Learning to teach
I’m all done with teaching except for final-project grading and final-grade calculation, so it’s as good a time as any to post a post-mortem in case I do this again (and I’ve already been asked if I’d be willing). I’ve been leery of posting much about teaching, because several of my soon-to-be-former-students do read the blog, but hell… if Michael Stephens does it, can it be that bad?
I liked teaching back in the day, even in the Department from Hell. I still like teaching. My hammy nature comes out to play, as does the highly opinionated part of me that holds Strong Views on what folks ought to know about and be prepared for. I walked home from classes feeling good, and that was a sustaining influence given the up-and-downness evident in my day job lately.
(Still hate grading, but no jam comes sans pill.)
In general, I think my syllabus covered useful stuff. Next time, though, I want to do some hands-on work, and I’m already looking for notions (Andrea Mercado’s kioskification of Firefox looks like a good one!). I can teach a basic SQL query from scratch in an hour or two. I should. Ditto regular expressions and the basics of HTML and CSS. It’s all about expanding one’s daily technology toolkit.
Of the three major assignments, two were solid hits and the third… needs work. The job talk and the position-description assignment went over really well (how often do students thank you for assigning them work? well, mine thanked me!) and I was chuffed at how useful the job talks actually were, for the rest of the class and even for me. The third I may separate out into two or three smaller assignments—it really isn’t safe to assign big, relatively unstructured projects, because students get more stressed than they should. It’s a shame, because big and unstructured projects are what the real world is all about, but there seems to be a limit to how far a class can go in acting like the real world.
So I think “write an implementation plan or project documentation” and “install, theme, and mod a new server-based technology” can and should be done separately from each other, likely as the dreaded group projects. Live and learn.
Our local course management system sucks rocks and I refuse to use it ever again for anything. Next time I’m putting in a Drupal install, and we’ll interact online that way. The blogs worked reasonably well, but they’d be better in a Drupal install (like Five Weeks’s) because of increased opportunity for interaction among students.
Using del.icio.us as a tickler file for current events was a winner. For one thing, it helped me tie what I was teaching to the real world. For another, it modeled the professional behavior of keeping one’s ears perked for relevant news. For a third—hey, readings for next time! (Though I’m happy with the readings I found for this semester, and will reuse a lot of them.) Drupal’s RSS module should let me put a few good blogs and technology-news sources (Ars Technica for the win!) within student reach.
I’m scheduling quizzes next time, instead of doing them ad-hoc. Should be a stress reducer for everyone, me not least—several weeks I ought to have written up a quiz, but life just kept on intervening in that annoying way it has. No major exams, though; in a class like mine that’s just goofy.
I can’t say enough about how great the students were. They took a chance on a brand-new class from a brand-new instructor. They put up with my genial weirdness (did I mention the day I played two Monty Python clips in class?) and my insane outside schedule. They let me know how I could make the class better instead of grumbling out of earshot. They expressed gratitude early and often, and sometimes in embarrassingly fulsome terms. They took chances with their final projects, several of them, trusting me enough not to let fear of a poor grade hold them back.
I will be proud to have them as colleagues, and the library world will benefit from their presence in it.