Pacing and Grading
We get a lot of “training” on doing research — four to six years of PhD followed by an year or two of post doc — but almost none on teaching. I was a TA (teaching assistant) for one course every year of my PhD, and that was it. This experience is not enough and it just doesn’t prepare you for teaching assignments.
A few minutes ago, I had a few students leave my office with their graded homeworks. The one part of teaching I (and I am sure most) dislike is grading. But it needs to be done and I do it, though I complain a lot. And I have a small class: just 17 (most of them post-graduate) students. I don’t know what I will do next semester when I teach a class of 60. (Yes, I know: TAs)
However, the biggest problem I have with is pacing my course. The students just pointed out to me that the current section on Partial Differential Equations has dragged on too long. I planned to teach 4 classes on this; I have already taught 7. Which means that I have that much less time to cover the remaining items I intended to give in this course.
I had spent a week in December preparing the outline for the course and setting the overall objectives. I was then looking at a overall perspective. My mistake was to get too much bogged down with details in this module that I lost the track of the broad aims. A lesson on what to avoid for the future.
Most of us have had project over-runs in the past. It is important to identify the root cause of such over-runs and work on processes that allow you to maintain a project timeline for the future.
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