Reflecting on My First Two Years as a Lecturer

I just wrapped up the end of an another academic year, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on it. While I still love my job, I think this has been one of my rougher years for teaching. What Changed? As you can probably tell from my long history of reflecting on teaching, it's been a while since I've talked about teaching. Part of the reason I haven't written about teaching in so long is that the reflections took a long time to write each semester. In addition, I always end up quite burnt out at the end of each semester, so I have almost no desire to even think about teaching, let alone write about it. Not to mention that I also got really busy with having a kiddo and finishing up my doctoral program. So, why reflect now? Well as you might know, I applied to become a lecturer about two years ago. By fall of 2023, I was officially hired. Since then, I haven't really had time to talk about what's changed, so I figured now would be as good a time as any to talk about it. The life of a lecturer and the life of a graduate teaching associate are more or less the same. Both roles are teaching focused. The primary difference being teaching load, pay, and benefits. In terms of load, I now teach three classes a semester. Over the last two years, I've been teaching the same exact class three times a day for four days a week. Needless to say, it's a bit of a slog. In addition, I am now in almost full control of my courses. We're still sharing schedules and assessments across the sections of the course, but I decide on what exams look like and how I run my class (though, that last part isn't really different from being a graduate student). Beyond that, my life is pretty similar. I don't have service requirements like practice and tenured faculty, and I don't conduct research. My day-to-day is all about teaching. New Reflection Format In that past, I used to focus on "the good, the bad, and the ugly." Instead, I want to simplify things by reflecting on the challenges and the opportunities of teaching over the last two years. Challenges At the moment, it's late April 2025, and I am wrapping up grades for the semester. Right now, I am feeling really burnt out with teaching and looking forward to a summer of rest. To give you a feel for why I'm so burnt out, I want to briefly talk about some of the challenges I've faced this year. Generative AI First, I want to talk about generative AI. It's one of those things that makes it feel really bad to be an educator right now. Even the most well-meaning students are using it, and I fear students broadly are not learning at all. Just to put this into perspective, one of my graders reached out to me today with the following screenshot: In his words, "??? am i being trolled". Or, how about another student who submitted a test case so absurd that I don't even know where to start: For context, the student was asked to implement a map data structure on top of a hash table. They were asked to write tests to verify five methods that they wrote (i.e., add, remove, removeAny, contains, and size). Nowhere in the assignment did we ask them to test hash collision behavior, nor did we ever suggest writing a custom inner class for testing purposes. In fact, even the bottom half of the test doesn't even follow our testing strategy, and they never provided a reference data type to check against. While reviewing that code, I had an epiphany. Even giving feedback to students is becoming a pointless endeavor. I have a suspicion that this particular team was asking ChatGPT to rewrite their code using my feedback. I already know they feed the assignment descriptions into these tools to get a summary, so why not feed them feedback? It's all very dystopian. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I also see ChatGPT make its appearance on exams. In fact, several students clearly just use ChatGPT to answer all of the questions. Here's an example of a "compiler" written by ChatGPT: You might be looking at this and wondering, "how does he know it was written in ChatGPT?" Easy really! The Tokenizer, Parser, and CodeGenerator components don't even exist, the return type of the generate method is a Queue, not a List, and none of these methods throw a SyntaxException. It's all completely made up! Naturally, looking at something like the previous samples as an educator is really frustrating. Students across the board have completely outsourced their own thoughts and ideas to a chat bot, which they affectionately call "chat." Personally, I think the solution here is to provide students with more opportunities to develop software that they're actually interested in and care about. It's why I give students an optional "portfolio project." And while I think that largely works, it's incredibly taxing for the education staff. There is just so much more to assess, and there is just so much more time to be invested in supporting the students. I think where I've become the most frustrated is exams. I hate exams, and in an effort to convey that to students, I provide a ton of opportunities for them to do well on the exams. For example, the exam is online. They can take it whenever and wherever they want over a 3-day window. They can use any resources they want. They just have to complete the exams alone (which means no AI as well). Given how much grace and respect I give students, I always expect the same in return. I could very easily do what every other instructor does, which is give a paper exam and not really tell them what to expect. I could easily