The Biggest Surprise of My First Semester Teaching

I just completed my first semester of teaching, and I learned a lot. Having been a student for almost my entire life and the son of a public school elementary school teacher, I thought I had a relatively solid handle on what teachers did. Nevertheless, I found myself surprised about several things this semester. I think the biggest surprise is something that I certainly understood from what I have seen but didn’t really comprehend until I found myself on this side of the classroom.

Preparing for class is hard work. I knew that, but the type of preparation that was required was what surprised me.

I was teaching about J.R.R. Tolkien. I was teaching books I have read many times and have written articles about. I love these stories. I honestly know them very well. If you wanted me to give an hour presentation on some topic out of The Lord of the Rings, I could probably figure it out with relatively little preparation. I could reach into my mind and pull out the information needed to present my take on these stories.

Preparing to facilitate a seminar style discussion class is entirely different. Of course, I need to prepare to say what I want to say just like when I was a student. As the facilitator, I still bear that responsibility. However, being a teacher required me to prepare in a different way. Not only did I need to know the text well enough to put my perspective into words, but I also needed to be prepared for whatever my students wanted to talk about as well. They might see the text much differently than me, so I need to know it well enough to remember even those portions of the story I might find insignificant.

One class we had a discussion for a good deal of time about artificial intelligence. If you would’ve asked me prior to the class if I thought our discussion was going to move in that direction, I never would have predicted it. And while this may sound like a digression, it actually fit into one of our discussion questions for that day. I just did not anticipate that we would progress in that direction.

As a result, the skill set I needed at that moment was not necessarily the one I have spent years developing. I have always read The Lord of the Rings through the lens of my own research interests. When I think about the stories, I tend to think about them in the way that I find most interesting. When I found myself facilitating a discussion on artificial intelligence, it was almost like hitting the rewind button. I needed to be able to go back to the story and reconsider the factual matter of the plot in light of the discussion that we ended up having. Not only that, but I needed to do it in real time because my students were all right there on Zoom looking at me.

Again, I always knew that teachers prepare a great deal for the classes. I have seen it in my own family, but it is different when you are the one who has to do the preparation. It hits you differently when you are the one in front of the class and are expected to facilitate a discussion that has taken a turn you did not anticipate ahead of time.

I suppose that my students would be the ultimate judges as to how successfully I was able to facilitate these discussions during class, but I know that is something I definitely improved at as the semester went along. For the first few classes, I came to these discussions with a definite plan of what I expected my students to pull out of the text. Sometimes I was right, but sometimes I was not. That caused me to reevaluate how I prepared and try to prepare in a way that would more accurately anticipate the fact that there was very little about our discussions that I could anticipate with absolute certainty.

I certainly would not claim to be any kind of expert, but it is funny what you learn after your first experience in front of a group of students. I have to imagine that no matter how much I improve, there will always be more to learn and more surprises. But that’s not a bad thing.