Thought on teaching

Recently, I've found  my joy in teaching again, after feeling a little burnt-out the end of last semester.

Part of this is "externals" - being nominated for that silly award has peculiarly boosted my confidence that I am not boring people. Part of it is a colleague favorably comparing me to someone else in how I do my stuff*

(*Mainly, that I can adjust my teaching style to serve the students we have, and not the students I wish we had....there are a lot of innovative things one COULD do if our students weren't working sometimes-full-time at jobs, or came from less-well-prepared backgrounds, or whatever. But my MO is to try to meet people where they are and to pull them up to the next level, instead of expecting them to find that level on their own).

And yes, also: I have a critical mass of really engaged students this semester, and that makes a difference.

But I realized today, while doing some of my "Factors affecting climate in the tropics and temperate zone" lecture today: a lot of teaching is really just getting to geek out over stuff you care deeply about, and if you're lucky, much of your subject is that way. I spent some time - maybe more than the class would strictly justify, but I don't care - in Soils yesterday talking lovingly about rain gardens and how they can solve a problem (your yard floods when it rains hard, like it can here, or you want to corral the run-off from the parking lot at your place of business) fairly elegantly. But rain gardens are COOL. And I saw one person in the class taking down the web addresses I gave that had information about the gardens, so who knows? Maybe they'll build one some day.

And really, all through my teaching career, I feel like the times I really reached people was when it was something I cared deeply about and kind of geeked out on. The good news is that I care deeply about a LOT of things in my field, whether it's butterfly identification or how plants get water out of the soil or rain gardens or what little I know about clay mineralogy or some of the history of how stats tests were developed*

(*I go into the whole William Gosset story, about how he worked for Guinness and came up with the one-sample t-test, but couldn't publish under his name, presumably because Guinness was afraid of corporate espionage, so he adopted the pseudonym "Student" and while it doesn't really add a LOT to a person's understanding of how the test works, it's a cool story)

And as I said on Twitter (euphemising even slightly more here than I did there): it's perhaps a good thing I give a hard darn about so many things, because here is a place where giving a hard darn serves me really well. Normally it exhausts me (especially in interpersonal stuff, where I really have no control over things and people are gonna be how they are no matter how much I care), but giving a hard darn about the Gulf Fritillary or tree identification or things like that probably DOES make me a better teacher.