Preparation is paramount. However, with this being said, having a lesson plan does not equate to having a script. Just as individual students have personalities, classes each class takes on its own personality. Some are outgoing, but some are afraid to be wrong. Some will laugh at your jokes, others will sit in silence, and some will laugh at you. And whatever the personality of any given class, it’s prone to change on any given day. An unchangeable routine cannot cater to the variety of potential classroom environments one may encounter.

Luckily for us, the teachers, this makes our jobs easier. Formalized lesson plans can be tossed out the window because we can’t expect a “one size fits all” solution. Instead of spending laborious hours drawing up meticulous examples and scribing complicated derivations we can spend time at the bar, or whatever other teachers do. However, this freedom and leisure come with a price: you must be able to teach the entire course, not just the lecture of the week, from the top of your head. You must be able to explain what has past, what you are teaching, and how it relates to what is coming, as well as drawing relevant example questions, without pre-plotting a course of action. Your personal expertise and knowledge in the area is the crutch upon which you fall back, rather than a set of notes. The preparation, which is so paramount, is your own mastery of the subject, rather than some one-day lesson.

This is, after all, why we are the teacher and they are the student. We have, or should have, the knowledge; they need the knowledge. The teacher-student relationship can take many forms, but at the core this is what it has to be. They will look to you to answer their questions, and will trust your answers so long as you don’t lead them astray.

This is not to say, of course, that one should have no general plan as to where the discussion should go. The teacher is the guiding hand, leading to conclusions and maneuvering the class through material. However, in the best of all possible worlds you point the ship in the right direction, while they provide the power to move it through the hour.

To effectively operate under this philosophy, there needs to be an active dialog within the class. My view of nuts-and-bolts classroom mechanics stems from the idea that an effective teacher will never ask a question to which the student knows the answer. Whereas a standard question-answer session can prove existing knowledge, it has limited pedagogical value. It may aid the slower students but only at the expense of those performing at a higher level who need a challenge. It is important, in my view, to ask questions to which the students do not know the answer, but, through application of what they do know, they can reason their way to it. This kind of questioning teaches new concepts while reaffirming the old. Then, the solutions to these questions must be reasoned through methodically, stepwise, giving the chance for students to show what they know as they apply it to a more complicated system.

I teach organic chemistry here at Penn. My students tend to be highly motivated, but at the same time beset with pre-med worry. These questions and answer sessions are beneficial in that students gain confidence in knowing the elementary pieces of complicated problems. They then can see the utility in what they know, as large organic syntheses are reasoned from the elementary steps they’re taught. I was once swayed from the pre-med track by the elegance and power of modern chemical thought and methods, and it is my hope that in my teaching I find that chemist hiding in the pre-med body, and let him/her come to the same decision.