I was working in the scope room one morning when I was summoned to the telephone. I had been anticipating this call for days, and took the cordless to a quiet space. The voice on the other end began: "Hi . . . I have the pleasure of offering you . . ." I had gotten the offer! I was thrilled – a faculty position at a small college. I began preparing, doing important stuff like donating away my supply of free T-shirts and buying a new wardrobe, and planning what I would put up on the walls of the office I would have all to myself. I would envision myself in that office, preparing lectures, and daydream about speaking to a classroom of students. I was champing at the bit.

I arrived at my new home eager to succeed. I knew it would be tough. Everyone I had spoken to said that the beginning is the hardest part. The first time you teach a course, especially if the course is completely or mostly of your own design, it takes a great deal of time and effort. This certainly turned out to be true. I was also pretty sure that I would love the work and thankfully that also turned out to be true. However there were many aspects of the experience that I didn’t expect.

I was surprised by the autonomy I had as essentially the sole responsible agent for a course. Somehow it hadn’t really dawned on me that everything in my course would be entirely up to me. I guess I had this fuzzy feeling that there would be a person or source somewhere that would tell me, "you have to teach this and this and this," but there wasn’t. I got to decide what material to cover, choose a textbook and assign reading. I planned all of the lab exercises and wrote instructions for them - using mostly other people’s ideas. I was very happy to have that freedom, though it meant a lot of work and responsibility.

Another surprise about teaching that hit home after a few weeks was the relentlessness of the schedule. In the lab I was used to being the master of my own time, able to give myself a break when I needed one. When teaching, I was beholden to my classes, which met 3 times a week. I hadn’t thought about how demanding such a regular schedule is. I would just manage to get Monday’s lecture prepared by late Sunday night. I would give my lecture on Monday and then after taking a deep breath in my office for a moment after class, I’d have to rouse myself to prepare for Wednesday’s lecture. After that came Friday’s lecture . . . and then Monday’s again. This went on and on, week after week, and was really quite exhausting. By the time Spring Break arrived, I was more in need of a break than I had ever been in my life. Of course, this could have all been eased considerably if I had been more prepared before the semester began. But when starting the job, it’s difficult to prepare ahead enough, partly because designing a class is so much work and partly because you don’t really know how to prepare until you’ve done it once or twice.

My students were an unexpected pleasure. In my previous experience as a TA, I hadn’t felt that there was a culture of learning in my classrooms. The first priority of most of my students seemed to be to get the best grade with the least effort, and it was a rare student who actually seemed curious and interested in what they were learning about, enough to ask questions and think about the material for its own sake. The students I encountered in my job had quite a different attitude. They were excited about what they were learning about, and disappointed about what they wouldn’t get to learn about. I was struck by their commitment to the class: they almost never were absent or tardy. The Friday before Spring Break my wife suggested that my students wouldn’t show up. I ended up making her a bet that all of them would come. I won. Another time I gave an optional lecture, telling my students well in advance that none of the material in the lecture would be tested on. Everyone came. I ended up quite appreciative of and attached to my students, and despite the rigors of the semester, I was genuinely sad when the course was over.

That isn’t to say that my class went off without a hitch. There were many, and in particular there were three challenges I hadn’t foreseen that dominated my class. The first was how to make the class work for students that spanned a fairly broad spectrum of scholarly ability and background. In other words, how to keep the strong students challenged without losing the weaker students. The second was how to help students develop new learning skills. Some students thought that learning biology was only about memorizing definitions and bits of information, and I struggled to help them gain deeper comprehension of the material. Third, most of my students did not spend much time on campus. Most worked 10-20 hours a week, and many had children or lengthy commutes to campus. This was quite different from my undergraduate experience, in which commitments to activities that had no connection with the college or campus community were uncommon. Most everyone I knew in college lived within walking distance of campus, and the school was the center of our universe. The more distant connection my students had with the school forced me to change the way I thought about my students’ relationship to my class and my expectations for their utilization of class and campus resources.

Outside the classroom, I found the work of the college to be an educational surprise. I hadn’t done much college service before, and I found it fascinating to attend the departmental, divisional, and college-wide faculty meetings and see how the academic life of the college is shaped and legislated. Ever wonder how the requirements for a major are decided? Or why the semester starts on day X and ends on day Y? Well, I never did, but it was interesting to find out and be involved.

In dealing with the unexpected and expected challenges I faced as a neophyte teaching professor, I was aided greatly by my colleagues. They knew what I was going through, and were an invaluable source of advice and insider knowledge. Thanks largely to their help I considered my first semester a success, and looked forward to many more.