Encouraged

When it goes well, teaching is the best feeling.

I was feeling discouraged about my grad class before spring break, as you might have noticed. But I think tonight's class went really well. I decided to try a new frame for the class, telling them at the beginning how we would break down the three hours and what questions I planned to address. At then end I went back to that slide full of questions and asked them to tell me about something they'd learned and something they still wanted to know more about. It was encouraging to skim through a pile of responses about things they'd learned, and the lingering questions are very reasonable.

We went through the exam, which can be a PR exercise in disguise. I was feeling particularly down two weeks ago because OH MY GOODNESS did I labor over that exam. I thought it was structured in such a sensible and helpful way; the students just thought it was hard. I have to keep telling myself that just because something is hard for students doesn't mean it's bad for students. They do not always share this opinion, but tonight was an opportunity to say, "Here's what I wanted you to learn from taking this test."

(That's always my goal: to write an exam where students learn from the process of taking it, where they are asked to synthesize information in ways that can spark an aha! moment right there in the classroom. Sometimes it works better than others.)

In preparing for this class I had a helpful realization: I'm not preparing for a doctoral seminar; I'm teaching MS students. I think I've been worrying needlessly about some aspects of preparing for class. So tonight we spent some time on breaking down a useful but slippery concept, and then a lot of time talking about examples and uses. I think it was a good mix of practical and theoretical information. They took lots of notes; they laughed out loud frequently; they talked energetically in small groups. (I did have an exercise lined up that didn't go according to plan at all because of unforeseen file management issues, but there's always next time.) From the front of the class, at any rate, the 3 hours zipped by.

I am posting this mostly for my future self, who will inevitably have moments of thinking, "Can't do it, don't want to do it, have to do it, UGH." (I know this because my 2:00pm self was saying that very thing about tonight's class.) It's a great gig, Future Self. And you can too do it.