Teaching is fun! I love teaching because (at least at the University level) it involves all the things that make a job great. No, money is definitely not one of them (although I really cannot complain about my salary).
Like most teachers, I started out as a horrible teacher. I dreaded having to give lectures and standing in front of a class was really scary. And nobody had to tell me that my lectures were difficult to understand and not really interesting. You just know, in the same way that you know when you did well and got the students interested. And knowing that you have bored your audience (in other words, that YOU are boring) feels terrible.
The fact that I dreaded teaching when I first started and love it now shows that when it comes to career choices, first impressions can be very deceiving. In fact, most jobs do not start out being fun. And one reason is that in most jobs, when you start you are just not good at it. Who enjoys a game when you lose every time? The same is true for jobs.
But nonetheless, even if we get good at it, some games are just not fun. And this is also true for jobs. Getting good at what you do takes time and is a prerequisite to enjoy your job, but it is not a guarantee for loving it.
So what is it about teaching that makes this such an enjoyable thing for me? This only became clear to me when I listened to a very amazing podcast by a computer science Professor at Georgetown University, Cal Newport.
Why “Follow Your Passion” Is Bad Advice With Cal Newport (Ep. 35)
https://collegeinfogeek.com/cal-newport/
It all has to to with these four characteristics that make a job great: autonomy, impact, mastery and creativity. And it turns out that teaching is a perfect match for all of these:
1. Autonomy – I must say that the one thing that always amazes me is how much freedom we have as lecturers. Nobody really checks what we do during the class time, and unlike in school, at the University level even the parents do not seem to care, because they trust that the University lecturers know what they are doing (even though school teachers are definitely trained much better in teaching than University lecturers!). So we have all the freedom to come up with new ideas and try them out in the classroom. This is really exciting, and it has always puzzled me why a lot of lecturers do not seem to take advantage of this.
2. Impact – As University professors, we spend a large amount of our time trying to do research that makes an impact. Making an impact with your research is really difficult, though, partly because coming up with new and important things is very hard. Even if you have a good idea, what follows is a long process that involves to first get funding for the work, then actually doing the research and eventually publishing the results. In contrast, in teaching our impact is immediate. If we have an idea to change our teaching approach, we can just put it into practice. And we will know at the end of the semester if the approach was working well or not. And there are a whole lot of potential impacts that we can make, from having students learn new knowledge effectively, helping them to acquire important skills, all the way to getting them interested and excited about the subject.
3. Mastery – I believe that most people (including myself), after standing in front of a class for the first time, feel humiliated. And I would think that the natural response is to try to improve, because being a bad teacher can really affect one’s self-esteem. Luckily, teaching gives plenty of opportunity to improve. Every new lecture is a new chance. And so probably any good teacher will tell you that they started out being horrible teachers. And it took learning over many years to improve and perfectionate his/her approach to conducting classes and designing assignments and assessments. When I started out teaching, I was super scared before any lecture. Now I look forward to lecturing. It is the result of mastery, one of the key characteristics of a satisfying and fun job.
4. Creativity – As a University Professor or researcher in general, being creative is one of the key ingredients to success. Coming up with interesting and important research ideas is not only key to doing good research, it is also the prerequisite to obtaining research funding. However, obtaining research funding has become really competitive, and hence getting a research project funded requires a lot more than just having a good idea (including to convince potential funders that the idea will work and will have a big impact).
In contrast, when a lecturer has a new idea on how to conduct classes or assess the students, he or she can usually implement the idea immediately. And therefore teaching really promotes creativity.
Now, let’s use the same criteria to look at what seems to be the most popular career goal for life science students, graduate medicine. Having studied medicine in my former life, I would say that as a doctor one can certainly develop mastery. You constantly have to become better at what you do and learn new things, because there is so much to learn and there are constantly new developments in medicine.
As a doctor you can naturally also have a tremendous impact on patients. However, I personally felt that the impact is so great that the responsibility you have and the possibility to make mistakes can actually turn into stress.
With regards to autonomy, as a junior doctor, you don’t have a lot of it. You have to start work very early, and then you have a daily list of duties that you cannot really run away from. And frequently, additional duties crop up that make your day even busier. And frequent night shifts make it difficult to have an enriching personal life. Here is an article that gives you some idea of what the life of a junior doctor is like.
I must say that I found not having the freedom to decide how to plan my time very difficult.
And as a doctor, one’s creativity is also limited. You can’t really decide, hey, today I try this new medicine that I read about on this patient. Most things in medicine are done according to a standard procedure that one needs to follow. Of course, you can do clinical studies to find better cures for diseases, but then you are really a researcher, and not a normal doctor anymore.
I think the lack in autonomy and creativity and the stress associated with the high responsibility you have as a doctor are some of these reasons that made me decide that being a researcher would be a lot more fun (and less stressful, too). And along the way I discovered that being a teacher is equally fun!
After hearing Cal Newport’s podcast, I was immediately convinced that he was right. It is these four qualities, autonomy, impact, mastery and creativity, which for me make teaching great. And I would urge you to evaluate any potential job by these criteria (unless of course you just want to, or have to (!), earn money).
As Cal Newport also points out, even if a job offers all of these characteristics, it takes time to gain them. Thus, one first needs to become good at the job, before one is given autonomy and before one can make an impact. But it is good to know what we should strive for in a job. After all, autonomy, impact, mastery and creativity, are also the qualities that will help us to personally develop in our job and enable us to move on to other positions eventually.
Me, studying as a medical student.
