I've come to the end of my second academic year of tutoring philosophy at the University of Leeds. Incredibly, I've now led almost 150 tutorials and marked well over 500 essays. Those are dizzying statistics. The 08/09 year was larger in quantity and breadth than last year -- I taught more groups and a wider range of courses. As I've previously mentioned, I was lucky enough to tutor on a third-year philosophy of literature course in the autumn term, and in the spring I taught for the first-year philosophy of religion course. In addition to this, I taught on the first-year core course again -- a series of four modules comprising Intro to Philosophy, Ethics, Descartes' Meditations, and Philosophy of Mind.
Teaching is a challenge, but an enjoyable challenge. It's a challenge because (a) one is obliged to put up with varying degrees of apathy on the part of the students and (b) the success (or otherwise) of a tutorial is often out of the tutor's hands. It's a sad fact that if a group of ten students turns up having not prepared the material and with no interest in the topic, there's little that the tutor can do to make that session a success. (In fact, the best course of action in that case can be simply to make them all read the relevant material in class, which is far from being the object of tutorials.) But when a group is well-prepared and enthusiastic about the topic, the resulting tutorials are a dream. Sessions like those are genuinely fun.
It's very difficult to know how best to encourage the independent thinking that makes the tutorial system successful. Tutorials really only work when -- as above -- students have prepared and are willing to get stuck into discussing the topic. But it's very hard to know how best to encourage (or force) students to do those things when they don't want to, especially in our framework which doesn't involve the students getting any academic credit for participation in tutorials.
I think I'm often too willing to settle for mediocre outcomes. The goal of tutorials isn't to teach students the basics -- that's for the lectures and reading -- but rather to help them develop skills of critical thinking, etc by engaging critically with the reading. But too often under-preparation means that the best outcome a tutorial can have is to make sure students go away understanding the basics.
Nevertheless, teaching is an enjoyable and valuable experience. I love doing philosophy, it's a good feeling to be able to help other people become interested in philosophical issues. Also, the art of communicating complex ideas to beginners is a great aid to thinking, talking and writing about philosophy generally.
This related article has some interesting points -- and it supports what I've said before about A-Levels being very poor preparation for degrees that require critical thinking skills.
