“Dedicated, innovative teacher,” said my annual evaluation. This is perfectly true but teaching is really something I can take or leave. I do not dislike it, and I know how. I think it should be done well, and I do not mind. But really I am a very old fashioned research-1, teaching-2, service-3 person (despite having semesters in which my actual effort goes the other way in this hierarchy), and I do not “love” to teach in the manner of many who say they do. Here are some of my reasons for not liking to teach:
1. Pressure from time immemorial not to spend time on it. “If you do, you will not write and not make tenure.” Teaching still causes me anxiety for that reason.
2. The supposition that if teaching was successful, too much time was spent on it. (How do you know that? Maybe I am just a good typist and a fast thinker!)
3. The expectation that, since I was a girl, I would put it first.
4. The requirement that, since I was a girl, I do it in a motherly way.
5. Having to summon the type of extroversion it requires.
6. The expectation that, if one is good at teaching, one should love it above all else in the world and be willing to sacrifice anything for the sake of continuing to do it.
7. The behavior of students in lower division and required courses.
8. There are deeper reasons, but I erased them from this post because they are even more about my vulnerability to exhortations about duty than what I’ve already said is.
Notice how my issues about teaching have to do with what other people transfer onto it.
Do you like teaching? What kind and in what sense? Why and/or why not? Does your reaction have to do with your particular teaching situation(s), and/or with other factors about you that do not really have to do with teaching itself? Remember, as you plan your response: there are no judgments here, nobody is required to prove anything, and you don’t have to like teaching to be good at it!
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I like teaching because it’s like performing, like being someone else for an hour – a person who isn’t shy and quiet, but a person who knows things and can explain them. I guess I like summoning the extroversion it requires – good way to put it – because I like knowing that I can, and it’s fun, and it’s only for an hour at a go. I don’t feel any pressure to be that way all the time.
I also like watching students have new ideas, and get excited about ideas. And I like helping them become better writers.
What I don’t like about teaching is that it’s so hard to tell if I’m doing it well, or how to do it better. Student opinions aren’t necessarily useful in making this determination, because not all of them want to learn or have the same expectations about how they will/can/should learn. And my fellow graduate students and the professors around me all have so many radically different ideas about how teaching should be done that I would go mad if I tried to measure my performance against all these bazillion different ideals and expectations. So I feel like I’m groping my way through a dark room – one that has lots of heavy objects randomly placed on the floor. Ow.
Of course, I used to feel that way about research (minus the random heavy objects, thank goodness) and I don’t anymore, so maybe one day I won’t feel this way about teaching.
If I could get over what other people transfer onto teaching for me or project into me about teaching, I’d agree with you, with these caveats:
* one class is great, two classes are fine, three and four are manageable depending upon what they are, more than that is pure drudgery and four can be;
* required and general education courses are hell if you aren’t in a position to really control them and do them in a creative way (and even so … check out that blog, A Gentleman’s C).
Well, I don’t really control the course I TA for. Although, I am TAing for a much more controlling prof this semester than I was last semester and it has been pretty miserable at times. Every time any of us TAs does or says something that indicates we are enthusiastic about teaching, or thinking creatively about stuff to do in our sections, or whatever, she stomps on us hard. Fortunately, in the end, she doesn’t have enough time and energy to really control everything we do, so we still have a good deal of leeway.
[Comment deleted because the CHE linked to this blog, in a column that gets e-mailed to us.]
Oh yes, here’s another reason I don’t like it: people won’t talk about it. They’ll preach about what they do, but they won’t converse; often their best ideas are secrets. This was not my experience in graduate school and hasn’t *always* been afterwards, but I think there is altogether too much paranoia and secretiveness about it.
Weird! My graduate student colleagues and I talk about teaching all the time. Arguing about pedagogy is one of my favorite ways to procrastinate writing papers, as it happens.
After that it becomes like sex: something you’re expected to be competent at, but in which you only engage in private and which you do not discuss in any detail with anyone but your very best friend.
On the other hand I *do* really like the performative aspect of it, and I like a lot of its informal aspects — helping students with research projects, applications, etc. I also like moderating discussion.
