A Recipe for Good Teaching

Disclaimer: I do not know anything about baking or evidently, about units of measurement.

Ingredients:

• A heap of compassion for the students for whom the material is not easy, for the students who struggle with impostor syndrome, and for your fellow TAs, who are also balancing many responsibilities.

• A stack gallon of patience for the times when you must explain the same concept over and over again.

• A liter of energy and humor to ensure that recitations are fun and students are awake, even if it is 9:00 am the day after a grueling exam.

1. Sprinkle some humor into everything you do, even (especially) if your jokes are bad. Move around the room, make fun of yourself, draw funny things on the board. Your students won't remember every concept they learned after a couple semesters, but they will remember if recitation was entertaining (and might even make some jokes themselves!).

2. Sometimes you have to knead concepts a little longer, and in multiple ways. Everyone has a different foundation coming into each class and the explanation that worked for you might not work for them. Be prepared with multiple explanations and approaches.

3. Silence helps the bread rise. Alan Perlis once said "If a listener is nodding their head while you explain a computer program, wake them up" – this also applies to problems. Students remember their thoughts and conversations even more than the funny moments so it is helpful to facilitate discussions. The best recitations are the ones where the students talk more than the TAs.

4. Always stir a little longer than needed. Every extra bit of time I spend makes someone's life easier in some way, so it is always worth it to put in that time. I spent each break preparing for the class I was TAing by preparing ideas for how to teach recitations and better hints for office hours or coming up with new problem ideas.

5. Now toss out this recipe. Take everything I have said with a grain of salt. When I first became a TA, I read through all of the reflections of the past winners of this award, looking for a list exactly like this one that would claim to tell me exactly how to be a good teacher. There is no such list. Just as everyone learns their own way, everyone has their own style of teaching. It is important to find what works best for you.