I’m beginning this blog post before I feel ready. I haven’t mulled over the assigned chapters to my satisfaction, and I haven’t read over everyone’s blog posts yet. However, I’m starting to type now.
Boice’s suggestion to go into the classroom before one feels completely ready to teach struck me as great advice. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve bored by over-preparing for my lectures. When I read from lecture notes without engaging the students in the proceedings (at least by making eye contact with them), I feel stiff and slow, like I can’t look up from my text to respond to things that are actually going on in the classroom. The “permission” to teach even if I feel unprepared also makes me feel less guilty for keeping my class preparation for last, after having done work for my own classes. I know that my priority as a grad student is to do my grad student work, but all the same, I want my students to have a great college experience. To me, that means teaching them as well as I can. Even if my day-to-day undergrad routine at Smith College didn’t prepare me much for teaching, Smith did make me a “believer”— I believe absolutely in the value of a college education, and I think those 4 years can stimulate tremendous intellectual and personal growth in a student.
Now I’ve gone and intimidated myself. How can I possibly change my students’ lives? At least I can start with the strange idea of improving my teaching by minimizing my preparation.
I think it would also be good for me to begin my exploratory essay “before I feel ready.” I suppose I’ll never feel completely ready. It would most likely be a problem if I did feel I had complete control over the material and knew what I wanted to say about it, particularly for an exploratory essay! Here I’ll try to apply Boice’s suggestion to view unpredictable situations as fun and exciting.
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