Classic Edition: Advice to New Faculty

Classes for the Fall term start next week, which means that things are starting to gear up on campus. We've been sent our class rosters, and lists of new freshman advisees, and have started to have meetings about team-taught courses and department policies and the like. And, of course, the new faculty hired for this year have shown up.

There was a meet-and-greet last night with the new faculty, which was fun (though as usual, I got to talking to people, and wound up coming home an hour later than I had said I would...). This also reminded me that I should dip into the archives for a Classic Edition post on adviece to new faculty.

This one goes way, way, way back, all the way to September 2002, when I was just starting my second year, and asked to talk to the new faculty that year:

The new term started this past week, with a larger than usual crop of eager young freshmen turning up Monday (the 9th) for orientation before classes started on Tuesday. They're very young (born in 1985-- they almost certainly don't remember Reagan being President, and they're probably hazy on Bush the Elder), and very eager, and it generally looks like a good crew.

Before they showed up (the previous Thursday), there was another orientation, this one for new faculty. A little over a year ago, I was one of the new professors wandering confusedly around the campus (new faculty are easy to spot-- they obviously don't know where anything is, but they're too old to be students, and not dressed well enough to be parents of students...); this year, I was one of the second-year faculty asked to speak at the new faculty orientation.

Most of what I said wasn't really general-interest material, being a little too specific to the small liberal arts faculty thing. It's really not worth posting advice on syllabus construction or classroom discipline to the internet (though as a general comment, The Poor Man has a good guide to how not to conduct a class...). But a few of the things that came to mind were probably worth a blog post. Most of them can be condensed into two statements: 1) This Job Can Eat Your Life, and 2) That's Not a Bad Thing.

My stock response for most of the people who would ask me how I liked my first year as a college professor was "It's a lot more work than it looked like when I was a student." Which is true-- until you actually have to teach a whole class, you don't really appreciate how much work goes into it. In retrospect, it should've been obvious-- I probably spend at least four or five hours prepping a one-hour research talk, and a lecture class is essentially three of those a week. And that's before you get into the issues of choosing demos, setting up demos, writing exams and quizzes, grading exams and quizzes, choosing or writing homework problems, grading homework, posting homework solutions on the Web, setting up labs, grading labs, and answering questions at odd hours (it really doesn't matter what time you designate for office hours-- in fact, posted office hours are the least likely time for students to show up-- students will turn up at all sorts of strange times, expecting help on the homework). Teaching is a time-consuming job, and that doesn't even get into the question of doing research.

Even beyond that, though, it's a job that preys on your mind. When the term is in full swing, I find myself thinking about classes more or less constantly-- making up exam questions while doing laundry, re-thinking the structure of a lecture while I'm in the shower in the morning, or planning labs and demos in the produce aisle at the supermarket. It's an incredible distraction from other concerns-- wet clothes sit forgotten in the washing machine, I realize in the car on the way to work that I forgot to shave, or I get home and find that I forgot to buy any actual food when I was at the store. Some of this is just my natural tendency towards obsessiveness, but a good chunk of it is really just part of the job. It's sort of like blogging is for some people-- last winter, when I was teaching mechanics for the first time, I got to the point where I'd see a car skidding off the road in front of me and think, not "Ice!" or "Gee, I should see if they're all right," but "I could use that as an example in class..."

A colleague who stumbled on my book log expressed amazement at how much I was reading during the term, but it was really necessary to maintain sanity-- I had to read fiction for an hour or so at night to reset my brain, or I'd lie there in the dark plotting lecture notes, unable to sleep. It's really fairly pathetic.

The last three paragraphs make teaching sound like a bad lot, but that's the amazing part-- the job will eat your life, but surprisingly, that's not a bad thing. You end up pouring all kinds of effort into this stuff, and other less pleasant stuff, but somehow it all pays off, in the damnedest ways. I had a couple of students in one of my classes who were a gigantic pain in the ass, and there was a bad stretch in the middle of one term when they were disrupting the flow of the class, and generally making me miserable. And in the middle of that, another student in the class went out of his way to drop by my office and apologize for cracking wise once, because he'd been really fired up about getting a good grade on a mid-term. It sounds corny, but that made my whole week.

There are two things that I always manage to forget between terms (at least, for the three between-term breaks I've had thus far). One is just how much energy lecturing takes-- the first few classes of a term, I'm always a little hoarse towards the end, and absolutely ravenous when I get out of class. And Friday, after two partial classes and the first full lecture of the term, I was an absolute zombie when I got home (playing hoops for an hour at lunchtime didn't really help, either).

The other thing I forget is what a kick it is when a class goes well. I'm starving at the end of a good lecture, but also more than a little bit hyper. It's hard to resist the temptation to provide a comprehensive recap to other faculty members, the department secretary, Kate, or random passers-by. Some days I don't resist.

One of the new faculty members this year in another department had worked in theater, and made a comparison between teaching and acting. There's something to that-- lecturing is an odd sort of theater, part scripted, part improvised (I re-invented a couple of bits of Friday's lecture on the fly), and with the same audience every time out. It's not exactly a death-defying spectacle, but you do have to put yourself on the line to some degree-- if you put the lecture across well, maybe they'll learn something, but if you blow it, particularly early in the term, they'll decide you're simply the biggest idiot on the planet, and you'll never really recover. When things go well, and you hold their attention, and the on-the-fly re-writes work out all right, it's an incredible rush.

A lot of things about this job are a pain in the ass-- you're given limited resources and impossible tasks, and if you succeed, you get asked to do even more. And general faculty meetings can occasionally make Dilbert look soothing and idyllic. But all in all, I love my job.