First Person

Preparing for Class, Without Overpreparing

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By James M. Lang

Even before last spring's semester had come to a close, I had thought about how much of my summer I would have to spend preparing for the fall semester, and for my second year on the tenure track in general. I wanted to spend as many summer days as possible devoted to my writing, but I also wanted to plan my courses out as thoroughly as I could, in the hopes that careful advance planning would alleviate some of the time pressures of the semester itself.

I would be teaching three courses in the fall -- one was a rerun of a course I taught in the spring semester, and two were brand new for me. One of those new courses was also a brand new course at the college, so I had no models to guide me.

Three weeks before the start of the semester, I set aside my daily writing schedule and decided to spend one week preparing for each course. It had seemed to me like I spent the entire summer last year preparing the courses for my first year, though, and so I wondered whether three weeks would be enough.

I came to my campus office on a Monday morning, made myself a cup of tea, and began dutifully working on my first syllabus. About two hours later, I was finished. I had a momentary thought that I should move on to the next syllabus, but that thought was quickly crowded out by another one: "What the hell am I doing here?"

I packed up my books, went home, poured myself a lemonade, and pulled up a chair on the lawn beside my wife -- a schoolteacher -- who was watching our two children splashing in the wading pool in the backyard, still enjoying her summer.

"I thought you were working on your syllabus today," she said.

"Turns out I jumped the gun a little bit on that," I said. "I've got a few more weeks of summer left."

Earlier that summer, she had caught me reading one of the books I was going to teach in my senior seminar in the fall. It was a novel by one of the authors whom I had written about in my dissertation.

"Haven't you already read that book?" she asked me.

"Yeah," I replied. "A couple of times."

"You're not planning to read it while you're teaching it this fall?"

"Of course I am," I said.

"So," she continued, "you have read that book at least two times already, you are reading it now, and you are going to read it again in the fall?"

"Huh," I said. I put down the book and picked up her copy of Bridget Jones's Diary.

The common threads in these two stories are the two factors that have made the biggest difference for me in the transition from year one to year two on the tenure track: confidence and experience.

Experience first. So much of my anxiety last year came from unknowns about the students, the environment, and the expectations that my colleagues and the administration would have of me. Although some questions still linger, and probably always will, I have answers to most of those questions now.

I know that students here need some nudging -- and the occasional gentle shove -- to participate in classroom conversations, but that they will respond, eventually. I know roughly how many activities I need to plan to fill up a 50-minute class and a 75-minute one. I know how to find those tiny pockets of time, in a packed week, that I can devote to my writing.

Best of all, I know that it is humanly possible to get all of my work done, spend some time with my family, and lead a normal life during the semester.

The confidence I have in my ability to do just that makes all the difference in the world to me on a daily basis. That confidence has cured me of the constant mistake I made, and one I suspect many newcomers to the tenure track make: overpreparation.

Somewhere along the way I had picked up the conventional wisdom that, for each hour of classroom time you have, you should spend around two hours of preparation time. If you counted the time I spent reading the material I had assigned, thinking about it while I was doing other tasks, and then sitting down and typing out a full lesson plan, I am certain that last year I would have averaged four to five hours of preparation time for each hour I spent in the classroom.

That overpreparation stemmed from anxiety and uncertainty. I never knew if the strategies I had planned for generating discussions in the classroom would work, so I always planned at least one or two extra activities that we would probably not have time for. Even with that extra planning, on some days, nothing I did seemed to work, and I would find myself 60 minutes into a 75-minute period with nothing left to do. Such experiences led to more and more overpreparation.

No more, thanks to a collection of ready-made teaching techniques.

To call them tricks implies that somehow they are dishonest or cheap, and so I won't use that term. Let's say instead that I now have a bag of concrete strategies for teaching literature and writing courses. I still have to read the material, of course, but I can set down plans for the discussion of a novel in less than an hour by patching together a series of the strategies I know will work.

Begin by asking students to write for five minutes in their notebooks about the novel they have been reading; give everyone one minute to offer what I call their "opening statements" on the book; brainstorm with the students on a list of the book's most concrete visual images; connect them together into a pattern on the board; spend 10 minutes linking their ideas to the themes I have identified as important in the novel; look up at the clock and discover that you've reached the end of class.

Not that it always runs so smoothly, of course. I still have bad days, and the teaching strategies that work well in one class sometimes fall flat in another. But I have learned an important lesson about that, as well.

Ending class five minutes early a few times during the course of the semester won't cost me my tenure. I know many of my colleagues feel a sort of Puritan impulse to keep the congregants in their seats until the bitter end, and will find a way to fill up that time, but I've lost that impulse. When we are done with what I have planned for the day, class is over.

Last week I spoke to a colleague who is in her first year on the tenure track about what a difference my ready-made teaching strategies were making in my life this year, and she pounced hungrily for them: "What strategies? Can you tell me what some of them are? Could I borrow them?"

Of course I shared them with her, and I hope she learns to use them as I do, to reduce preparation time, along with her stress and anxiety. But I suspect she will do exactly as I did, and continue to overprepare for most of her first year.

I'm not sure it's possible to get through your first year any other way.