I first went to ISU I wanted to be a high school history teacher. I always wanted to get my Ph.D. in the long run but, for me, what was important was sharing my love of history, and there is no better group of individuals to share it with than a captive audience. As the semesters wore on that perspective never changed but I became too afraid of Illinois’ school system to continue, teaching sociology, psychology, or even economics did not interest me. The university seemed like the place I would want to teach, I quickly realized, and Andrew (Weeks) confirmed, that the way forward was community college. All I had ever wanted to teach were 100 and 200 level courses anyway so the idea of teaching what I enjoy with no pressure to publish seemed like a dream come true.
The important thing to keep in mind is that I wanted to be a teacher. I still do. In the tax haven, I have met two lovely women who are training to be teachers, one Albanian (Kosovar), the other Portuguese. What has shocked me is that they do not receive any pedagogical training, it is only courses in history, grad-level history to teach high schoolers! I do not discourage teachers from getting their M.A.s but to become a teacher without setting foot in the classroom is ludicrous to me. Nana would often complain about her teachers that the lycée not being very good, they would just “read from the state’s script,” and I am starting to understand what she meant by that. I hope that these two students will be better, they both want to be, but it will be a challenge for both of them. A poor friend of mine at Illinois State is only now doing her student-teaching, she still has a chance to back away, these women will not have the same luxury.
The lack of teaching skills extends to the university as well. Here, professors are researchers and students are an annoyance that must be overcome before they can return to their research. What is another website on the CV versus 14 young historians? Only one of them can actually get you tenure. In one course a doctoral TA organized a talk over zoom. The guest lecturer was able to adequately present his research and I had prepared a few questions for him after the talk. The question time, unfortunately, was dominated by the TA who wanted to see how these topics related to his research, the teacher – a good teacher – said nothing, the student, it seems, simply wanted to impress us and the guest lecturer with his research. Another student had to elbow her way into the Q&A and I quickly followed in her wake. The TA’s questions made the Zoom presentation go long, I’m sure to the great joy of all the students bored stiff by the intricacies of nineteenth-century German financing in the chemical industry.
I was already aware that, in Europe, the emphasis is on research, you do not have to be a good teacher. I am spoiled by Illinois State where my teachers truly cared about their students (most of them anyway) and where I learned what being a good teacher means. I’m watching these university professors carefully for myself. I do want to be a good teacher and bad examples are sometimes extremely informative.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 