I Respectfully Refuse to Be a Teacher

I sit uncomfortably with teaching each time we face each other—quite the predicament for a PhD candidate still considering committing to academic life, I know. It’s taken me years to write this sentence, too, partly because I never imagined myself as a teacher, but also because grad students are strongly advised against prioritizing teaching. Scholars of the tenured kind should be researching, publishing, applying for grants, attending key conferences, serving on committees, planning research trips, and then, yes, teaching. Both the urgency and priority of these activities are not entirely up to individual faculty, always caught between the never-ending list of tasks on their path to tenure, and their own vocational commitments to the profession. Unfortunately, this confusing, deeply individualistic, and oftentimes contradicting working environment is the one inherited by graduate students to parse, survive, and make their own.

Conventionally, doctoral programs include a required pedagogy course all students must take before teaching at the institution and, in many cases, this course constitutes the full extent of the pedagogical training grads will receive. And so, just like that, one day, after completing the course and still grappling with my commitment to pedagogy, I had students calling me professor, asking questions about grading, and textbook alternatives. I struggled to keep the teaching working load under 20 hours per week while also taking courses, researching, putting together exam reading lists, and applying for grants. Something’s got to give. Your mentors, looking out for you as a budding academic, will tell you something like “teaching should never take most of your time,” or “it’s ok if you can’t be the best teacher this semester, focus on your research.” But doesn’t teaching define what a professor is?

It took me some time to become aware of the paradoxical truth: though teaching is the core essence of being a professor, the graduate curriculum is instead training you to be a doctor, a field expert. Who you are as an instructor and the development of your own pedagogy is largely left up to you. Moreover, prioritizing teaching means spending precious time in an activity that won’t weigh nearly as much as robust published peer-reviewed articles for the search committee of a tenure-track job. It’s also difficult to notice the intentional faults in the system since the official discourse on teaching still positions it as an activity central to the identity of the professor despite its institutional devaluation to a kind of burden that comes with the job. Once I did see the cracks, I had to come to terms with the reality that the PhD was not going to naturally train me how to teach, as I’d originally thought, but that pedagogical training was an added extracurricular matter I’d have to pursue for passion—one I didn’t have. Thus, I decided that I hated teaching as a way to avoid it whenever possible. I hated how vulnerable it made me feel, how time consuming the grading and lesson planning was, how meaningless standard exams are, and how little time 50 minutes actually is for connecting with students.

Against all my odds, however, I came to go through two punctual occasions that changed the outlook of teaching for me, and I owe both of them to the folks at the UVA Scholars’ Lab. The first instance it happened was when they had each of us in the Praxis Fellowship design and teach a pencil and paper workshop exercise, which you can read more about in here. The second happened early this summer, in one of the sessions of the Intro to Digital Humanities I led for the Leadership Alliance Mellon Initiative Program, which hosts the summer research projects of a small group (4–5) of undergraduates across different fields and institutions. Both times, there was a moment in the middle of the discussion where I forgot I was a teacher, “the person in charge,” and for some blissful moments, I had fun. Rather than focusing on proving that I was capable of providing new knowledge to my audience, the informal and intimate nature of both environments allowed me to relax and concentrate on sharing information about common interests with people similarly invested in them.

It was then that it occurred to me: I don’t want to be a teacher. What I do want, and brings me joy, is discussing what I’m curious about and sharing what I’ve learned with others. I want to organize reading groups and co-create learning activities with people in different spaces, formats, with bespoke outputs that respond to the needs of the group. I want to be another learner joining a conversation in a multitude of small, collective pedagogical encounters.