Training the Teacher

​In retrospect, my professor was grooming me to teach for a year before he convinced me to accept his class. When I gave him my accommodation request for an alternate midterm exam, he asked me to email a paragraph about ethics. After reading my analysis, he told me I would teach the lesson. I shook my head in abject horror; I was terrified to speak in public. I was raised in solitude and had no real social skills. The military had done nothing to improve the situation. I withdrew from my speech class three times before I found a professor who allowed us to deliver scripted and unconventionally formatted presentations. Nevertheless, he persisted. I declined but found enough of my voice to ask him why the lesson on ethics was in our book, while not on our syllabus. “Because it is the cornerstone of the course… of the entire legal system… and should be for everything,” he explained.

Even though I was not his student the following semester, we continued talking with each other. “What can you tell me about critical thinking?” he asked one day. “I have never heard of it,” I replied. “Come back and talk to me when you understand critical thinking well enough to explain it,” he ordained. Wanting to continue the discussion, I spent most of my remaining work-study hours that semester participating in an email chat thread about critical thinking that was sponsored by Sonoma State University. The pieces fell into place when I heard about the bowl of noodles: Consider your thoughts to be like a bowl of cooked noodles. Each noodle represents a complete thought. Critical thinking is when you can connect the noodles end-to-end in something resembling an ordered design… maybe even a straight line.

Satisfied with my explanation, he encouraged me to keep in touch over the summer while I designed the first website for the Faculty Senate. After successfully presenting my work to the group, one of his colleagues came up to offer commendations and kudos. Somehow, he knew.

After that, I saw him almost every Monday and Wednesday morning before my real estate law class. His office was across the hall from our classroom door. He would be standing there saying “Good Morning!” to the students arriving for the day. “Teach my class; it is all online,” he would call out as I strode into view. “I am so busy,” I countered, “I don’t see how...” Smiling in encouragement, “You can do it,” he would insist. After six weeks of this, I caved and consented to his request. I figured that, rather than spend the time talking in the hallway, we could be working on his class.
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We were half-way through the semester when the students first heard from their instructor, and it was me! Lord have mercy. He did need my help. Quickly, I transitioned their first six lessons (eighteen quizzes) from webpages into WebCT where they could catch up with their work. After that, we brought the class online in layers over the next five semesters. Once it was up-and-running, it was a work of art. The students produced amazing work, earned excellent grades, and gave fabulous feedback. It was enjoyable to teach and spectacularly simple to manage, despite its breadth, width, and depth. We were beginning to note student participation and production behaviors that warranted further exploration through properly prepared and approved research. Our oversight? We were so busy doing the work that we had not documented the development process. I do not plan to repeat that mistake. This is a big part of the reason why I am moving so slow and methodically through my graduate program. It is worth doing right the first time.