Becoming a Teacher
Steven B. Zwickel
October, 2021
At the end of 2019, I retired from teaching at the University of Wisconsin after 28 years. It wasn't my first teaching job. Before that I had been an Adjunct Professor at the Madison campuses of Upper Iowa University, Concordia University , and Cardinal Stritch University. I taught adult ed courses for Edgewood College, the State of Wisconsin, UW Minicourses, and many other places. By the time I began teaching at U.W–Madison, I already had a lot of experience. I just didn’t plan on becoming a teacher.
When I was 12, I swore I would never become a teacher. Both my parents were schoolteachers and I loathed their endless writing and grading of quizzes and cranking out lesson plans; the stacks of papers waiting to be graded that seemed to have a permanent home on our dining room table, and the dark winter nights when my parents came home exhausted from having to attend in-service training sessions after a whole day of teaching.
I promised myself that my dining room table would remain bare and beautiful when I grew up. I broke my promise and for many years my table groaned from the weight of papers needing grading, textbooks, and rubrics for all my courses.
In 1992 I had the misfortune of being laid off during an economic recession. My unemployment benefits were extended, but I really needed to find a job as quickly as I could. That’s why, when the UW advertised for someone to teach a technical presentations course, I jumped at the chance. While it was a new topic for me, my natural chutzpah kicked in and I blew them away in the interview. A few months into the semester, the Program Director needed someone to take over the technical writing course. One thing led to another and within a year I was teaching undergraduates full time. And that is how I became an educator.
I loved teaching and I was very good at it. I had good rapport with my students, even though I was teaching required courses that they didn’t like having to take and didn’t value very much. I taught communication courses in the College of Engineering, where math and science acumen is acclaimed and writing and speaking skills are not always accorded equal respect. All through their education, students who went into engineering got a lot of positive reinforcement for their math and science skills; no one ever told them they were good at writing or speaking.
Grading was tough—grade inflation made it hard to give them the Cs that many of them deserved. Motivating them to work at their communication skills was also difficult until I found the key. If I could impress them with my expertise and the breadth of my knowledge (depth was not an issue, since I have no background in engineering and did very poorly in math after high school), then I could get them to a point where they wanted to please me, to show me how smart they were and how well they could learn the skills of good writing and speaking. Not every student was won over, but it happened often enough that I felt justified in giving them good grades for their work.
I enjoyed my job, but I couldn’t understand why someone who was so set against having a teaching career, would become a teacher. Then I had a conversation that gave me a new perspective.
One of my students invited me to be her “honored guest” at a student-faculty dinner. We were seated with another professor and student and started making small talk. The other professor told me he taught an introductory course in genetics and one of the students in that class had invited him to the dinner. We talked about teaching undergraduates and how hard it was, sometimes, to reach them.
I asked him how he’d gotten into teaching and learned that he’d followed the usual path, from Teaching Assistant while working on his Ph D to taking on other assignments once he was hired as a professor.
I told him my story and then I asked him, “Is there some kind of “teaching gene” that brought me into this career?”
He laughed. “No, there is no such thing as a teaching gene. However, there has been some research into what might be an inherited tendency to enjoy watching other people learn. You may have inherited that from your parents.”
That was great for me to hear. I loved it when my students did well. I used to do a little celebratory dance when I gave an A for great work. And I know I got a terrific thrill from that “aha” moment when one of my students “got it”—understood that the lesson wasn’t just about the moment, but had broader applications to the wider world as well. For me, teaching was not just about helping my students acquire academic skills; it was preparing them for lifelong involvement in learning and contributing to the community. I have no doubts about the value of what I did; my students who went on to work in business and industry frequently told me that they apply the lessons learned in my classes just about every day.
And I learned a heck of a lot from them, too.
