Teach to Teach

by Elio

The bad teacher's words fall on his pupils like harsh rain; the good teacher's, as gen­tly as dew.
—The Tal­mud
In a com­pletely ra­tio­nal so­ci­ety, the best of us would be teach­ers and the rest of us would have to set­tle for some­thing less.
—Lee Ia­coca

Typ­i­cal of old folks, my mind read­ily wan­ders back to events in ear­lier days. High on the list of me­mories that pop up is that of my very first lec­ture. It's one that I gave to med­ical stu­dents, the year be­ing 1962 or 10 years af­ter Wat­son & Crick. Imag­ine the thrill. Sure enough, I pre­pared the lec­ture as if I was go­ing to dis­close the in­ner­most se­cret of life (an out­look that was widely held, not the least by W&C!). I thought it went quite well. But I soon got my come­up­pance. A stu­dent from the class got into the el­e­va­tor with me and breath­lessly said: "Doc, can I ask you a ques­tion?" "Of course, of course..." He blurted out: "Doc, what's good for dan­druff?" So much for the sub­lime.

My theme, how­ever, is not just to bring up a half a cen­­tu­ry-old rec­ol­lec­tion but rather to make a point. As a crisp new fac­ulty mem­ber, I had been told to give lec­tures – pe­riod! That was the to­tal of my in­struc­tions. I re­ceived no hints about what to in­clude, how to pre­pare it, how to de­liver it. Noth­ing. My boss was well-mean­ing and had an abid­ing in­ter­est in the stu­dents, so it was not a case of in­difference. But in those days, it was as­sumed that if one had got­ten an aca­d­e­mic ap­point­ment, one must know how to de­liver a lec­ture, as if it was some­thing that came with mother's milk.

Teach. CC BY-NC 2.0 David

Seen through the lens of to­day, this may seem pre­pos­ter­ous but I be­lieve that it was the norm of the time. I haven't re­searched the his­tor­i­cal point, and surely there were ex­cep­tional cases, when a new fac­ulty mem­ber was taken aside by an ex­pe­ri­enced col­league and shown the ba­sics of lec­tur­ing. But I never ran into one. Rather, re­quir­ing such help could well have been taken as a sign of in­ep­ti­tude or some­thing.

Years later, when we found out that one of our med­ical stu­dents had been pre­vi­ously an ac­com­plished ac­tor, we asked him to tell the fac­ulty how to lec­ture. It was an ut­ter rev­e­la­tion. He taught us about the need to achieve 'com­mand over the en­vi­ron­ment,' that is, fig­ure out where the chalk, the eraser and the light switch were, etc.. He then went over the need for hav­ing a clearly stated pur­pose of the lec­ture, in­clud­ing an out­line one should re­fer to of­ten, the suit­able tempo of pac­ing, and many other ob­vi­ous-sound­ing bits of strat­egy. He re­minded us to avoid ut­ter­ing dis­cour­te­ous bab­ble as: "Let's see what's on the next slide." His pre­sen­ta­tion was con­sid­ered ex­tremely help­ful. I couldn't help think­ing how much I would have prof­ited from hear­ing it at the be­gin­ning of my teach­ing ca­reer.

You may ask, did I even­tu­ally mend my ways and did I later ex­tend a help­ing hand to in­com­ing young fac­ulty on how to lec­ture? No, I didn't, to my last­ing shame. It plain didn't oc­cur to me, nor, I guess, to oth­ers around me. As with my first boss, it wasn't that we didn't care about our stu­dents. On the con­trary, pro­vid­ing high qual­ity teach­ing was very high on our list of de­part­men­tal pri­o­ri­ties. But how to teach was just not part of it. Doesn't this sound ab­surd?

How about now? I don't know how far the old as­sump­tions have been sub­sti­tuted by clearer think­ing, but I cer­tainly hope that they have. It now seems ob­vi­ous that there is need to dis­cuss the ele­ments of lec­tur­ing with a new col­league and to of­fer to at­tend some of the lec­tures for the purpo­se of ex­tend­ing thought­ful com­ments. I un­der­stand that grad­u­ate stu­dents are now ex­posed to teach­ing meth­ods and have greater op­por­tu­ni­ties for hon­ing their skills. I won­der how wide­spread the prac­tice is and how many shapes and forms it has taken. How about post-docs, who may be nearer to the be­gin­ning of their teach­ing ca­reer? Surely there are many modal­i­ties that are be­ing tried and im­ple­mented.

Let's keep in mind that the early days in the life of a fresh pro­fes­sor are among the most de­man­ding. Stan­ley Falkow, one of the great teach­ers our field has seen, has re­lated the ter­ror of his first teach­ing ex­pe­ri­ence in this blog. A lit­tle help can go a long way to­wards mak­ing it eas­ier.

I would ap­pre­ci­ate hear­ing from young and old re­gard­ing the help they re­ceived (or not) when star­ting out in this won­drous en­deavor.