Something strange I’ve come to notice is that the more teaching experience I get under my belt, the harder courses become to plan. Not the individual lectures — those get easier — but the over-arching structure and ordering of the class. It’s like the more you know can possibly go wrong, the more you want to prepare for any possible eventuality, and the less chance you have of being successful. Now, looking down the barrel of my first year as a full-time professor, it’s downright paralyzing.
I think part of my problem — not that it’s strictly a problem, per se — is that I feel like students are capable of much more than is required of them in a typical lecture-and-two-essays sort of class. That’s why I’ve been so excited for college life. I can tell from the sample syllabi that I’m not alone in that belief! But where it becomes a problem for me is that I spend all my downtime dreaming up exciting and creative projects for my students to engage in (let’s write wiki articles! let’s have blogs! let’s do independent novel study! let’s have oral presentations! let’s have online presentations!) that narrowing it down becomes a nightmare.
And then once I’ve decided, I become full of dread. Will they hate it? Will they do what I want? Will they gain what I hope they will from it? Will they like me? (Embarrassingly, this plays a major role — never in grading, but massively in course and assignment design.) I then start to run through other assignments I’ve assigned or ben assigned that might be similar. Did they fail? If so, how? How can I structure the assignment to predict any possible pitfalls?
Realistically, I know that the early years as a teacher are at least partially about trial and error, but I feel sick still at the thought of a student being on the receiving end of my error. I’ve had bad instructors turn me off entire fields of study for years!
It’s scary being adventurous in course design, but I really do believe it’s worth it. Or at least, I’ll believe it’s worth it again in October.