One semester down…

This week our semester draws to an end, and the curtain is about to fall on my first semester as a faculty member. I’ve come out of it pretty well, though sightly bruised. I taught many classes before this, as an adjunct or as a TA, but this was the first semester as a full time faculty member, and I surprised myself by making some “freshman” errors that I would have thought I should be past. And so I learned (or in some cases re-learned) a few things, that I thought I would share.

1. Always go with your gut. I have some standard classroom rules or course policies that I have been using since I was a wee TA, and based on the advice of some other faculty at my current institution, I changed a few of them (to be more in line with departmental policy). I thought, at the time, that it was a mistake, because I have direct experience with my policies working in the past, but I went with the advice, against what my gut told me. Big mistake. Next semester, I’m going with my gut. One example of this is how to deal with make-ups. My previous policy has always been, “No makeups under any conditions, for any reason.” Instead, I over-load the course with assignments, quizzes, or tests (or all three) and then “drop the lowest” one or two. For example, when I taught general biology as a TA, we had 13 quizzes, but only counted the top 10. No makeups were given — if you missed a quiz or two, those were your drops. I did something similar as an adjunct lecturer at a community college… 4 exams, drop the lowest. I was told that “wouldn’t work” here and it was better to give makeups. What a mistake! For one of the exams in the non-major course I had to give about 18 makeups (out of a class of just under 80)… almost a quarter of the class took  a make-up, in other words. Each time I had to make a whole new test (so they couldn’t ask each other for the answers). I can’t begin to imagine how many hours that took me. So, next semester, I go with my gut — 12 quizzes, drop 2; 12 labs, drop 2; 4 exams, drop 1. No makeups.
2. Never put office hours late in the day. This is one I knew but forgot. Students rarely come to office hours, but you have to be there just in case, for the whole time. If you set office hours early in the day, no big deal. But at the end of the day, office hours that extend until 5 PM can prevent you from leaving early when you otherwise have no need to be in the office. I spent many hours sitting around the office when I could’ve been working at home, for example, and thus had to deal with heavier rush hour traffic, all to see effectively no one. So, next semester, office hours are going to be nice and early.
3. There is no point to prepping lectures too far ahead. If I prep a lecture (go through the book, make lecture notes/outlines) too early, I will forget what I prepped and have to re-prep over again. It’s best to prep about 1 week before, or slightly less. I got ahead of this a few times to try to get a jump on my insane workload this semester, and then I’d have to re-prep before going into class anyway. So next semester, I’m going to read through the text ahead of time, but I’m not going to make notes or draw up an outline until the week before.
4. Never give open-note exams. I know, I should have known this already. But I was teaching a class that was not my strength, and I found that even I needed notes to make up the exams. My reasoning was that if even I needed notes, my students should be allowed them too. And it was a lot of material. And I did try to make the exam more difficult to compensate (using notes to analyze problems, rather than regurgitating them). But… I also know that open notes = empty head in many cases. At the end of a semester of developmental biology, hardly anyone in the class could simply define the notochord on the final — a basic structure that is key to many elements of development.  And this was with their notebooks open! I think that forcing the students to actually commit things to memory means some of it will stick — especially the important stuff. So next time I teach this class (if I ever do), I will cut down on the material some, but make them learn it, rather than just taking good notes.
5. Stay on top of purchase orders. Things are so snazzy now with purchase cards and no more “purchase order forms” to be signed, that it lulled me into a false sense of confidence. Half the stuff I ordered early in the semester still has not come in, despite the “new easy p-cards.” In the past with P.O.s, I knew I had to stay on top of them and basically harass the people in charge of orders until the day my shipment actually arrived. With the p-card I didn’t think I needed to do that — big mistake. From now on, I’m going to make sure to send weekly reminders to whoever I need to, to get my orders to actually show up.
6. Retain copies of everything the students turn in, even things you don’t think will become an issue. Students at this school like to lie about their grades or lie about having turned in their work, and put it onto the teacher: “I turned it in but you never gave it back.” This claim might be believable for one in a thousand students. For two or three hundred out of a thousand students, it starts to seem a bit silly. But my MS advisor trained me to basically “document everything, no matter how trivial it seems,” and I was so busy this term that in some cases I forgot to follow that advice. Next term, I’m going to retain originals or photocopy them. And I’m going to make my students sign a form saying they received each thing I hand back.

Well, those are six things I mostly should’ve known, and really did know, but was either so busy I forgot, or was talked out of knowing by other people around me. Next semester I listen to myself, not them.