not allow them to resubmit work, and I could easily let them not debate their grades. All of these things would make my life infinitely easier. So, imagine how frustrated I am after crafting an environment that is incredibly student friendly only to be taken advantage of. This semester was among the worst it's ever been for me. Students don't come to class. Students blow past my deadlines and expect me to accommodate them. Students use AI and don't even try to think for themselves. It makes me wonder what I'm doing this for. Attendance I tend to hold the belief that if you cultivate the right environment, you don't have to worry about attendance. Students will show up because they see value in your course, either through your teaching or the classroom community. While I still hold that belief, the past two semesters really pushed me to my limit. At the start of last fall, I dropped my 4% participation requirement. It was one of those things that I found really annoying to assess at the end of a semester because I had to arbitrarily assign grades to everyone. Since dropping the 4%, I can't get anyone to come to class. Keep in mind that participation isn't an attendance grade (though, attendance is one way to get it). To put this in perspective, last semester I had a section where literally 4 people out of 40 were showing up to the labs. This semester, that number was down to 3 in one of the sections. While I chalked this up to being in a classroom that was much too big for the class size (~80 seats), part of me wonders if it's because I dropped the participation grade. Are students really so grade obsessed that they won't do something unless it's tied to a grade? I sure hope not. Of course, I think grades really are the only thing that matters to a lot of students. This semester, I told students that they could coast after their second midterm because the remaining material wouldn't be tested. I also told them that we could spend that time relating the concepts to their real life and goals and that I would let students derail the class to follow their interests. In my mind, this was a great opportunity to relieve stress for students at a challenging time in the the semester while also keeping them engaged. Instead, attendance dropped. When I saw a couple of students during my "career day" (as the name suggests, a day where I relate the concepts from class to their futures), they told me they had been skipping class because I said the material wasn't tested. While I appreciated their candidness, I could never imagine just telling an educator that. I don't mean to sound elitist or holier-than-thou, but I would have killed for an educator to talk about literally anything that wasn't directly out of a textbook or off of a slide. Yet, when I offer that space in my class, students check out. Obviously, some students really enjoyed it, but I find it silly how much weight we place on curriculum and how little weight we place on curiosity. We seriously made a huge mistake with how much we prioritize grades in education. At any rate, part of the way I've been rationalizing the lack of attendance is the COVID pandemic. I want to believe that there is some cohort of students who are socially stunted from the effect COVID had on middle and high school education in 2020/2021. I want to believe that students are just used to not having to participate in class (and society broadly) because of COVID. Part of me also believes that maybe students are disengaged because the world is crumbling. For me, my job is an escape. Perhaps for students, school is a reminder of their possibly hopeless futures. I know that in my field (tech) students are deeply worried by how many peers they have to compete against for jobs. I know each of them is sick of grinding LeetCode and completing applications that go into an AI void. Perhaps it all seems very hopeless to them, so class is sort of meaningless. At least, putting it in those terms helps me feel like 1) I'm not bad at my job and 2) things will hopefully get better. Deadline Heroes A tale as old as time is procrastination of college students. Again, I often chalk this up to an underdeveloped frontal lobe, but it's still incredibly frustrating to deal with as an educator. One way this shows up is in exams. While I give students 72 hours to take them, the vast major of students will not complete the exam until there are less the 6 hours left. I mean this literally. I always check throughout the last day to make sure everyone has taken it, and I often have to repeatedly remind folks to take it. While I don't really care when students take the exam (as long as they do), I regularly receive requests for extensions with less than reasonable justifications. For instance, here's one I received with 2 hours to go on the final last night: Hey so I got a little carried away with finals prep and stuff and kept pushing off taking the final. Could I take it like a little past midnight tonight? Or how about six days after all assignments were due, when I received the following email: I had spoken with a friend who sad that the last day to complete the homework and projects were April 18th but I had assumed it was April 29th as it was the last day of school. I was planning on completing everything by the end of today for credit. Would I still be able to receive credit for all the assignments as I only have some assignments left as it would be pivotal for my grade if they were given credit for? Sorry for the inconvenience. Because this comes up so often, I remind students repeatedly about the last day