Teaching

Abstract

Most of those first-year graduate students afforded the opportunity to teach worry far more about stepping into a classroom than they do about beginning their own course-work, which is perfectly reasonable. Course-work entails that you continue being a student, albeit a more focused and hardworking one; teaching requires that you redefine rather completely your position vis-à-vis the university and academe more generally. The difficulty of this transition is heightened by the fact that you are still a student yourself—still attending classes, still being evaluated by professors, still stressing out about your own in-class performance. On any given day, in a matter of several hours, sometimes minutes, you will move from a classroom in which your work has been analyzed, even interrogated, to one in which you are suddenly the analyzer of 20 or more students. How can you possibly be confident about your ability to teach others when you are reminded everyday how much you still have to learn?