It's my privilege

I'll be back on campus later this week after eight months away, and while I'm wondering how in the world I ever juggled teaching and writing and family responsibilities--because it's not like I've been watching TV and eating bonbons for the last eight months, despite the break from teaching--I'm also looking forward to it. Last night I was working on syllabi and actually having a good time thinking about how to structure my classes.

I'm teaching four courses this spring, all courses I've taught before, but I never do exactly the same thing from semester to semester. Part of the pleasure I take from teaching is the fact that it includes a learning process for me: each time I teach a class, I learn something new about the subject matter and the way my students receive it. I've learned, for instance, that asking first-year students to workshop each others' writing just doesn't work; developmentally, most of them aren't in a place where they can separate their fear of hurting someone's feelings from their response to the writing. If we do workshop each others' writing, we do it briefly and with lots of direction. By the time they're sophomores and juniors, though, most of them can do this pretty effectively and free-form workshop discussions are the central feature of the class.

It's not easy to juggle four classes that often require four different approaches, but I actually prefer this to teaching two sections of the same course. (By the time I teach the second section, I'm out of gas. I've said what I have to say. And I feel like my lack of enthusiasm is contagious.)When I was in Boise a few months ago, one of my former BSU colleagues expressed surprise at my teaching load. "That's like a community college teaching load," she said. At one time, this may have been true--but when I was interviewing for tenure-track jobs, not one of them offered anything less than a 3-4 load, and 4-4 was much more common. Colleagues who teach at research-oriented universities (the minority of professors, taking the big picture into account) tend to forget that a 2-2 load isn't standard.

I'm not sure it's a privilege, either. Graduate students are taught to view it this way, but I think that's because they're often taught by professors who view teaching as an annoying distraction from their research and who can't imagine why anyone would want a job that requires they do more of it. (I have three graduate degrees from three different institutions, and this was almost universally true of the graduate faculty I encountered.) The 2-2 load does leave much more time for research and writing, no doubt--but are those really the most important activities a professor engages in? Scholarly activity informs the professoriate--but is it really more important than helping students create new knowledge for themselves? Is it more important than the kind of learning we do in our own classrooms? I'm not so sure.

I've missed being around students. I've enjoyed having the time to focus on my own reading and writing, but I remember how energized I felt after the class I taught at BSU--there's no denying that teaching gives me a kind of energy that research and writing just don't. When the semester gets frenetic, I'm going to try to remember that it's a privilege to interact with and learn from my students every day.