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How do you honestly feel about teaching?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I'm a grad student on the market, and I have a lot of teaching experience (as TA and as lecturer at my degree-granting institution as well as others). I've had success getting first-round interviews at institutions that really care about their students, and I do think I'm pretty good at teaching (though I admit I have plenty to learn). However, I'm beginning to doubt that I enjoy teaching at all, or that I want to do it for the rest of my career. (This is making interviews tough, where I have to work hard to conjure my former feelings about teaching being rewarding, etc.)

It's possible that my doubt and discouragement stem from my current teaching gig (tough to admit, but I dislike many of my students at my current institution, and I actively dread preparing for class, etc.), or from feeling demoralized by students' dependence on generative AI. (Is there just something about students "these days"?)

What I'd like to know is how others here feel/have felt about teaching. Have others gone through phases where they actively disliked teaching? Is there light on the other side? Is it worth pushing through? Or am I exhibiting symptoms that mean I should look for something else to do career-wise?

These are all good questions. Are any readers willing to weigh in?

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23 responses to “How do you honestly feel about teaching?”

  1. teach your children well

    I would be a little concerned if you are not liking teaching at this stage. The first 20 years of my career were spent mostly teaching … first in short term contract positions and then in a TT and Tenured job. 15 of these 20 years were spent teaching students with a wide range of skills and preparation. For many of these students the academic side of college was a low priority. Many of us will spend our whole careers with these students. Of course it can be rewarding, seeing students develop skills and knowledge, and go on to get good jobs, etc. But if you are not quite keen about teaching in this sort of environment (a quite typical environment in higher ed in the US), it may be soul-crushing.

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  2. Young SLAC Prof

    I am several years into a tt job at a teaching-focused institution. I earned my PhD at an elite university with excellent students. I did a good bit of adjuncting at other schools though, ones with ‘regular’ students.
    I initially got into this career for the teaching; my undergraduate teachers helped spark something in me that I wanted to help others achieve.
    That’s background, to see where I am coming from. My thoughts, initially: I wouldn’t worry too much. I generally like teaching, but it very much becomes a drag. I am desperate for the summer about a month into the spring term. At that point, I wonder what I am doing, why the kids can’t just do the damn reading, and so on. But then I get evaluations, letters from students, a note indicating that being in my class prompted someone to get a minor in philosophy, and so on. These sorts of things also help make it all worth it.
    So, in short: I think it is normal, especially at the end of one’s PhD, to want to focus on research (assuming OP’s disinterest in teaching just is a desire to focus more on research). But very few places that afford an academic life–which is genuinely awesome–pay you mostly, or even significantly, to just do research. So, I see teaching as the sometimes rewarding but always eventually obnoxious price I have to pay to have a fairly sweet lifestyle. In other words: my feelings about teaching have changed over time, mostly in a negative way, but I still see teaching as something, overall, worthwhile.

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  3. SPEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

    The “kids these days” ARE worse, largely due to internet addiction and AI. There’s no doubt. I’ve transitioned to cheat-proof assignments (all in-class, hand-written, friends of mine are also doing lots of oral exams) and EVEN THEN they prepare with ChatGPT.
    But I’ve found that all in-person assignments are still much better than spending time busting people for use of AI. It sucks the joy out of everything to spend the majority of one’s teaching time dealing with the most vicious students, who obviously cheated, but will nevertheless lie to your face, dig in their heels, wail about how unfair it is, break down sobbing, or whatever. It’s the worst. I did not deal with this garbage my first ten years of teaching. If they were caught cheating (copy&pasting from the internet, mostly), they were caught, received a penalty, and that was that.
    So: IF this is your experience, I highly recommend getting rid of take-home assignments. I also found that simply banning any internet-enabled devices in class helped with how that class went and increases student engagement and interest. Third piece of advice is to teach what you love. My intro class is a bunch of my favorite texts. I enjoy it more, I don’t hide my enthusiasm, and so my love for the material is a bit contagious, I think. I focus on the students who resonate more with the material (not necessarily the best, but the most “into it”), make a point of talking to them before or after class, remembering things about them, and so on. It makes it a much more enjoyable experience.
    I agree with a previous poster that if you are doing all of this, and still hate teaching, maybe this isn’t the career for you. It’s most of what we do, sometimes all of it.