to turn in work. In fact, I counted mentioning the hard deadline for submissions five different times going back to spring break. It's amazing that anyone could have missed that, let alone all assignments closing automatically on the last day. Beyond that, I also get a little bummed out when it comes to the portfolio project. It was an idea that I came up with originally to have a project that students could create themselves following our discipline. In a way, it's my "baby" as it's the one assignment I care about deeply. Because I want the students to do good work, I spread the assignment out over like 10 weeks. Of course, because it's only a midterm replacement, about half of the students never opt in. As you can imagine, once students start failing their midterms, they immediately race to me to see if they can opt in—even though the deadline has passed. This happens after both midterms and leading up to the final. Students will go through all six parts in a weekend and create some complete garbage, hoping that it will be enough to improve their grade. It's one of those things that's frustrating for me because those students only value the grade. They don't care about their work. The Easy Class At some point in the last year, I have come to be known as "the easy professor." This is an incredibly frustrating reputation to have because it means both students and colleagues look down on me. It implies that my teaching is not rigorous enough to be taken seriously, as seen by many of the issues described above like students not attending class, not completing assignments honestly (such as using ChatGPT), and not respecting deadlines. Often what makes other classes "hard" is objectively bad teaching practices. We're talking about courses that exclusively employ lectures as the mode of content delivery, as opposed to any form of active learning. We're talking about courses that were not created using any pedagogically sound practices like backwards design and/or universal design. We're talking about courses that employ high stakes testing with no consideration for a set of learning objectives. We're talking about assignments which are not assessed using a rubric—let alone one grounded in learning objectives. So when students come to my class, they find the environment "easy," despite the content being virtually identical. They end up getting good grades because they actually learned the material and are assessed fairly. They go on to tell their friends to take my class because it's "easy," and I pay for it by students not taking the course seriously. It's frustrating. So now, I'm wondering if I should make my class more difficult. Not in the ways that the other instructors might (e.g., by removing rubrics or returning to lectures), but instead by tackling the concepts with more depth, giving more challenging assignments, and overall having higher expectations of the students. Opportunities While teaching has been quite frustrating over the last year, I will say there is still a lot to love about the work. Lifelong Connections One of the parts of my job I really enjoy is getting to know students personally. It all starts with me learning their names, and it often snowballs over the course of a semester into really getting to know a handful of them well. In fact, my office hours are a place where I'm regularly visited by previous students who just want to know how I'm doing. They don't necessarily come because they need something from me. They come because they value the relationship. To me, that's really awesome! Over the past year, I've had probably over a dozen students visit me just to catch up. I've talked to students about their upcoming internships, their research projects, and their personal lives (mostly gaming, hockey, and anime). It's a lot of fun, and it makes the work feel worth it. Passion on Display Another part of the job I love is being able to help students build something they're passionate about from scratch. Over the past year, I've had a lot of students come spend time with me in office hours just to work through their portfolio projects. It's what I imagine helping students with writing essays feels like. They're not there to have you write it for them. They're there to get help with getting their ideas on paper (or in code). Over the past year, I got to help with a lot of really cool projects from TODO lists to ticket tracking services to sports team lineups. In fact, one student built out a book recommendation system, and all they really needed from me was to help them with the client interface. Being able to see students actually passionate about learning is just about the only thing I need to make the job feel worth it. Having some students who want to connect with me over sports or gaming is a nice plus though! Community Building One of my key values is community building, and I try to incorporate it in every facet of my teaching. It starts with learning student names, but there are so many ways I prioritize community building in education. For instance, I run my classroom as a discussion rather than a lecture. All of the topics are discussed through think-pair-share and peer instruction activities, which forces the students to talk out their thoughts with each other. One of the ways I see this pay off is when I attend department events like the recent Destress with Donuts event. I am not kidding when I say that probably a quarter of the students who attended were current and previous students of mine. To me, that signals that community building in the classroom works. My only hope is that