From the Origin provides a forum for lively discussion of issues of importance to the mathematical community. The Michigan Section-MAA Newsletter solicits opinion pieces for publication in this column from anyone in the Michigan mathematical community. In addition, comments on pieces published in earlier issues are welcomed.
Items for From the Origin should be submitted to the editor by the beginning of October to be considered for inclusion in the December issue and by the beginning of February for the April issue. Main opinion pieces should be at most 1800 words long, and responses at most 400. The editors reserve the right to shorten responses, if necessary, in order to fit as many as possible within the available space.
On the day I received my undergraduate degree, one of those people swirling around me asked what is a particularly reasonable question given the circumstances: “What are you going to do after graduation?” On hearing that I was going to graduate school, the follow-up question, “Are you going to teach, then?” was, perhaps, understandable.
I said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Five years later, looking at the prospect of finishing graduate school, I was applying for teaching jobs. To any who asked I replied that this was because I realized in the past couple of years that the days I left work the happiest were those on which I had been teaching. But I couldn’t say that I was doing a whole lot of teaching. The sum total of my teaching experience in graduate school consisted of working in a short summer program for bright high school students, for whom a cadre of graduate students were recruited to teach courses on any topic at all—mine was called “Mathematical Modeling”—and running homework recitation sections for one class each quarter of my last year as a graduate student. I have a vague memory of a meeting of math TAs at the beginning of that year, in which the expectations and responsibilities of the role were, I suppose, clarified. But the only thing I’m sure that I retained from the meeting was a contact with another TA I saw later at several national meetings as we made the transition from graduate students to academic professionals.
And so I went into my first recitation overly prepared, and by the time I got to the third had disposed of most preparation and cheerfully worked with the class the problems of those who came to ask them. I gave a couple of substitute lectures for the faculty with whom I was working, which were frenetic in their energy, faultless in their organization, and most memorable for a comment made by a student long after my efforts: It is never possible to follow a lecture from start to finish. Even mine, as it turned out.
Then, after around four months, 120 job applications, 20 or 30 employment register interviews, three on-campus interviews and one job-offer—it was a bad year to be looking for jobs—I was standing at the front of a first-semester calculus class as a shiny new assistant professor. Where does one start filling in a completely clean slate with a lecture for a class one took nine years before, especially when there are 40 more class-days visible behind the cinderblock back wall of the classroom? I started with the notes from the Calculus I course I took my freshman year in college, which (astonishingly) I still had—until I found that their content was more impressive for its doodled hands, faces, dragons and cartoons than for any organized mathematical presentation. Closing the notebook, in a time-honored tradition I took a deep breath and asked the questions “what is calculus?” and “what are we doing this semester?”
As the semester came to a close I was asking different questions, like “how can in-class time be made more effective?” While teaching at a small school may have increased the efficacy of my frenetic lectures, the lesson given by my student in graduate school remained. In my first semester I had tried an occasional stab at something other than lecturing, but had only slightly better than no success. However, I had the good fortune to be a Fellow in the MAA’s Project NExT (“New Experiences in Teaching”), starting in the summer I completed graduate school, with the subsequent meetings of my fellowship year taking place the winter and summer following that. It was from this program that I sought such answers to these questions as could be found—in fact, the origin of the questions can itself be traced to a great extent to the workshop I attended that first summer. My department was small (five faculty for a combined mathematics and computer science department), and I made the transition from primarily lecturing to a more active classroom on the strength of the sum of its wisdom with that of the 65 other Fellows I had contact with through Project NExT.
As time has passed since that first year, I’ve wondered and been asked by others whether my experience in graduate school prepared me for the plunge I took into teaching and being an academic professional. The waters of the academic sea are deep and wide. I think it’s possible to dive into teaching, especially when teaching three and four courses a semester (with two to four preparations), and never surface to find the breath to dive again into the service and scholarship that are expected and necessary for academic survival. Or, in the course of the first dive, to get stuck irretrievably between that and the inevitable pull of service and see little more.