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  4. Galen

    I have always found teaching to be one of the most meaningful jobs, when it goes well. When it doesn’t, it’s a real chore. I share the OP’s concerns about teaching. And I don’t think there’s light at the end of the tunnel, except perhaps insofar as your teaching improves. The students will likely stay the same, or get worse, for the foreseeable future. I’ve found that the key is to lower your expectations. Not every day needs to be magical. And you’re going to be forgotten by the majority of your students. The hope is that you get a minority to think about things in new ways, often in ways that affect them for a lifetime.
    More concretely, I would scale back on the use of slides. I’ve found that the preparation of slides for a captive and disinterested audience is a real burden (and time consuming at that). Make simple slides or just make handouts. It’ll free up your time and will kill the dynamic of “this is information transfer” that unfortunately exists too often in philosophy classes.

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  5. American students are something else

    I dislike teaching my students. But they are the ones that pay my bills (10k+ a month). I don’t need to grade (my TA does). But, even that, I am contemplating not teaching and having no money instead. (I want to say something more blunt about them, but I don’t want to ruin the good vibe of this blog.)

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  6. anon

    I like teaching quite a lot. Teaching great students, teaching students who have never looked at the readings, teaching students who aspire to replace all intellectual work with AI outputs – the full range.
    It’s hard to give detailed advice for your situation, since it depends on what exactly is causing your negative feelings.
    But, here’s a stab: a generalized version of the advice from LONELY HEARTS above is to try to change what you are paying the most attention to.
    With a different style of distributing your attention, you might have a better emotional response to exactly the same teaching situation.

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  7. H

    I like teaching most of the time, but I think it’s helpful to consider the component parts of teaching separately, just in the same way that “research” is not a single activity.
    Teaching involves designing courses, preparing lectures/in-class assignments, preparing out-of-class assignments, the act of teaching/lecturing itself in class, discussing material outside of class, grading, and (arguably) mentoring students. Everyone hates grading, but the rest of the components of teaching may differ for your enjoyment of it and proficiency at it.
    You may enjoy preparing lectures for one class but not for another. These are signals to pay attention to. If you’re uninterested in a topic that you’re preparing a lecture on, this is a signal that you probably shouldn’t be covering it and that something went wrong in your course design stage.
    Think carefully about the aspects of teaching that you enjoy or are good at vs. the aspects of teaching that you dread or are bad at (or maybe just decent at). If you dislike all the components of teaching, this may be a sign that you’re in the wrong profession, or it may just be a sign that your current teaching gig isn’t very rewarding.
    I recently had a period of several months when I was dreading teaching every class period, hated grading, and hated preparing for classes. On reflection, I realized that a lot of this dread was based on getting a bad teaching evaluation from a colleague and teaching an upper-level class outside of my competence that I didn’t enjoy, combined with having no time to ground myself in research work for about six weeks. Once I recognized this and started a new semester, I’ve been enjoying preparing and giving lectures a lot more.
    In short, don’t throw everything under the broad label of “teaching” when there are many discrete tasks and skills involved.

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  8. Loves Teaching, Hates ChatGPT Essays

    I had the advantage of growing up in an academic family and hearing stories about bad students from before I could read/write myself. So I went into teaching with low expectations of students. Also, I had opportunities to teach at an early stage, so it always felt like a privilege I was given rather than something that I “had to do”. I enjoy teaching nearly as much as I enjoy research, which is a huge amount.
    My advice is:
    (1) Don’t feel guilty about not feeling enthusiasm for teaching. “What we resist, persists” is a good principle. Resentment grows if you don’t let yourself have negative feelings about something.
    (2) Break down ambitions and tasks into the smallest components that you can manage. For example, rather than try to get students off generative AI dependency, try adjusting some of your assignments (if possible). If you’re teaching non-philosophy students taking a mandatory course, as I often have had to do, try focusing on getting each of them interested in SOMETHING philosophical, even if they view the overall course as a chore. The more micro you make your goals, the more often you’ll feel a sense of achievement, so if you’re not feeling good about doing something, try going more micro.

