So THAT’S the point I was trying to get to. My “supervisor” (the graduate adviser) came and visited my 9AM class last Thursday. I know a lot of people in my incoming grad class are intimidated by him and will have trouble when he visits because they will be super nervous. (He’s a really awesome guy and is a fountain of knowledge and I really like him, but he is cranky-looking and is quite sarcastic, so he’s on the same page as I am, but that’s not true of all of the grad students.) But anyway, as for me, I did not really get any elevated nervousness when he visited my class. Honestly, I didn’t have time for it. The particular day he visited, I had to go over the students’ first exam (work out 14 problems start to finish and answer questions about them) and then give the students a 10 minute quiz. For my 9AM class, I have to RUN there from across campus after my 8-8:50AM class. I always arrive to my 9AM class flustered, out of breath, and sometimes 1-2 minutes late. (I thought this would make a bad impression, but when we discussed his visit after the fact, he said he understood I had back to back classes across campus and it’s not a big deal.)

From there, I hit the ground running. I wrote the day’s agenda on the board: (1) hand back exams and homeworks, (2) go over exams, (3) take quiz. I multitasked and spoke in generalities about the exam grades as I handed them back. Honestly, I didn’t even notice Dr. B sitting in the back of the classroom until I’d already been in the classroom 5-10 minutes that’s how focused I was on the tasks at hand. Once the exams were handed back, I flew through the problems. This means I hauled ass to work through them, but I was thorough and clear in my explanations and paused frequently to make sure all the students were understanding the words coming out of my mouth and asking if they had any questions. I finished RIGHT on schedule, giving the illusion that I have perfect classroom time management, and gave the students their quizzes and gave them 10 minutes to complete it and then class was over. It was quite a rush, and I felt really awesome about how I did that day. I really didn’t feel any more nervous during the class than normal, even though I was being watched like a hawk. The only second I allowed myself to be nervous was after I’d handed out the quizzes, when Dr. B walked up to me. But the fear that I had completely embarrassed myself (and possibly lost my job!) disintegrated when he whispered “Stop by my office later to discuss in more detail, but I just wanted to tell you you did a great job. What you were asked to do was nearly impossible, to cover all of those problems and still have time for a quiz. So you should feel very proud of that.” 🙂

I won’t go through all of the stuff he said in our post-game interview, but I will say it was all positive and words like “impressive” and “remarkable” were used, which was a huge ego boost. Plus, it reinforced the positive feeling I have about my teaching. He said he could tell that the students both respected me and understood me, and that they were comfortable asking questions. He also said my explanations of problems and concepts were nearly spot on (he caught me on a few mathematical technicalities, but none that affected the students’ education, just things he wanted to clarify for my own education). I already felt that I was explaining things clearly to the students and that they were respectful and that I generally foster a good classroom environment, but it’s nice to hear it from someone who’s been in the business for a long time and has enough experience and is brutally honest enough to tell me if I am terrible at it.

In addition, yesterday in this class that I’m taking for new grad students, we had to present problems to the class as if we were teaching them and then get everyone’s comments and critiques of our teaching techniques (including voice projection and enunciation, chalkboard organization, and actual teaching/explaining/etc). I went up and presented and awaited my peers’ relentless criticisms. Not that I thought they’d be mean, but I did want some feedback if there was something I needed to improve upon. When I finished my problem and Dr. B asked everyone to comment, someone just said “Wow. That was really good.” And a couple people echoed “Yeah.” And then no one else said anything… Now, I am glad to feel like I’m doing a great job (and, really, it validates the opinions that people have been giving me for years that I would make an amazing teacher – even though I hate kids), but there’s got to be SOMETHING I am doing wrong. I’ve only been teaching for a few weeks, and I know I’m not perfect at anything, including this. Finally, someone piped up with “In a few places, your lines of work are too close together on the board.” Okay, now that’s something I can work with.

So anyway, I guess what I’m saying is, apparently teaching is going REALLY well. Which is a relief. If I were struggling with teaching, that would make grad school 100 times harder. But as long as I keep chugging along at this level with teaching and step up my studying for my own classes that I’m taking, I think I’ll do fine.