How to Teach Almost Three Quarters of the Department Course Offerings When You Only Have “Expertise” in One Quarter of those Courses:
- Be creative and crafty in finding ways to connect the topic to your research and teaching interests
- Be open to expanding your research interests
- Be willing to learn with students, not just teach them
- Read a lot, really quickly
- Embrace the feeling of panic and uncertainty that you will feel the entire semester as you frantically try to stay (at least) a few steps ahead of your students in reading the material and understanding the concepts
- Don’t try to be the Expert
- Take a lot of deep breaths
How to Endure But Not Survive a Class That You Despise, One Approach:
- Have someone* create a private webpage with a countdown, right down to the second, of time left in the miserable class
- Have them include an animated gif of Homer Simpson repeatedly waving his middle fingers that you can look at as you prepare to walk across the bridge, enter the auditorium-sized class, stand at a podium, and speak into a microphone for 50 minutes to (mostly) apathetic students
- Check the site after the final class and watch in surprised delight as the countdown clock explodes and transforms into a video, with shooting rainbows, of Cee Lo Green singing “Fuck You”
- Laugh and celebrate
- After you stop laughing realize that this class, and the larger trend towards “more butts in seats” destroyed your passion for University teaching
- Stop teaching
*For me that someone was my awesome husband.
Continue Reading: Mutating Teaching Methods, Approaches and Assignments
Return to Teaching Experience: An Inventory