Stephen Nash gets ideas for teaching his classes by watching other professors.
This is the first week of classes for the Spring semester, and this time I’m experiencing it as a student. I had my first class this week.
I’m enrolled in Introductory Italian. I don’t need this for my job. In late summer I’m going on a cycling trip in the Italian Piedmont, near Turin, at the base of the Alps, and I’d like to have some knowledge of the language.
The university provides this as a benefit. Mason employees can take up to 12 credit hours during the academic year. I will be auditing the class, although I could take it for credit, and perhaps even seek another degree.
This isn’t the first time I’ve taken a class, although I don’t do it often. A few years ago I took a law class, a seminar on intellectual-property law in technology and entertainment.
Over my career I have taught a lot of courses and given dozens of lectures at conferences, but I have no formal training as a teacher. I don’t think that is unusual for a lot of professors. Of course, I took many classes as an undergraduate, and some more as a graduate student. But it is one thing to attend a class and another to teach it.
I can remember my first year as a professor spending hours preparing for class, writing notes in excruciating detail. My first students had to suffer through it. No one has ever provided me with much feedback, other than the course evaluations that I receive at the end of each semester.
Taking a class is an opportunity to watch how others do it. Having taught myself, I’m now a more attentive observer.
There can be different expectations across disciplines. In the law class, the students were assumed to have read the class materials beforehand, even before the first class. The professor would just turn to a student: “Mr. Nash, please summarize the facts in Adobe v. Hoops.” It was bracing.
I learn a lot in these classes. But it can also be a little like foreign travel, entering a different academic culture with practices and idioms that can at first seem strange and unsettling. You’re not quite the same when the trip is over.
Inizia l'avventura.
Stephen Nash is Senior Associate Dean of Mason Engineering. This column appeared in his weekly newsletter for the school.