I like teaching Japanese, because in their culture the onus is on the listener to put in effort to hear what the teacher is saying. I have tried “teaching” many of Western culture — and I mean “teaching” in a very broad sense here. What I mean is educating, and imparting a different aspect of knowledge to that which they already have. I don’t like it. I think most of us who are feminists here, or who have a differing perspective from the majority (perhaps because you come from a different culture) are all too familiar with the plaintive murmur, “I-don’t-geddit!” It’s supposed to indict the teacher for having nothing meaningful to say to the burdgeoning patriarch, or the cultural chauvinist who has become stuck in his ways. I really don’t like the heavy loading of political intent that lurks behind I-don’t-geddit!
Very good point and astute, and this is one of the main reasons I don’t like teaching or being lectured to about it.
In every day life, one is free to respond, “no, you don’t get it, do you?” But where the teacher is paid to teach, the student can blackmail the teacher for failing to deliver promised services. There is so much of this kind of stuff going on in the system as it is currently set up. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to distortions of fact and the capacity for coercion.
Yes, but remember, that’s the schools and the consumerist model of education, and also the way women are (sometimes) treated. If you’re a professor the point is that you have a much more complex job intellectually and administratively than just delivering a particular data set to a particular bunch of recalcitrant children, and people know this.
(The general public doesn’t, of course; one of the reasons I get so tired of their discourse is that I talk to so many members of the general public so often.)
I just did not put up a blog post about something similar.
I agree that lots of people project lots of things onto teaching — it’s a bit like motherhood in that way.
One of the things that I really don’t like about teaching is your number 6 (and the mother one, too). The message seems to be that you are supposed to LOVE teaching, and you are somehow bad at it if you don’t and should quit your job to let other people who LOVE it take that job. What my not-posted post said was that teaching is a job — a good one if you can get it — but it is a job. A job has a set of problems to solve, and you solve them to some degree of competence. You don’t have to LOVE it, you just have to be good at it. In fact, I’m better at it when I’m not LOVEing it.
I also teach 5 gen ed-level courses, two online. Quite a bit of the time it is drudgery — like right now with the grading of a zillion papers and the hearing of a zillion excuses (which probably falls under your #7). The performance is the best part, so I really consider the online classes drudgery.
Your comments about the online experience, Clio, are very useful to me in our discussions about it here, by the way. Now I’m going to remember the performance issue as another point to seriously take into consideration. THANK YOU!
The thing I hate about teaching, on the other hand, is feeling guilty.
I just replied to a student who emailed requesting an urgent meeting about her paper revision. I returned extensive comments on my students’ papers two weeks ago today and in my comments to her I strongly recommended that she visit the writing center. I met with her last week and talked with her about strengthening her thesis statement, and she walked out of my office with (I thought) a plan. But now she says she is lost. So I told her that since she had already read my comments and had a meeting with me I thought she would benefit most from visiting the writing center and getting advice from someone else.
Not only do I not have time for student meetings this week, I honestly do not know what else to tell her. I wrote her detailed comments, gave her a handout about thesis statements, and had a face to face conversation with her to explain exactly why hers was confusing and what she could do to fix it. What else can I do?
So now I feel like a horrible, awful human being. GRUMBLE.
She’s guilt tripping you, send it back! This is the sort of thing Jennifer is talking about I think. As you know, it really isn’t your responsibility at this point.
I guess, yeah. Yeah, it probably is exactly what Jennifer is talking about. I like this student, though, so it works on me.
I suspect part of the problem is that when I tell students they should visit the writing center for help with their essays, what they hear instead is, “Your writing sucks so bad that you need professional help.” So they get anxious and come to me begging for help because I am their teacher.
Yes, and they have to go meet someone they don’t know, and so on. It might be good to take the class on a field trip to the writing center early in the semester, so they meet it / meet a person in it.
Students you like and to whom you really have given enough feedback, you know I almost literally hold their hands. I have this coffee hour every week for 1.5 hours, in a cafe, outside office hours, that is my tutoring session. After that, I am willing to sit and read or work quietly for as long as any student wants to do the same, so they can ask a question here and there.
(Isn’t that insane?! It’s more comfortable for me than letting them sit and study in my office, though, and I have a colleague who even does that!)
You are all obviously superb teachers.