My understanding of all of these things as I emerged from graduate school was very close to nonexistent. The expectations of service and scholarship were lined up behind the other walls of my first-day classroom, but I don’t know if I really saw them then. Coming out of graduate school it is perhaps not so hard to understand what continuing research means, but as I wandered into the service component of my professional role I think the largest asset I had was that (in at least some cases) I was able to think just fast enough to keep my mouth shut. Insofar as deferring to the inevitable and postponing the undesirable may be graciously accomplished by silence, there may be something to be said for retaining that part of one’s role as a graduate student that involves keeping a low profile by saying less than one thinks. Of course, this is clouded by the convincing argument that one should say “yes” to opportunity even as one tries to say “no” to those assignments which, from their onerous or political nature, are best avoided. Campus politics, especially at a small school, are a fantastic web, better to be admired from outside than discovered after walking into it. As I traipsed through the committee assignments I fell into, I wandered around this web rather blindly, becoming at some point aware that I had missed it by dint of no conscious act I could pin down. Perhaps the subconscious avoidance techniques of graduate school were at work, or perhaps I was simply lucky.
Or perhaps I was aided by my network of Project NExT Fellows and the colleagues in my department, all of whose opinions I trusted. These networks served to augment what limited knowledge I brought from graduate school to work out my path through the professoriate. Armed with them I was never left adrift as I charted that course, but I don’t know that I adequately used the sage advice at my disposal. It is with a vague sense of astonishment and awe that I’ve watched friends and colleagues equipped with the same bestowed wisdom balance the three pillars of their professional career and simultaneously appear to avoid burnout. This mantle of success I am not sure I can claim for myself. I plunged into teaching with the same frenetic energy that I put into my first substitute lectures, and after each semester of running from that to committee meetings, to office hours and grading, I would emerge with a sizeable sleep deficit (something that graduate school did prepare me for, perhaps), reasonable teaching evaluations, and a need to recover the conviction that I love what I do. I have never been a good candidate for the “balancing your professional and personal lives” panels that have appeared now and again at national and regional meetings. Of course, balance and committee work aren’t really parts of one’s graduate work either.
And so went this first transition in my academic life. By most measures it was made successfully, if informed only in small part by my graduate experience. When the university’s evaluation machinery rolled around to my case I had an established niche in which I appeared essential, though I found it periodically to demand more than I was willing to give. And I was able to do many things that I enjoyed doing, not the least of which was teaching—the desire for which directed my job search as I departed from graduate school.
I don’t have any illusion that my path is either unique or universal, however. I have since moved from the cozy niche that I carved on emerging from graduate school to a very different one at a school with a graduate program of its own. I am now able to watch this transition from the graduate school side again, albeit vicariously. The view I have now is different, though I don’t know how much of this difference is a change in culture over time and how much a change due to location. Here I watch graduate students make their way through an intricate training program designed to give them both the tools and desire to do more than lecture in their courses. When I was in graduate school, I did not have whole courses of my own, a reality dictated at least in part by the administrative reality there. For better or worse, these graduate students are starting with a teaching background I did not have until a semester or so after I left school. Whether it is possible or desirable to also give them a sense of the expectations and requirements lined up behind the other walls of their academic careers I don’t know. (After all, who wants to see the underbelly of a curriculum evaluation committee before it is unavoidable?) And I am fortunate to be far enough from administration to be able to leave idle my wondering if preparation of this nature is better considered at the level of the graduate school than within the mathematics department.
But in the long run, it seems reassuring that we as academics do make the transitions in our careers—graduate school to the professoriate to other roles as faculty and as academicians—with remarkably consistent success. I wrote in a teaching statement once that at the end of the day it seemed most significant that on Mondays I could still look forward to going to work, an assertion I am happy to still make. And it seems reasonable to hope that anyone making a transition in their academic life might at the end of it be able to say the same.
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