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  9. Daniel Weltman

    I think you can be successful in academia without being thrilled about teaching. However, this requires getting a fancy research job, which is very hard. And either way, I think the happiest people in academia are those who enjoy teaching. So, I would not say you should absolutely change your plans if you don’t like teaching. But, you should consider it.
    I like teaching a lot and I find it energizing. I also think there are lots of different ways one can enjoy teaching. SPEPPERS’s advice is to teach what you love. Mine is to ignore that stuff and teach what the students will love. I find it much more fulfilling to teach for the sake of the students, and to therefore measure my success based on their experience, than to teach for my sake, and to try to get fulfillment from students who meet me where I am. But that’s just me: different things will work for different people. So, try out various things. The advice from H and Loves Teaching has some good things to try out, for instance.

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  10. Just keep pretending

    I think you should keep pretending you love teaching until you get a stable job and get to decide what you want to teach. Just based on personal experience, teaching can sometimes be rewarding, but a lot depends on the students. Some of them clearly just see everything related to the classroom as a hurdle they have to go through to get the degree. Be honest with yourself. There’s not much you can do for them when they either don’t attend in person, don’t watch the recordings, or simply play online games when they do physically attend.
    Weigh the negativity of teaching against what you find rewarding. For me it is research, supervising grad students, and teaching things that just happen to align with my own research.
    What’s more, remember that even if the plan B is as rosy as some say is, it will nevertheless have some negativity you’ll have to deal with. Weigh your dislike towards teaching against the potential negativity of plan Bs too.
    I furthermore absolutely don’t believe that one’s love of teaching correlates with how well one teaches. I happen to know some people who teach into this thing called “Advance HE.” If you’re in the UK you will know how BS this thing is. But the point is that the people who teach there, as far as I can tell, both love the teaching and believe that the stuff they teach is meaningful.

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  11. Heraclitus

    My feelings about teaching have fluctuated over time. Excited about it when I started first teaching in 2006, found it to be a calling after I landed a job, life outside of academia made me dread it a few years later, found my step and creativity down the road and began enjoying it again, and now, post-pandemic and AI, all I want to do is research and write but I’m at a teaching school. If I didn’t get to research and write (have a 3-3), I’d think about something else. But, I love books too much to give up one of the few jobs where I get to be in a community of people who feel the same and where I get to spend most of my time reading, thinking, and talking about them. As for the fluctuations, I can say something similar about research and service. Being an academic in most places involves all kinds of work. Get a job (if you can), and see what being an academic is like, not just a teacher, then make a considered judgment. To my mind, you’ve put too much in, you’re pot-commited, it’s too late to fold. Two reasons to quit, you’ve given it a real shot on the market and don’t see a viable future; you’ve gotten a job and it sucks. Also, teach what you love and what the students will love as much as possible.

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  12. Anonymous AP

    Honestly, I am mixed. I used to love teaching but that was when I was at an institution where students were top notch, highly motivated, and it was before COVID. Now I am at a university where students are good, but not as good and the pandemic has made students much less capable (let’s just leave it at that). I find that my students demand more and more while being willing to do less and less and it just bleeds me dry and burns me out. At the same time, I think if I had a teaching-only position, I wouldn’t mind that. It’s the fact that I know that my performance is entirely evaluated based on my research, and yet my teaching is now taking so much more of my time and energy than before that is the problem. If universities actually cared equally about research and teaching (as mine purports to do), then I’d enjoy teaching a lot more. The way it’s set up though, it feels like every hour spent on teaching is an hour not on research which actualy matters for my career (tenure, promotion, etc.)

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  13. Learning

    Teaching is hard because learning is hard. Many students have great attention spans: listening to Joe Rogan podcasts for 4 hours straight. But somehow struggle to read. Maybe evolutionarily speaking, we’ve spent the majority of humanity sitting and talking to one another rather than sit in solitude reading difficult texts. When Socrates taught, there was no pre-reading. They just sat around and talked about justice. Socrates just made sure the conversation stayed focused and each person’s logic was consistent. That’s how we’ve learned for the majority of human history even during the caveman era. Maybe modern day teaching should be somewhat like a cult. Podcasts are popular because they resemble what we’ve always done: listening to a conversation without a lot of jargon or abstraction. I don’t have a solution. I’m just curious to know why students can handle one form of learning and not the other.

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  14. Cap

    I absolutely love teaching—even the dumdums. It’s rewarding and exhilarating and I’d happily do it forever. Even if I had a 100% research job, I like to think I would do some undergrad teaching pro bono.

