“I will miss the creativity of teaching.” In this ScienceWorkingLife essay, a recently retired professor emeritus reflects on how she challenged students to think beyond facts—and how she learned to teach like a scientist. TeacherAppreciationWeek
After a fulfilling career as a college biology professor, I'm retiring."What will you miss most?" a colleague asked. My answer was something that, 30 years ago, I would never have expected myself to say:"I will miss the creativity of teaching." When I was a new faculty member, I considered teaching a necessary evil that took me away from the lab bench. I wanted to focus on research, guiding graduate students in what I hoped would be groundbreaking studies on nerve growth.
It was hard to drop a research program that—up to that point—had defined my career and fueled my passions. To stay close to the research world, I began to assign journal articles in my upper-level undergraduate course, anticipating lively discussions about the latest discoveries. This failed miserably. My students would skim the papers, but they'd rarely dive into them fully. Many wouldn't even look at the figures, which I had expected them to focus on.
This epiphany changed the way I used the primary literature in my teaching; I started to go for depth over breadth. I spent multiple class sessions deconstructing a single paper with my students, analyzing each figure and table. I then asked,"If you had co-authored the paper we just studied, what would you do next?"Some balked."I'm not creative," they'd say.
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