Thirty Years Ago: My Teaching Career Begins

Thirty years ago, more or less, I'd have been reporting for grad school orientation.  I'd have signed up for classes, the few classes that had open seats.  That's how I wound up taking the class on James Joyce, a literary figure I'd barely heard of.  It was such an inspiring class that I went on to write my MA thesis on him.

Actually, that's not true.  It would have been 31 years ago.  Thirty years ago I'd be about to teach my first English 101, English Composition class.  Yesterday I spent some time in Google land, trying to remember which day would have been the exact day.  But while the University of South Carolina has many old catalogs online, they haven't archived very far back, certainly not 30 years.

I had been in grad school for two semesters, so my school saw me as fully eligible to teach.  I'd had a required class that gave us the theory behind effective teaching of the first year Composition class.  I'd spent many years thinking about how I would teach, and finally the day came when I had a class of my own.

I was able to create my own syllabus with very little oversight.  I had three textbooks to choose from, but that was more for the convenience of the bookstore than about the department wanting to control the class.

I made copies of the syllabus on the ditto machine--ah, the smell of the purple ink and the dampness of the paper!  Those were the days when photocopying was almost cheap enough to make the ditto machine obsolete, but not quite yet.  Or maybe the department just wasn't ready to move ahead with the latest technology.

I came to class with my dittoed syllabi, which I handed out, and then I went to the podium, where I stayed for the next 50 minutes.  It was a great class, very welcoming with a good energy, but I kept that podium in a death grip.

I thought about that class yesterday, when I went to sub for a Speech class.  I no longer need to hold the podium in a death grip, and I'm able to teach a variety of subjects, for an hour, if not for a whole term.  Some classes still make me break into a sweat, but that's more about the temperature in the classroom, not about nerves.

I'm still teaching, but it's a very different world now.  I'm online only, which would not have been a remote possibility 30 years ago.  Distance education meant something very different, although we're still arguing about the basic principles of this kind of education:  do we lose something if we don't gather together in the same physical classroom?

I would argue that yes, we do lose something, but we also gain something too.  In our arguments about the best education, we often forget that just because we gather in a physical classroom, that doesn't mean we'll have a great class.  In fact, we might have a lackluster, uninspiring class--or worse, a class that leaves some feeling bullied or depleted. 

In one area, peer editing, I've seen much better results in my online classes than I ever did in my classes that met in a classroom.  Because we're online, people have time to read, to think/reflect, and to write a coherent response.  That almost never happened in peer editing groups in classrooms that I managed.  I had become so unhappy with peer editing results that I had left the practice behind in my onground teaching.  I'm happy to have had these online classes to show me that it is possible to have effective peer editing.

What will the next 30 years bring?  I'll still be teaching for part of that time.  I look forward to seeing
what develops!