for first-time teaching assistants, to provide guidance, discuss the curriculum, and so on — but it obviously wasn’t enough for me.
I performed abysmally. I didn’t take it seriously and didn’t particularly enjoy it — I wanted to be doing research instead. I remember uttering “I hate teaching” in class. Among other unforgivable transgressions, I provided an input set to a coding assignment that had a bug — I’d not even bothered to test it. How much frustration did that cause, I wonder?
I paid the price on the instructor evaluation at the end of the course, scoring at the very bottom of my entire department. I knew this because those scores were made public, including the names of the instructors. Everyone in my department would have looked at the bottom of the list and seen my name, kind of like looking at a car accident while driving by and being glad that it wasn’t them. “John is the worst TA I’ve ever had,” one student wrote. In retrospect I don’t know why, but those evaluations were a huge shock at the time. Somehow I hadn’t realized that I was so bad.
So I begged for another shot, and was offered an 8am class the next semester to make amends. I believe I did, at least to a new batch of students. I took it seriously, worked hard, and kept the perspective of the students in mind and treated them with respect. I doubled my evaluation scores, and I also found that I actually enjoyed teaching.
I think of this experience as being formative. When I was a professor I put a lot of work into being a good teacher, and have no doubt that this experience was a part of what motivated that. I always tried to put myself in the shoes of my students and never asked them to do something I hadn’t done myself to completion. I didn’t hide the day before the final exam, I held “all day” office hours from 9 to 5 instead. I memorized the name of every student in my classes and spent the hours I proctored exams going from one student to the next in turn, reciting their names in my head. I believe I managed to straighten myself out, and even received an award one year for outstanding teaching — one of the very few professional honors I’ve received and undoubtedly the one that’s most meaningful to me.
But I’ll never get that first class back. And to those that took that class with me, all I can say is that I am truly sorry.
As someone who has had the priviledge of being your student, I think it’s safe to say that you paid back your teaching faux pas debt in spades. Besides, I’m sure that advising me as a student was the universe’s way of rebalancing the karma balance books. 🙂
In all seriousness though, this is a great post and one that resonantes with me for various areas of my own life. It’s not about how hard you hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep getting back up which is the separating hyperlplane of life. I can’t be bothered to look up the origin of that quote, but my money’s on either Gandhi or Mother Teresa.
Anyway, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the writing you’ve put up so far and am looking forward to more of it.