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Rookies in the Classroom

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By Jennifer Jacobson

The student walked into Kathleen C. O'Leary's anatomy lab section an hour late. As the rest of the class finished the exam, the latecomer apologized for her tardiness, explained how she got caught in a traffic jam after visiting her sick grandmother, and then began to work on her test.

After class, another student approached Ms. O'Leary to complain: It wasn't fair that the tardy classmate had gotten to take the test since, in reality, she'd been visiting her out-of-town boyfriend, not her sick grandmother. It was the sort of scenario an experienced teacher has seen time and again. But for Ms. O'Leary, a newcomer to college teaching, it was a first.

"What was I supposed to do?" asks Ms. O'Leary, a graduate student in biology at James Madison University. "I let her take the test. She ended up getting a 52. She got what she earned."

In the fall, hundreds of graduate-student instructors and assistant professors will teach on their own for the first time. They will stand nervously before classes offering lectures and discussions that they hope will be filled with neither too much information nor too little. They will grade papers and give tests and try their best to cope with one of the hardest parts of first-year teaching: the move from student to authority figure.

Hundreds of other graduate students and assistant professors just finished making that transition, and they have some advice for the newcomers.

Eleanor "Ellie" M. Kennedy, a graduate student in the German Ph.D. program at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, faced a particularly grueling initiation into teaching. Three days before classes were to begin last fall, the university sent her an e-mail message asking her to teach an advanced course in German conversation and composition in place of a professor who had fallen ill.

Although she had been a teaching assistant for introductory German classes at the university for six years, this was the first advanced course she had ever taught alone. "It was a fantastic opportunity for me," says Ms. Kennedy, who was in England when she received the message and then flew back to Canada where she spent two days "frantically" trying to plan the syllabus. "The previous instructor e-mailed me what she had done," Ms. Kennedy says. "I looked at it and thought that's fine for her, but not for me." So she winged it. For the first month of the course, she ended up handing the students a new syllabus every week. "It became sort of an inside joke," she says. "The students seemed OK with it, but when I got the evaluations back they had put down that they thought it was a little disorganized."

And perhaps it was, she admits, but with good reason: "I was making it up as I went along. Of course I didn't want to talk to the students too much about the fact that this was my first time and that I'd only had two days to put it together. I didn't want to sound like I was complaining, and I didn't want to lose any authority in their eyes."

Neither did Ryan D. Mathur. A new assistant professor of chemistry at Juniata College, he says one of his only concerns as a first-year teacher was whether students would see him as a professor or as a friend. It turns out they saw him as both. "They felt comfortable with me because I was younger," says Mr. Mathur, who is 28. His students sought him for many "life discussions," like what they should do for the summer and what their parents thought they should do. "I just never envisioned that happening." But Mr. Mathur, who earned a bachelor's in history and geology from Juniata and a Ph.D. in geochemistry from the University of Arizona, realized that "when students see you as someone they could hang out with, they talk to you much easier."

He taught three courses and four labs this past year, with 10 students in his smallest class and 45 in his largest. The problem with the bigger classes, he says, is finding the right pace and amount of material to cover in a lecture. "Some people pick up concepts quickly," he says. Then there are the times that "three quarters of the class misses the question you thought you had given enough time on."

Regardless of class size, keeping students awake is a challenge. "People fall asleep," Mr. Mathur says matter-of-factly. "You can't help that." Although it doesn't happen all that often, he says, when it does, "we throw chalk at them" to wake them up.

Imraan Coovadia doesn't throw chalk at his students but he has, on occasion, raced after them on campus and demanded an explanation if they have been repeatedly absent from class. "Some of them would have amazingly intricate excuses," says Mr. Coovadia, a new assistant professor of English at Clark University. One of this favorites: A student said he hadn't purchased any of the required books -- A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and Great Expectations -- because his parents' credit card had been canceled, and by the time he'd driven home to get a new card, the bookstore had sold out of the texts he needed.

"He was just completely disorganized," Mr. Coovadia says. "The lesson you learn as an assistant professor is that you have to be very strict with freshmen to begin with."

Mr. Coovadia earned his Ph.D. from Yale University and specializes in 18th-century British literature. In his first semester, however, he had to teach a course on Romantic poetry -- not his specialty. He felt his knowledge of the subject was limited but says he was surprised to find "that students actually take your word and assume that you understand your subject."

Kristen P. Walton, an assistant professor of history who just finished her first year at Salisbury State University, also found herself teaching outside her speciality -- the Tudor and Stewart period of British history. She taught four courses a semester, half of them on "world civilizations," a freshman requirement that featured course material on topics like ancient Japan. In that course, Ms. Walton usually ended up staying only a day ahead of her students.

Ms. Walton, who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, assumes a certain degree of maturity among her students, "because I feel they're adults by the time they get to college," she says. "But if I give them complete independence they'd never show up." So she allows only three excused absences and tells them that their grades will go down after that.

The larger challenge Ms. Walton faced over the past year, particularly among some freshmen, was plagiarism. In reading freshman essays during her first semester, she realized that a couple of papers written by two of her weaker students included "very elaborate vocabulary words and exceedingly perfect grammar." So she did a search on the Internet and immediately found the Web site from which the students had copied their work. She failed both students on the assignment, but that was the extent of their punishment because she hadn't established a policy on plagiarism at the beginning of the semester. "I guess I had too much trust in the students," she says. She didn't make that mistake again.

All in all, she says, she found her first year of teaching to be somewhat turbulent. But on the positive side, it was comforting to watch students improve their writing and thinking skills and flattering to have some of her first-semester students sign up for a class with her during the second semester.

As a teaching assistant, Ms. Walton says, students call you by your first name and often view you as a pseudo-authority. But with the tenure track comes credibility. "You're the professor," she says, "you know everything." Even if you're a British historian teaching about ancient Japan.