Be the warrior students want to see at the front of their class

My life as a professor began during the Dark Ages of university teaching. I got my undergraduate degree at a football-loving southern school that admitted anyone with a high school diploma and went on to an elite institution in the north for graduate work. The two universities couldn’t have been more different, yet the approach to teaching was the same: the students sat in neat rows, the professor would deliver a lecture, everybody would go home.

That was it. A few classes featured quizzes; every class required a midterm exam, a final exam and a paper. Our professors had office hours but so what? As long as your term was going smoothly, why would you want to disturb your professor when he (they were almost all men in those days) was napping or preparing his next lecture?

There was no teacher training: my major professor visited my class once during my final year of grad school and told me afterward that I was doing an okay job but would do better if I were a little less stiff. “Just be yourself,” he said, but what did that mean? I was 24 then and still assembling that self one piece at a time.

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Shortly after, I lucked into the best job that anyone could ever have at the university where I teach today. That I was ill paid was offset by the fact that the work wasn’t very hard: I gave lectures, graded exams and papers. I held office hours. No one came.

Then there was a paradigm shift. Our masters decided that the sons and daughters of Florida taxpayers deserved quality instruction so at the end of each term my colleagues and I found ourselves passing out evaluation forms that would be sent to a central office, which compiled the data and reported it to us, as well as the people who set our salaries and decided whether we were worthy of tenure or not.

Nothing changed. We all continued to lecture, grade and nap in our offices undisturbed. Most of us got mediocre ratings on our teaching; I sure did.

Then my university introduced a second measure: an award system for good teaching that presented winners with a lovely certificate and a cheque. By that time, I was raising a young family and thinking it’d be nice to get that certificate – but mainly the cheque. How, though?

My “aha!” moment came when I took a second look at those evaluation forms. While the front side consisted of multiple-choice questions (“The professor shows respect for students’ opinions”), the back was a blank that invited students to comment on what they liked and disliked about a course.

On those comment sections, three things were most important to my students. The first is a no-brainer: it’s expertise. Your students expect you to know your subject top to bottom, inside and out. This may seem obvious but one student wrote that an instructor he’d had at another university began his answer to every question with “I’m no expert but...” 

Expertise doesn’t mean thundering at your charges for the full period but laying out a key concept or two, checking to see if your audience is comfortable with it, taking questions and comments (and calling on individuals if your wisdom is met with silence) and following up later with an email if you’ve thought of something else they need to know.

The second thing students valued is a sense of humour. This could mean you might tell a joke from time to time; few things bring a class together better than a shared chuckle. But it’s more important to think on your feet and respond quickly and wittily to what your students say. After all, wit is a form of intelligence since it shows an awareness of life’s essential duality, of how something is and isn’t itself in the same moment. Being funny is a way of showing you’re smart without saying you’re smart.

The third characteristic of good teaching is enthusiasm: for the subject, for the students, for yourself. And this is the most important requirement of the three. Enthusiasm is like the Oyster card that allows you to breeze through the ticket barrier while others wait in line to pay. 

When I first started teaching full-time, my office mate told me you have to like your students whether or not you want to, because if you like them they’ll like you and work hard for you. You might mispronounce a name or catch yourself teaching next week’s lesson this week but if you love what you do and the people you do it with, your students will forgive you and love you back.

At least that’s the way it worked out for me. A year after I started emphasising these three classroom practices, I won my first teaching award. Then came another and another: I’m up to five awards now, and while part of me is sure I don’t deserve them, the majority of myself tells me I’m doing something right.

And after years of doing my best to be knowledgeable, witty and enthusiastic in the classroom, I’ve recently added a fourth ingredient to this formula for effective teaching because the times require it, and that’s courage. Academe is under siege everywhere: diversity initiatives are forbidden on campuses, bureaucrats are scanning syllabi for words like “queer” and “minority”.

Just last week I was brought to account by a supervisor because I’m planning to teach a book called Why Internet Porn Matters. It was the p-word that triggered the query, and I was given the choice of dropping the book (“that’d be the easier way,” I was told) or justifying it. If I dropped the book, though, how could I look my students in the eye? So I spent more time than I liked explaining that the book was a rigorous critique of internet pornography, not an endorsement of it. I still had to answer a lot of questions but in the end, I prevailed.

Goethe is credited with saying, “Be bold, and mighty powers will come to your aid.” He actually didn’t say that, but it’s true. Your students don’t want to see a weakling at the front of the class. They want to see a warrior.

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton distinguished professor of English at Florida State University.

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