TA Thoughts – Preparing to teach for the first time

So my guest post on GradHacker is up! Here’s a teaser for you:

“Teaching for the first time can be extremely nerve-racking. It can also be horribly confusing, isolating, and at times immensely frustrating. You desperately want to do a good job, but how can you when you’ve no experience and the course coordinator insists on sitting in on the lecture and making notes on everything you say?

To be honest, even after a couple of terms it sometimes feels like every time you have to teach a new session you’re right back at the start again. What experience you gained teaching ‘Identifying Roman pottery – first century products of South East England’ doesn’t always transpose well to ‘Introduction to archaeobotanic laboratory techniques 1’.

Having just finished my first two Teaching Assistant positions, and having taken a couple of guest lectures, I’ve come up with a few basic approaches of things I’ve done – or wished I’d done – before I actually gave the class….”

For the full post, head on over to GradHacker.

If you have any tips and suggestions to add, to comment over on GradHacker. Hope you enjoy!