Teaching is Harder than You Think
After a 32 year career with PwC I wanted to try one more thing. I had 4 ideas as to what I wanted to do for Retirement 1.0. Two fizzled out quickly, one did not materialize and one stuck.
I earned a contract to deliver a course at the University of Minnesota in the Carlson School of Management. The course is titled IDSc 3104 Enterprise Systems, a 2 credit course delivered over 8 weeks in the second half of a semester (B Term), offered 3 times in the fall and twice in the spring. It delves into large business transaction systems, focusing on one used by very large companies, SAP. If you are getting a Management Information Systems (MIS) degree you may take this your junior year and if you are working on an MIS minor, you likely take it your senior year. MIS majors their junior year in the fall are far more enjoyable to teach than MIS minors in their senior year in spring about to graduate.
I have met people over the years with a strong desire to lecture at a university. This was not top of mind for me and certainly not a goal when wrapping up my time at PwC. I regularly guest lectured at an introduction to IT class at Carlson, which entailed speaking to a couple class sections during one week per semester. Practically, it had a recruiting dimension, but it also felt good to be in front of students conveying the benefits of pursuing a career similar to mine. After leaving PwC, I had the opportunity to shadow a professor and the energy of being on campus felt like it would be a great opportunity to give back and fulfill a purpose I may not have realized was available for me to fill.
The time and effort to deliver a university class is much harder than I imagined. I did not think it would be easy, but since most my materials were inherited from the previous lecturer, I would be assigned a Teacher’s Assistant (TA) to handle most grading, and an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) for each section to assist students with hands on exercises, I did not think it would be too hard. However, preparing and practicing enough to feel comfortable owning a room averaging 40 students who are counting on you to fulfill their learning needs is no small effort. There is also the administrative burden to be the recipient of 200 students in my 5 sections. Between illness, illness of family members, religious holidays, accommodation coordination, and a host of miscellaneous questions along with those who should have gone to the TA or the UTA is a much more time consuming effort than I would have thought.
Not often, but from time to time I have heard someone make the comment about how easy teachers have it. There are what seem like rather naive points of view on the limited hours of teaching and all the time off during seasonal breaks, especially summer. The next person who makes this comment near me will likely get an ear full. The course design, prep, delivery, student interaction and grading are serious time commitments and big energy drains. And I am teaching college juniors and seniors, so I cannot even fathom what it takes to teach at the elementary and high school levels.
Overall, a great experience. However, the next time you are introduced to a teacher, please thank them for what they do and comment on how hard their job must be.