A Stage Actor in a Home Movie, or Teaching Online

Though Therese Huston’s book Teaching What You Don’t Know is about that inevitable requirement that those of us at liberal arts schools teach courses outside our fields of expertise, it offers some engaging insight into the similar task of being forced into teaching a course we have perfected using tools with which we have no expertise at all, or in other words, teaching a course online.

Perhaps the most engaging observation in this book — implied, not stated — is that whenever we find ourselves teaching material we’ve barely just learned ourselves, we can take courage in reminding ourselves that a college class is always a collaborative endeavor, a fragile ballet of student, teacher, and the university itself, each with different goals and different levels of investment that come together for a brief time in hopes of creating a kind of alchemy. Sometimes it works, even when everyone in the room is a novice, maybe because everyone is a novice. No doubt we learn quickly; that’s why we’re teachers. Huston tells the story of one teacher whose course in some new and foreign subject was so successful that the departmental expert in that field later came to her for advice. All of us teaching a completely new course can hope for such success. Yet most of us have had the experience of teaching a course focused like a laser on our field of expertise and have it crash like the Titanic, with the same slow and inevitable sense that the end of the semester (like the Carpathia) is too far away to save us. Small things can sink a class; throw in lots of technology with a huge learning curve and...oh, well.

We may be one of the best teachers our students have ever had, but we will absolutely not be the best TV show they've ever seen or the most interesting blog they've ever read, and that's the medium we're on when our course is online. Teaching with technological tools we do not know how to use professionally (and probably just barely understand) drives that point home in spades. To survive the trial we’re all facing, Huston writes, our goals should be to get better with every class, build enough trust with our students to admit to our shortcomings, and use the experience to broaden ourselves as scholars and teachers. She reminds us that, though the university tries to hold the teacher responsible for the errant missiles that result from faculty teaching what they don't know, it derives enormous benefits from the sort of lean staffing that makes teaching outside our fields necessary (or in the present situation, from having students enrolled at all rather than staying home and waiting out the pandemic) and is not about to do anything to threaten that.

The upcoming online semester reminds me of my first semester on a college faculty, when I was given an eighteen-hour course load, six of them at a satellite campus three hours’ drive away. Four of the courses were completely outside my training. My engagement with Huston’s book, then, was filled with flashbacks of class sessions that fell flat, embarrassing flubs, more than a little self-doubt, and the lonely experience of sitting in my campus office hours after the police had locked the building at midnight trying to ensure that I had something to say in class the next morning. That was thirty-five years ago. Funny how after thirty-five years of great courses and wonderful experiences with the students I’ve taught, those haunting memories of trying to become an expert at something in a matter of hours still sit so close to the surface. Maybe last semester’s brief online foray taught me that I’ll be up until well past midnight every night this fall trying to make sure something great happens when my students log on to our class at 8:00 A.M.