About Me: Preparing to Teach

During the interstitial time between semesters I always think back to my first semester teaching. Every semester we teachers prepare for our classes; we usually just call it prep. Prep can be a verb ("I'm going to prep my course sometime in the non-specific future when I will allegedly have more time to work on it.") or it can be a noun ("My prep for 101 hasn't changed in 30 years and if I don't notice any problems then it must be working fine."), but either way it refers to all the work we teachers do before the first day of class. It always feels as though there will be time to get this done, but it also always seems to devolve into laying tracks before an oncoming train. The first time I had to do prep was daunting; I had no idea what I should prepare. 

I did the same thing  a lot of new faculty do --  I read the text book, downloaded the powerpoints supplied by the publisher, and perused the Instructors Resource Manual (IRM). The IRM was a binder that had been given to me that had a HUGE amount of instructions about how to run lectures, what sort of activities one could do and a bunch of other junk delightful materials that teachers could use like worksheets and crossword puzzles. I thought I was well prepped for day one. I was wrong.

A PowerPoint Wall of Text

The publishers powerpoints, while detailed, are essentially the same information that is in the text. So, I found myself reading them and then saying, "Any Questions?" to a classroom of bored students. So by the second week I had cut most of the text out of the powerpoint, but then what should I do with my time in class? Activities. But, crosswords didn't work for me; my students sat quietly looking up answers in their books and trading them amongst themselves. Same thing with any "work sheets" but what did I expect? That is high school style. So I went to work transforming those work sheets into real interactive learning experiences. It wasn't too hard to reshape them into a discussion followed by a writing exercise where students generated answers that used material from the textbook instead of regurgitating vocabulary terms.


Then I went nuts. I made a disturbing amount of assignments, rubrics, and activities. I tweaked and re-tweaked my syllabus. Ultimately deciding to run an experimental classroom where I did things way differently than I had before. Each semester from then until now I've had experimental elements in my class trying to find out exactly what works for me, to achieve the classroom that I want. Never once though have I felt "prepared" by the time the semester starts. I always feel there is more I could do ahead of time if only I had more time.

Which brings us to now. After this summer I think I have it locked down. I'm not adding anything new this fall. This is the first time that everything I'm doing is something I've done before. This semester will be the semester of refinement. Without doing anything new I will be able to tweak, adjust, and weave my course into a fine afghan of teaching (or liberty blanket of learning I suppose).

For those of you that are interested here is my syllabus complete with a list of assignments my students will likely do this semester (Fall 2012). I, of course, reserve the right to alter this at my own capricious whimsy. Oh I guess that is one new thing I'm doing this semester; I put my syllabus on my Google Drive as a Google Doc.