Q: I've had good preceptors, and then I've had some who don't really seem to know what they're doing. Do graduate students get training in how to teach?
A: Of course we get training! An elite, undergraduate-focused institution like Princeton wouldn't throw us grad students to the wolves without any training. Before we're allowed to instruct our nation's future leaders, Princeton puts us through a rigorous course of pedagogical instruction lasting two whole days. Well, really a day and a half, since the second-day session on "How to Grade Student Writing" is optional. I spent more time in driver's ed class in high school. Of course, you can kill someone with a car, while it turns out that it's quite hard to bore someone to death in precept.
This is not to demean the nice folks at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning who would probably like to run us through a much longer training course. Beyond the mandatory two-day crash course, they offer an extensive series of optional workshops ranging from "Grading as a Teaching Tool" to "Teaching with Film." The key word here is "optional": No one will force a lousy preceptor to attend these workshops, so those who don't realize they are bad teachers - or, even worse, don't care - won't go. Beyond the warm fuzzy feeling we get from knowing we're not screwing up malleable young minds, there's very limited professional reward to attending, though there is often free lunch.
Nor do I mean to demean the many good preceptors out there. Even without specific pedagogical instruction, grad students have a few things going for them when it comes to teaching. We know the material cold. We all learned something as undergrads, so we likely have experienced good teaching first-hand. And most of us have an obsessive love for our chosen field, a love that gives us a strong desire to effectively communicate the subject to others.
To the extent good precepting happens here, it's a byproduct of having some of the best graduate students in the nation, and not a byproduct of having the graduate students who are the best-prepared to teach.
But hey, none of you are going to do the reading for precept anyway, so does it really matter if we know what we're doing?
"Ask a Grad Student" is written by a Ph.D. student. His name is withheld because, well, it should be pretty obvious from this week's column.
Have a question about grad student life? E-mail street@dailyprincetonian.com.
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