Michael Bérubé, International Professor of Danger, pimps out his upcoming collection Rhetorical Occasions by reproducing one of its essays as a blog post. The topic is well-known to any member of the professoriate: the academic anxiety dream. You show up to a class you are supposed to teach, but for some reason it’s not on the subject you thought it was going to be on, or you have completely neglected to prepare a lecture, or you have been reassigned to a classroom that looks like a castoff from the set of Brazil.
I was going to leave some smug comment to the effect that I never have such dreams, when it occured to me that I really shouldn’t, on the grounds that such a claim would not actually be “true.” Last quarter my travel schedule was even more hectic than usual; for an extended period I was flying out of Chicago at least once per week, sometimes twice. A couple of times I woke up early in a hotel room on the East Coast and zoomed to the airport, landing at O’Hare in time to make it to campus to teach my noon class. A couple of other times I went the other way, taking the red-eye from the West Coast. All in all quite hectic, and upon reflection I do remember one quite vivid anxiety dream during this period. The usual story: in the dream I kept thinking that I really should get around to the important task of actually preparing my lecture, but put it off, and suddenly there I was in front of the class. In fact, in the real world, it wouldn’t be such a big deal; at least once per term it’s a good idea to depart from the prepared text and have a free discussion about something related to the material but not formally part of the planned curriculum. Those are often the best classes.
However, I do have an unfortunate tendency to actually reproduce the conditions of the standard academic anxiety dream in real life. Not so much by being unprepared, but by sleeping right through some important event. (A habit which I take to be a sign of my innocence and inner peace.) It started as an undergraduate, when I woke up one day to find that I had completely slept through my E+M final. Fortunately, my professor was more worried about me than annoyed, and I made it up without incident. Then in grad school one of my apartment mates aroused me at noon one day after an all-nighter of general relativity and quantum field theory, to ask “Weren’t you supposed to be giving a lunchtime talk today?” Indeed I was, and I managed to run all the way to the department, showing up only twenty minutes late for my own seminar. I’m guessing that it was not the best talk I ever gave, but happily I have no actual recollection of what I said.
These days I am much better; I only sleep through events that are important for other people, like their thesis defenses (sorry about that, Tanya). On the other hand, as Michael says, why shouldn’t we be anxious about getting up in front of a bunch of smart people (youthful and inexperienced or otherwise) and attempting to teach them something? My very first assignment at the UofC was a graduate course on particle physics — something I know a bit about, but am certainly not the world’s expert. This was a useful experience, as I hit on a helpful philosophy right from the start: it’s not the professor explaining the material to the students, it’s the professor and the students engaging with the material together. In that case, it was “us against the particles,” and I think we acquitted ourselves just fine. And never once did I show up for class in my pajamas.
I agree with your philosophy of “us against the particles” quite alot, and wish some of my graduate professors had taken the same approach. I’m wondering, is there any application of this to undergraduate classes of reasonable size? Or will students feel patronized by it?
And I have taught an 8 AM physics lab in house shoes and sweat pants.
I think the philosophy is applicable in any teaching environment. The material is never the sole possession of the instructor; it’s always bigger than any of the people in the classroom. No professor knows everything about even the most elementary subjects; there’s always something new to learn, or a better way to understand what we already know.
One of my best graduate school math classes was taught by someone who wasn’t totally organized and generally showed up with little or no notes. The class did not have a canned feel, and we learned by watching him think on his feet in front of the class. He did stumble and sweat through one proof in particular, but that day we learned to relax with the thought that even those who have made it also have days like that.
“it’s the professor and the students engaging with the material together.”
The best presenter I’ve had the pleasure to meet was Anders Barany (who later become secretery for the Nobel committe). He teached physics from exactly this viewpoint. It’s not only that it gives the students a better feel for the material, by feedback or the professor explaining why he himself thinks what he thinks on the subject. But the fact that the professor seems so engaged in the material, and in a similar manner as the students, rises the enthusiasm all by itself.