Ten Things I Wish I’d Known Before Teaching the First Time

When I was thrust¹ into the world of teaching for the first time, it was an exciting experience, but there were some things I caught onto far too late. That’s the nature of the beast, right? Nothing can adequately prepare you for the real thing! Still, I figured I’d write up some of those lessons, so that if someone were to stumble across this page, maybe it’s because they’re trying to prepare just like I was! Plus, it gives me a chance to write in my standared tone, a welcome change of pace from all the clarity-focused technical writing I’ve had to do this semester.

If your university/department/whatever has an evaluation system, you need to incentivize students to fill out those evaluations. Of course, if you don’t care about the evaluations you might ignore this, but I think evaluations are incredibly useful if you have less than a few courses’ experience already. I received a lot of comments on policies students found beneficial at the end of the semester; this certainly wouldn’t have been the case if I hadn’t incentivized most of them to take the evaluation. (I went from ~8 respondents to ~44 respondents after implementing a grade replacement policy if enough students responded.)

You should keep up with every student’s progress. It’s hard to make a personal connection with every student in large courses (though I did still try and make sure to connect with students who came to office hours/frequently kept in contact with myself), but you should make sure to set aside a bit of time every month or so to check in on students’ progress. Has anyone suddenly stopped attending lectures? Has somebody missed so many assignments/midterms/etc. that they mathematically cannot pass the course? As the number of students you’re responsible for grows, perhaps there are some things you just can’t be on top of. But some things, like students who are on track to fail the course, probably warrant a bit of diligence on your part.

Students seem to only utilize office hours when their grade is immediately at stake. That is, if a graded assignment/exam/etc. is approaching, you’ll probably see an uptick in students attending office hours, and when there’s nothing on the horizon OH attendance will be much more scarce. We noticed that when I changed the assignment policy from correctness to completion, office hours were attended much less frequently. I’m still actively mulling over other methods of increasing OH attendance. Perhaps a mention in class/the syllabus that OH attendance will be considered when curving scores at the end?

Give objective exam questions where possible. A nice bonus is that they’re quicker to grade, but I think even more importantly, they provide little room for inconsistent grading/students to debate over “how correct” their answer was (in case partial credit is applicable). Some courses, like algorithm design, don’t lend themselves naturally to objectively correct answers, but if there’s a chance to find them, you should really take advantage of that.

Sometimes the bank errors in a student’s favor; that’s a totally acceptable resolution. I had several instances over the semester where students A and B would have pretty much the same answer listed, but student A would get a much worse grade. Then, student A would come to me and say that student B got a better grade for the exact same answer. Of course, retroactively penalizing student B makes nobody happy, so I always defaulted to going back through all the answers and awarding points back to anyone who was marked wrong, even if this answer was explicitly wrong. Instead, I wish I would have just explained why the answer was wrong, and then clarify that I wouldn’t penalize student B for our mistake, but would also not award student A points since the answer was still incorrect.

Be cognizant that your TAs (if applicable) may have friends inside the course. Of course, not every TA is made equal. In fact, the TAs that I worked with were fantastic. However, you should still assume a principle of least privilege with them: only give them access to midterm questions/rubrics/etc. at the moment they are necessary, and not any earlier. Also, assume anything you say to them may make its way to students taking the course.

Try to be as specific as possible when it pertains to things like the grading policy, attendance, etc. Of course, this is something we are probably all striving to do anyways, but it’s easier said than done. If you ask for grading to be done by Tuesday, do you mean 11:59 PM or 9:00 AM? There’s a line here between being vague and needlessly wordy, but I think erring on the side of the latter is better.

Students like transparency. Try to keep up with grades/attendance/etc. as close to real-time as possible. They like to know what the grade distribution for exams was. They like to know why they lost points on the homework. Again, this seems obvious once stated, but I think there are places I could have done a better job being aware of this fact.

Have a way for students to provide feedback anonymously. I used a Google Forms link that could be completed anonymously as a way for students to provide feedback on the course without having to say it directly to myself or one of the TAs. I found that I got more feedback on this form than I did from students directly! One concern with these forms is that somebody may “abuse” it, and while that’s certainly a possibility, it wasn’t abused in my case. It was occasionally used as a source of students to vent their frustrations, but with these it was still possible to sift through what was just venting and identify what were tangible concerns.

The working title for this post didn’t have the word “ten”; I wanted to just write things I’d identified without trying to hit a catchy limit. Since I was at nine when I felt satisfied, I’m just using this as the tenth thing I wish I’d known. What exactly is the thing covered in this paragraph? I’m not sure. Maybe the tenth thing was the friends we made along the way.