Incivilities

In Boice’s discussion of “classroom incivilities,” he points out that many new graduate students begin their TA careers with little or no idea of what “regular” college students are like. I believe this is true. As a college student, I managed to surround myself with people who were just as nerdy as I was, so it hardly occurred to me that some college kids might not even want to BE in college. When I first arrived in grad school and had to teach, it was quite shocking to realize the huge range of possible student responses to college.

Something that’s been weighing on my mind throughout the semester is the utter lack of teaching training that I received as an advanced undergrad/prospective grad student. When I was thinking about applying to grad school in Classics, the only things I was encouraged to consider were “do I want to study the Etruscans?” “How is my Latin?” “do I want to study 2^nd-style Pompeian wall painting?” et cetera. All of my classes in my junior and senior years as an undergrad were focused on preparing myself to study Classics. In some vague way, I understood I’d be teaching as a grad student, but nobody suggested to me that I should prepare to do this in any way, and this idea certainly didn’t occur to me either. Teaching wasn’t “the point” of being a grad student in Classics, or indeed of being a professor of Classics—the goal was to become a scholar, not a teacher.

But I learned that teaching was not a skill I could just “pick up.” I have to work at it, and it’s as hard to do well as translating a passage of Thucydides. I want to emphasize that I don’t mind being a teacher. In fact I'm learning to like it. But it frustrates me that my whole conception of the professorial career, when I was set to begin training for it, left out the actual day-to-day exercise of being a prof: Professing. So then when I entered grad school for the first time, I got the (implied) message: “Surprise! Congrats on studying all that Catullus. Now you have to learn an entirely new skill set that has nothing in the world to do with the literature of ancient Rome. Good luck.” I’d been had.

I think that teacher-training should really begin when one’s a senior in college, and we should stop pretending that professorial work is mostly scholarship—because God knows that’s not true. I’m not annoyed about the nature of the job, though. What I’m annoyed about is the lack of preparation I really received for it at the start. In what other career track is this the case for its trainees? It’s really too late to begin learning to teach when one arrives in grad school. Teaching involves so many specific skills that it’s impossible to learn competence in a single semester, or even a year, and we should stop expecting our grad students can do so.