Remembering How to Teach

Remembering How to Teach

I taught at Cornell for ten years. When you start teaching you learn how to develop a course, write a syllabus, prepare lectures, prepare assigned reading, prepare cases and assignments, prepare tests and administer and present all of that. A wiley old professor of mine (now rest his soul), told me he figured he put in five hours of preparation for each hour of lecture that he gave. I found in the beginning that it took about 15 hours for me to accomplish that same task. I think that improved over the ten years, but I would say I was lucky if it ever got down to only five hours per classroom hour. When one does the value added math on teaching, one always concludes that it is a labor of love rather than economics since it is hard to reconcile the wage value of what you are doing. For instance, I will be teaching the Advanced Corporate Finance Course at USD this Fall. That is a 3-credit course, which I think on their adjunct professor pay scale means I will get paid about $10,000 to teach. Ignoring commutation time, the class hours will represent 35 hours of classroom time over the course of the semester. That means I get paid about $285/hour which is 30% of what I bill for expert witness work, but still sounds like it is an OK pay rate for something supposedly less rigorous than what an expert witness must put in. But if you apply the five hour rule, the wage comes down to $57/hour. And at fifteen hours that means $19/hour. Now that’s more like it for unskilled labor. I think that is very equivalent to what Amazon pays starting employees if you consider their $17/hour wage plus $1,000 starting bonus. But then, Amazon gives benefits and adjunct part-time professors do not get that to my knowledge. So, its fair to say, at least, that I could be paid more for yard work if I stood outside Home Depot with the illegal(?) immigrant gang. But I think I am more employable as an adjunct than a yard worker and suspect I would be left in the parking lot as the last person picked every day.

Gearing up to teach a new course this Fall is proving to be very interesting work for me, but also needs to get done on a somewhat forced schedule of organizing what material I want to teach, what flow I am seeking so that the course follows a logical path to gets its various teaching points across, and the various guest lecturers scheduled. This all takes thought time and administrative time. I like the thinking part just fine and I am actually OK calling friends to ask to be guests, but making it all come together in, first a logical syllabus, and then a set of lecture slides and notes (I am a PowerPoint teacher because it is what I know and it works in person or by Zoom, which are the two mediums I will be using). There are newer, more interactive methods than PowerPoint, but I am afraid of how much added work will be involved in using a methodology with which I am less familiar. I guess I have to admit that if I were a younger teacher, I would worry less about that time investment, but I simply don’t know how long I will want to teach or how long it will be appropriate for me to teach (I do care about delivering a quality product that students feel good about). Testing yourself for relevance is a shitty thing to go through on a continuous basis. Some are happy to slide into irrelevance and some cling to relevance like a life raft of their psyches. I am somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

But here I sit on a sunny summer morning. I have finished my summer “vacation” road trip, I have readjusted to being home again, and like so many tasks we all must do in life, I am standing on the precipice of the work, knowing I will be happy to have a finished product, but also knowing that once I engage I will actually be back at work, because it is work any way you slice it. Luckily I have done lots of pre-work and have pages of notes and several books in digital and hard copy form to draw from. I actually have a course outline, lecture by lecture covering the fourteen weeks (here I sit in July, thinking about giving a final exam or project in early December). That makes me think that work is a great way to rush through life because you have to plan things forward and whole chunks of your life get swept up into the fray. I may have found the worst thing about work in that thought. Nobody should assume away six month chunks of their life, knowing that once the schedule is set, its just a routine march forward to get to the finish line in early December.

I have the rest of the summer to enjoy. I have a motorcycle trip to Spain and Portugal in September to take (I will be Zooming lectures twice during that tour), I have smaller trips and visits to plan for October and November, and I have the holidays to consider because we all have only so many Christmases to go in life. So, the question is, am I making a mistake using some of my “valuable” retirement time, selling myself cheaply on the auction block of academia, and thereby carving off big chunks of my remaining life rather than savoring them? Hard question.

My answer is a resolute NO. Our goal in life should be (at least for me) to stay as active and engaged as possible. I reject irrelevance because it is merely a state of mind. I do not have to be leading a company or forming a SPAC to be relevant in finance. I can stay relevant by helping younger students figure out what the hell is going on in finance in this crazy changing world. In fact, I may be a critical handhold for such students as they try to climb the steep ladder into relevance. I do not have it in me to preach dry lectures on old material. I insist on getting out on the front of the surfboard and hanging ten in the waves of finance that are ever-changing and towering over us all as the pace of change, change in finance, change in macroeconomics and, indeed, change in our entire day-to-day world, washes over us all. I may not have all the answers, but I damn well do have an informed and knowledgeable perspective and it has value.

I have done enough regular guest lecturing (I did one a few weeks ago and I have another one in a few weeks) to know that teaching is not just a hip-shooting exercise. I think I have enough experience in the topics I teach that I could probably be more casual and do less preparation, but that would not please me. I like to be well-prepared enough to have a plan and a goal for my lectures or even my dialogues. Without that, getting students to appreciate your comments and evaluate you accordingly is more of a hit-or-miss proposition. I care too much, have too much pride, to be so random and off-hand. And don’t think for a moment that students can’t tell prepared from unprepared. You can get lucky and hit your stride without preparation, but I am less inclined to rely on luck when preparation gets you headed towards success all by itself. Preparation does not assure a great class, but it sure gives you far better odds.

And then there is the learning that comes along with teaching. I have often found that some of the best learning I get is from my preparation to teach or my preparation to write. Learning still fascinates me and I feel blessed that is the case. I see others who are decidedly against learning new stuff as they age, but I feel sorry for them because it is one the things that most makes me feel alive and vibrant. So, part of my remembering how to teach is a reminder of how I learn and how special both teaching and learning are to me.