students go on to their future classes and try to make connections with their peers. I like to imagine that I'm slowly changing the culture of computer science at my university and that it will eventually be a place that students want to be—rather than a place students want to survive. Future Plans I hope for anyone reading this that it doesn't come off like I hate teaching. I think every educator goes through a moment in their career where they realize that everything about the education system is built against them. Whether it's the low pay, the grueling hours, or the grading culture, it's really hard not to be disillusioned as an educator. In fact, it made my wife abandon her dream of being a classroom teacher after a few years in the field. As a lecturer, my job is a lot cushier. I don't have a ton to complain about. But, I do see some worrying trends for the future of education, so it's hard for me not to vent that frustration a bit. With that said, I officially published all my course grades for the semester. Barring any annoying messages about grade changes (and I've gotten several begging for minor grade changes), I'm able to close another chapter. Soon, I will be running a study abroad course in Japan, and I'll be home for the summer just as quickly. Over the summer, there are a few essential questions I need to answer for myself about my future relationship with teaching: Do I reinstate participation?' Attendance is comically low, and this is particularly hard for me given that I run a discussion-based classroom. We can't really have discussions if people don't show up. While the course is designed to be easily transitioned to asynchronous if needed, it seems most students would prefer that over coming to class. While I don't necessarily blame them, it does sort of sap the joy out of the work. Who wants to come in and try to have interesting conversations with no one? How do I handle regrades, extensions, late penalties, and due dates? The course policy (not mine) states that students can submit assignments up to 48 hours late. They lose 20% in the first 24 hours and another 20% in the second 24 hours. I never cared for this but the lack of structure means students don't feel inclined to turn anything in until the literal last day and sometimes later, leaving us no time to grade everything. Because I do regrades, the concept of a late penalty is goofy. What if a student does perfectly but just a day late? Can they resubmit for full credit? If I eliminate the late penalty by enforcing hard deadlines, then I will be handling a lot of extensions. Students will also have to request to resubmit, which seems like a total nightmare. Though, this is how I used to do it, and maybe forcing students to self-advocate isn't the worst idea in the world. What do I do about the portfolio project? Should it be its own graded assignment? Part of me is really tempted to force all the students to do the portfolio project. It would alleviate a lot of the frustration of students begging to complete it for their grade. Instead, they would have to complete it, and it would offset how high stakes the exams are now. However, it makes a lot more grading for me. Right now, there are six parts to the assignment, so multiply that by ~120 to get an idea of how many projects would need to be graded. Yikes! Should I make my class more challenging? One of the risks I see with doing this is that I'll get pushback from the students. I can already hear students saying things like, "but the other classes aren't doing that!" Part of me thinks I should just tell my graders to grade harder because we do let a lot go. If they get a chance to resubmit, what's the matter with grading tough? What do I do about generative AI on exams? It was not that long ago that I could just tell students not to do their exams with each other, and they would listen. They knew that I could tell they worked together because I grade the exams in the order they're submitted. If two group mates submit within minutes of each other, it's usually pretty obvious that they worked together. It's often even more obvious if they get the same score and/or submit the same code (especially if it has weird errors). All it really takes is for me to say something like "this looks familiar," and that pair never cheats again. Now, it's tricky because students don't even have to go through the effort of cheating in any meaningful way. They can just plug an entire problem in ChatGPT and get an answer. While I'm generally of the opinion that exams are a bad form of assessment and that using your resources to "stick it to the man" is great, there is something so dystopic about outsourcing your thinking to a bot. In fact, it makes cheating feel like the moral choice because you have to at least work for it and take a risk. Unfortunately, ChatGPT is just really good at answering the types of questions we ask on exams (except for the compiler example above, apparently). As a result, there are a couple of things I want to do to overhaul my exams for next year. First, I want to create question banks that target specific learning objectives. That way, no two students have the same exact exam. Second, I want to embed prompts for ChatGPT into the questions. That way, when students copy the question into ChatGPT, the solution they submit has some peculiarity that could only have occurred through AI assistance. Obviously, this doesn't work if they use some sort of OCR-based assistant, but I think it should catch most lazy usages of ChatGPT. Should I enforce templates? One of the things I've