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  15. Recently tenured

    I have found that I enjoy teaching more now that I have tenure and student evaluations matter much less. The things that student evaluations incentivized were not things that actually improved student learning, and that dissonance sort of squelched my enjoyment of teaching. I’m also enjoying it more as I’m getting better at it. Honing my classes over time until I’m pretty happy with them has been satisfying.
    I also tend to enjoy teaching more once I’ve had a break from it. Things like being chair could potentially build breaks from teaching into your career, and hopefully sabbaticals too.

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  16. Dirty secrets

    Recently tenured’s point about student evals incentivizing the wrong things is really important.
    I am in a non-TT long-term position where I maintain my position and keep getting renewed by staying in the good graces of my department and the university. The main way this is done is through my glowing students evals.
    This leads to making some decisions that I would not ideally make, including: not regulating device use, being a really generous grader, not testing whether students are actually reading, being extremely lenient on late work, and only calling out the most obvious chatbot usage (and giving those students free opportunities to re-do the assignment).
    All of these are decisions I have settled on because of various bad incentives created by my university. And anyone who is judged by their evals has these sorts of incentives to some extent.
    All that being said, I genuinely enjoy teaching. I am frequently reminded of how crazy it is that I get to make a living talking about philosophy with students.

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  17. Michel

    I found it very rewarding at my open-enrollment institution… until the advent of ChatGPT.
    Most of the joy and reward has been sucked out of it now, though. Not all of it, but a lot. A big part of it is that I can’t trust them any more, and that sours relationships going forward. There was a lot of cheating here before; now it’s ubiquitous, even during invigilated pen and paper exams. I feel entirely like a means to their ends, and the prospect of doing this for anothter thirty years is demoralizing.
    I also teach too much–8-10 courses a year, usually spread across three or four semesters, meaning I get no real breaks. That was less of an issue before, when the work was more enjoyable.
    But also, I should note that this was only ever a job for me. It used to be fun and rewarding, but I always kept it at arm’s length from the rest of my life. I can find my rewards elsewhere (in my family life and my research community, for example).

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  18. Department Chair

    Recently tenured: Being chair to avoid teaching is a bit like cutting off one’s hand because of a hangnail, I think.

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  19. You said it

    Department Chair,
    So true. I became an assessment coordinator to avoid being chair … lol
    When I considered applying for a job in the dean’s office I knew something was wrong with my reasoning 😉
    (I have since published two monographs)

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  20. OP

    OP here. This has all been very helpful–thank you! Mostly it’s just nice to see that I’m not alone in being (at least) ambivalent about teaching these days. Ultimately, I think I have to face the fact that I won’t find a rewarding job without any of the anxiety/dread/disappointment that I’d otherwise like to avoid. And, when I take a step back, I do have to admit that I’m pretty lucky to get to teach. (I’m not naive enough to think someone will pay me just to do the research I want to do.) So, for now, I’ll keep teaching and learning how to accept the good with the bad. Thanks to everyone for sharing such helpful perspectives!

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  21. teaching…

    These are very good questions. I’m a few years into a permanent teaching-heavy position with several years of teaching experience beforehand as well. Some of my students are downright insufferable. At my institution, there’s a (very) small minority of interested and capable of students who make teaching tolerable. If it got to the point where there weren’t students like this anymore, that would really make things difficult for me in the classroom. However, I’ve also found it helpful to switch gears in my mind, so speak, when it comes to purpose of my classes. I have students who are so bad academically, so far from anything resembling mature, responsible adulthood, that I will sometimes start to veer more towards instilling in them the importance of just showing up, being attentive, communicating clearly and effectively, etc. I of course still hold them accountable for understanding course content; I’m describing more of a shift in my own mind regarding the way I conceive of what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, etc. It becomes less about conveying philosophical material and more about inculcating them into a practice which they do not yet partake in; the practice of responsible adulthood. I would also say that, no matter how frustrating teaching gets, I’m never too far away from a significant break where I get to read and write about philosophy. So, yeah, all things considered I’d say it’s worth it. But OMG these students…

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  22. K

    I dislike teaching, except at PhD level, where it’s really a chat about research; and I have the equivalent of a 1:1 load. I’m tenured, but before tenure I was in research-only, teaching-optional jobs.
    If you can, find out what your style is or get a research-oriented job.

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  23. PrinceGoGo

    As Wittgenstein said “Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake”.
    In moderation, on topics I really like, teaching is great. Even to large groups at lower levels.
    However, I hate grading and I really hate receiving student emails.

    Reply

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