Why First Year Students Don’t Get Us
First year university students find university professors weird. Personally, as a first year university student I found them weird and also charming. I liked them right off the bat. They made me feel normal. Wow, I’m home. These are my people. That was once I got over the gender issue, but that’s another story. Okay in brief: For years I had crushes on my professors, very unlikely crushes, I didn’t date men then, and especially not old, white haired, rumpley tweed suited men. But crushes I had, long fantasies of staying up all night talking about philosophy with them. I dreamed of being a philosopher’s girlfriend. Once I realized I could be a philosopher myself–I could be more than a philosopher’s girfriend–the crushes ended. Wait, I could be a philosopher and have a girlfriend! But the point is I liked academics and felt at home with them from the start. But enough about me, the wanna be academic/now academic in her own right, and back to them, the 1st year students who don’t generally go on to grad school. They think we’re odd. We’re generally shy and socially awkward. We love our research. We chose these careers because we love books and ideas and thrive on our own, thinking, reading, and writing. And then having spent years nose down writing a thesis, we get university jobs (if we’re lucky). And what do they do? Throw us in front of large groups of young people and expect us to perform. Yikes! Worse yet the 1st year students expect us to be like their wild and wacky outgoing high school teachers who chose their jobs because they liked the idea of being in front of the classroom all day (and all that good stuff about shaping young minds). Class clowns become teachers; class nerds become professors. It explains a lot. So the 1st year transition team talks to them about us–that’s called in biz speak "managing expectations"–and then another group, the teaching support centre, talks to us about them. They remind us that some of our students were now born in the 90s! That they have never known life before the internet. That they often can’t handwrite but they text really fast. And the helpful folks at the teaching support centre try to get us to find ways being comfortable in front of the class, to be the best darn introverts we can be.