The problem with teaching is that it uses the same creative skills that you need for your “own” work.
And there is only so much time and energy for all you have to do.
Therein, precisely, lies the rub.
Everyone seems to be pointing toward something rewarding in the human interaction of learning, even in the performance aspect, even in the student quietly working near you in the coffee shop. It’s sort of like live music — blues, jazz, rock, and anything where there is a back-and-forth — both for the performers and the audience. It’s also the energy of an intense discussion where ideas come together and develop into better ideas or deeper understanding of ideas. The teaching is a focused, live thing. That’s the good part.
Time and energy: Never enough of either.
Live music — I like that, may steal it for a discussion with an IRL administrator.
The other thing is about the discussions. I’ve been thinking that if it were like some blog discussions it could work.
But — what about that student who throws out a random remark ze thinks is just a side comment and some of the class thinks is silly, but which is actually a Very Good Idea — and that one can seize upon instantly to say oh yes, that actually helps a lot, here’s why (or something to that effect). I’m not sure how that would happen online.
I like teaching. It was one of the “natural” behaviors for me (unlike things like picking out and wrapping birthday presents, which is really stressful).
Because it felt natural, and because I really don’t care what other people think about my teaching unless they have something constructive to say, #1-4 weren’t an issue for me. I’m pretty immune to the “because you’re a feminist, you should act/think this way argument” and always have been, since I think that such strictures are stupid.
There, I’ve said it.
Natural activity, yes indeed.
I was terrorized far too young and too often about it, and had career setbacks due to not being motherly enough. I don’t mind what people say, but I do notice what they actually do to me.
I’ve never had a problem with the “As a feminist, you should…” sentence. My problem is the sentence, “As a woman, you are…”.
What I meant by that last part is that I didn’t and don’t worry about whether someone thinks of me as motherly because I’m a teacher or criticizes me for not being motherly enough, since that’s a cultural expectation. I just don’t care about that, and I think that’s a blessing in itself.
I’ve had to care for survival type reasons; I wouldn’t otherwise.
That’s terrible, profacero.
I love those random remarks that are so very smart. I have a class full of students like that and it’s the most fun. The class becomes almost improvisational. That hasn’t happened so much online because those students really budget their time on class and don’t see the value of online discussions. They get in, answer the question, and move on without even reading what anyone else said. They don’t want to or can’t take the time to actually discuss. They are also so guarded in what they say. The energy isn’t just not the same, it’s not there. That could just be me, and other teachers are better at it; but I’m not.
Clio, I doubt it’s just you. Going by the way people talk about online courses, I suspect a lot of students must take them precisely so they won’t have to do what they think of as wasting time on things like discussion.
Because they (some of them) don’t think of discussion as actual discussion. It’s not an exchange or a creation, it’s a performance or else a chance to state a view, like on Jerry Springer. Some say they have classes where discussion IS a actual time waster because it isn’t run well.
I have some trouble getting people to seriously respond to each others’ presentations and my latest tactic is to make them write response papers to them. I used to have presenters also give a QUIZ on their presentation and a separate committee of students would grade the quiz, and the grade would count.
This discussion has now expanded to Clio’s: http://cliobluestockingtales.blogspot.com/2010/05/on-value-of-not-being-in-love-with-my.html
And I think the reasons I don’t like it is that I really do, but you aren’t supposed to, and that I think that many of those who say they “love” it really just like to preach and hold authority.
And it’s painful because it has the guilt and endlessness of motherhood. And that is compounded if you’re in a situation where the actual expectation of the supervisors and approvers is that you will be motherish.
Well, I didn’t “love” being a mother, either. But it was my life. Teaching is a job, as Clio says; that’s a fair way to think of it.
I’m too lazy to register with Clio, and that blue background makes her blog hard for me to read, but I will add that there is no reason why teaching has to fulfill anyone. It does not offer enough for that.
“…there is no reason why teaching has to fulfill anyone. It does not offer enough for that.”
I find this perspective wonderfully refreshing, and also affirming.
As do I.
(Sorry about the background, Hattie. Thanks for reading, despite that!)
Undine: “That’s terrible, profacero.”
O good, the sensible and well balanced Undine says my experience is bad. Now, perhaps, I won’t internalize it as much.
🙂