A little about teaching (February 4, 2008)

Teaching is the most visible part of a college professor's job. Students see that aspect all the time. As I noted in my initial post however, teaching makes up only a third of our academic responsibilities. We are also responsible for conducting research and publishing academic papers, and we are expected to perform various types of service for our profession, for the university and college, and for the community. So when you stop by our offices and we don't answer your knock, don't assume we're lounging around at home watching Leave it to Beaver reruns on TVLand! I've been on campus the past seven or eight Saturday mornings (excluding a weekend or two around Christmas) for service activities.

What is involved in teaching? Keep in mind that I am talking about the things that are involved if you want to do an excellent job. I do. Want to, that is. Whether I succeed or not seems to vary from semester to semester.

When I talk about teaching I'm talking about how I teach, not necessarily how everyone else teaches. I put a LOT of time into my job, and I'm fairly highly organized, so my approach may differ from the norm.

Think about some of the things that you, the student, take for granted. Hmm, we go to class, we lecture, we give you quizzes or tests over the class lectures and the text book, we assign homework, we grade it, record it, and pass it back, we have office hours, we answer questions about assignments, we advise you on what classes to take, we advise you on the job market, we write letters of recommendation, etc. What a cushy job! Not so fast....

First, who decides on what textbook is used in class? Well, that can be a lengthy process. Depending on the representative for the textbook companies it can vary in difficulty. In the past you had a sales rep who periodically visited professors' offices and got to know what classes they taught and the kind of text that they preferred, and would suggest or send them evaluation copies. Nowadays in many cases the professor has to go to a publisher's web site, review all the books that their search engine is able to locate, and then request one or more evaluation copies, filling out lengthy forms for each. Once the evaluation copies from all the publishers arrive we have to find time to take them somewhere quiet and go through them, trying to determine how well they match the content that we intend to teach (the determination of which is another time consuming process) and also how readable they are. I'm not talking about two or three books. I'm talking between 10 and 30 books. Not a trivial task! You don't want a text with a lot of errors in it (believe me-they're out there) or one that is going to put the student to sleep as soon as they start reading it. You also want one that might be usable in follow-up courses (like an advanced programming course) but at the same time isn't 2000 pages long and overwhelming to the students. Oh, and let's not forget price. Text prices have gotten so outrageous that many professors (like me) try to find a text that students can actually afford. Once I select a text I also go online and try to find a few sites that might offer an even lower price so I can share that info with my students. Once we pick a text we then have to match up the content with our lectures so we can recommend what chapters the students should be reading at certain points throughout the semester. Well, that turned out to be a lot more work than you expected, huh?

I mentioned determining the course content. Again, who handles that? Well, that is generally your professor. At times it may be a committee decision as to what the course will cover in general, but it is usually up to the individual professor to make the final determination. What do we go on? Well, if it has been taught before and the previous professor did a decent job, you can use their content selection as a starting point. That doesn't always work that well because most professors have different ideas of what needs to be emphasized. And what if the course has never been taught before? Okay, some professors base their course on the chapters in a textbook. (I forgot to mention above that some professors take the easy way out when it comes to selecting a book and simply adopt what the book reps convince them is the most popular text. If 1000 other professors adopt a book then it MUST be good, right? Well, I've never bought into that approach.) Back to course content. As I said, some professors just parrot what is in the text. I worry about professors like that. I base my course content on professional experience, on my awareness of what is happening in the industry, on the needs of employers, and on what I know from experience to be critical content. But even after selecting the topics that you want to cover you have to fit those topics into the schedule that you have to work with--x number of lectures, etc. It can be a planning nightmare, because you have coordinate class content with exams, quizzes, assignments, etc. I generally determine course content PRIOR to selecting a text so that I have a basis for that selection. You also have to decide on a teaching approach. For example, in programming classes you have to decide on whether you want to teach object-first, objects-early, or objects-late. In database you have to decide on what type of E-R diagram to teach (Chen, Crows Foot, etc.) or whether you should be teaching REA or UML instead of E-R diagrams. Again, we have to know what industry is going to need--not now, but when the students graduate in a year or two.

How about those course lectures? You know from experience that lectures can vary greatly from professor to professor, even in the same class. I'll talk more about what is involved in lecture preparation in my next post. Why wait? Well, because I need to go prepare a lecture!

Aloha!