Folding Room Divider report (22-23 Teaching Recap)

In my last post I reviewed some recent updates from my research, but of course my job also includes another major component: teaching. I think it’s worth reviewing my experiences here for two main reasons. First, I use writing as a memory aid for things I’d like to remind myself later on. Second, I hope that other newly-hired or aspiring tenure-track faculty will be able to learn from my experiences, as well as any grad students trying to build their teaching practice.

But first, some disclaimers: I do all of my teaching 100% online, and largely asynchronous. My academic department does everything remotely, and has done so since 2009. This means that any observations or tips I share here will be indelibly skewed by this somewhat atypical arrangement. It also means, on a more philosophical level, that my entire experience of the world is now influenced by the fact that I spend all my working hours on the internet. But that’s a different conversation.

I started this job in August 2022, when I was living in Austin, Texas. I could have stayed in Austin if I wanted to, but I don’t have any roots out there and I don’t love the existential climate angst I feel when blasting A/C to cope with 110ºF heat, so we elected to move back to New York, which is where we started before my postdoc.

Making a major move right before you start teaching is rough. There’s no way around it. If you record videos or take Zoom meetings (which I assume most faculty do nowadays, even if your job is mostly IRL), one major problem presented by moving is the lack of a ‘professional’ background. This is doubly true if you live in a small space, like most NYC apartments, or most grad student dwellings. For the first semester, I tried to cultivate some semblance of an authentic professional-looking backdrop. In practice, this meant moving clutter out of frame each time I turned the webcam on. I also used a decent amount of virtual backgrounds on Zoom, but they often glitch around the edges if you move suddenly and reveal whatever’s actually behind you. They also don’t really work outside of Zoom (i.e. recording course tutorial videos). For the second semester, I bought a folding room divider, and it made my life much easier. Just put it up and go. I should have done it sooner.

As for the actual content of my courses, I was fortunate to begin my teaching with two sections of the same well-developed core curriculum course. When asked what I wanted to teach last year, this was my first request: please give me something that will run every semester and that has been developed by existing faculty. The course was slightly outside my usual teaching area, but still well within the realm of material I learned during grad school. Any rustiness in my subject area expertise was completely eclipsed by the benefits I secured by teaching a course that was already thoroughly road-tested. I also got to join a group of other faculty members teaching the course concurrently—built-in mentorship. This greatly reduced the challenge of finding my feet at a new institution.

Another thing that was new to me was the California State University system’s approach to teaching. During our training last summer, leadership emphasized flexibility and compassion. We had workshops about meeting the needs of working students, first-generation students, immigrant students, students in crisis, etc. The end result, for me, was a new outlook less concerned with competitive positioning in relation to other schools than the institutional cultures I’ve experienced elsewhere. Don’t get me wrong, I see the value in competitive drive for certain purposes. I’m a product of fifteen years at those competitive research universities, after all, and I think I got a pretty good education. But they’re not for everyone, and I am finding that my students reflect my attitudes back at me. When I’m flexible with them, they’re flexible with me. My kindness in evaluations of their coursework has, thus far, thankfully, been reflected back in the kindness they show in my course evaluations.

As I get ready for the 23-24 academic year, I’ll be trying to put these principles into action with another course. This time, I’m teaching a syllabus of my own design. I’m glad I learned to color within the lines, so to speak, by picking a well-established course last year. I’m also glad that I don’t have to worry about a Zoom glitch revealing my messy apartment during a lecture. Check back in a few months to see if how it all works out.