done over the years to smooth over assignments for students is give them homework templates. Historically, they would have been required to handwrite the homework and turn it in on paper. Since COVID, we've shifted to homework PDFs, and I've gone a step further and asked students to use markdown templates. In general, students love the templates, but I always end up with like 15% of students refusing to use them. Normally, I wouldn't care, but from a grading standpoint, it slows us down dramatically. When I see a handwritten assignment, I can never tell if they completed everything without opening the assignment myself to compare. When students use the templates, the problem and their solution is embedded directly. Part of me wants to adjust the rubric to not just require completion but also professionalism (i.e., the students should use the templates and use them correctly). That will definitely reduce a bit of the burnout on our end. With that said, I really only need to grow a spine and start drawing boundaries for myself with students. It's so hard to say no to them because they're all so good at making it seem like their lives are over if they don't get the grades they want. Perhaps someday college will be about learning and not grades. Only then will education be truly enjoyable. Until then, I suppose I have to be a bit more strict than I'd like to be. As always, thanks for taking the time to read what I have to write! If you liked this, there's plenty more like it below: Reflecting on My First Semester of Teaching: Autumn 2018 Reflecting on My 8th Semester of Teaching: Autumn 2022 Lessons Learned From Two Years of College Teaching If you want to support the site a bit more, feel free to check out my list of ways to grow the site. Otherwise, take care! I increasingly find myself using this little space at the bottom of articles to share related info after I've finished writing. Today is no different! This morning, I was going through my materials to help me prepare for my Japan trip, and I found a really interesting document from the Office of International Affairs about student trends. It's making me feel a lot better about my COVID assessment, and I want to just share it here: You are likely observing in your classes: students need more support. Given the complexities of life during and post-pandemic, students missed some key in-person milestones and opportunities to socialize face-to-face. Our team has noticed that, overall, students are experiencing more challenges with understanding and completing paperwork and requirements. Overseas, resident directors have observed that students behave “younger” than what they have experienced in the past. They also provided a set of tips that I'll have to incorporate in my work: Provide crystal-clear expectations (and repeat them often), frequent reminder about deadlines via multiple modes (email, verbal, notifications, etc.), and early, frequent feedback. Get to know them: ask them to complete a bio that provides insight into their family life, goals, interests, challenges, extracurricular activities, etc. Help the class/group get to know each other and learn to communicate with each other through team building and communication exercises. Note: Global education can help facilitate these activities. Use social emotional learning (SEL) strategies, like checking-in. It feels good to know that teaching isn't just getting hard for or because of me. There are certainly societal issues that are making the work of education harder every day. I found similar styles of posts on the r/Professors subreddit, which gave me hope that I'm not going crazy: I don't know about you all, but I feel like I'm limping towards the end of this semester. I cannot wait for it to end. However, I am not looking forward to reading those SOTs, because something feels off. Hard to put my finger on it, but it's there. I don't feel happy about any of my classes, but I'm mostly dissatisfied with my two online courses. In light of AI, Ive made some adjustments, including the requirement that they provide citations in all their quiz answers. This has had mixed results, but it's something. I've had two mini rebellions, from students getting together on group me and appointing one student to come out and say "Me and the rest of the class feel that it's unfair to dock us points for simply forgetting the citations." Even though I constantly remind them of this requirement. These are mostly minor quibbles, but I'm perhaps irrationally being pissed off at them. This is 6th year teaching, and maybe I'm just feeling a little burnt out. Whatever it is, I need to put this semester to rest and start anew. Come on finals. u/Ok_Witness6780 Then there was this one that hit home personally for me. After all, I did kind of lose it in one of my last classes as I shouted "holy shit" when a student finally answered a questions on the most basic material in the course: It’s a weird semester. This is year 35 for me. I did a “stop/start/continue” check half way through and my students thought everything was fine? And today was my last class—lots of folks coming up to shake my hand and thank me for the class. This class has nice human beings, mostly, who have been driving me insane all semester due to a general failure to participate in…anything for more than a minute or two before falling silent. So it’s a disconnect. I found the class experience disappointing and frustrating and it seems like they didn’t. 🤷♀️ u/Agitated-Mulberry769 I'd encourage you to browse the thread because this past semester certainly felt "off."