Following the suggestion of a reader, we will now have an open thread each Monday on a current academic keyword (e.g. “excellence”) or on other topics of very broad interest to academics.
Today’s question is: what did you not learn in graduate school that you most wish you had? My answers are: how to teach English literacy skills at the primary and early secondary levels (not just the late secondary and early college levels), and how to design (and not just use / imitate / borrow) programs, exercises, and testing programs in beginning foreign languages.
Of course, I would never have registered in a graduate program that emphasized those things.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Excellent idea. We all heard that ed courses were a waste of time. And they probably were, once, but the pedagogy has improved greatly.
Tools for grading quickly.
Servetus — yes. Hattie — pedagogy has improved but many other than ed people have worked on that, and it’s only the fanciest of ed people who helped with the improvements — or perhaps I am too unkind.
How to write grants, conference proposals, and inquiry letters.
Undine — that’s very interesting. I thought those things came with the graduate school territory but maybe not.
Anything about anything having to do with being a professional professor, from the grant-writing to the teaching to the conferencing. (I went to a very bad and embittered grad school — I wish I had know more about grad school, too. Total babe in the woods was I at 23.)
Clio, again I feel lucky — I got all of that. What I didn’t get were the things I actually needed. Maybe most people actually get all the elementary teaching and self-limitation skills I missed getting, but don’t get the professional skills that I got?
I learned the skills for grading quickly before being dumped from the grad program I was in (victim of the culture wars in the 80’s.). Fat lot of good it did me.
I would have been such a good college lit and writing teacher, too.
You sure would have, Hattie!