In 2008, I was completing my undergrad degree in Biology. One of my classes was Molecular Biology, known as one of the hardest and most feared class of the curriculum. It was notorious for the countless hours of studying that it needed to memorize names and names of proteins, functions and structures.
To add to the challenge, the professor was new to the department, it was his first full teaching experiment at the University, and he had been assigned to the class two weeks before the beginning of the semester. Consequently, his notes were a mess. He could never answer a question in class directly, made countless mistakes in his slides, and after each class we left with a sensation of being completely lost.
At the mid-term exam, I had studied more than I had ever studied. I had even tried the notorious sleepless nights of studying (which I would never try again). I felt prepared and confident, a feeling that was soon to disappear. The exam had 15 long excruciating questions that needed to be answered both in words and with a scheme with labels. In 3 hours, I had time to answer 5 questions. After looking through the exam (and understanding that I could never finish it), I had settle for less good answers. Some of the students had left the exam right after seeing the questions, some quit after, and some left crying (sleepless nights effect). After this exam, 20 of 100 students were still subscribed.
The teacher ended up scaling everybody up, but I felt disgusted by the pedagogy of the so-called institution that should be the gem of my education. I never attended another class, but went straight to the library to study the reference book. It demotivated me in general for the last year of my undergraduate studies. Whenever I started a new class, I was always thinking: “Another teacher that doesn’t care/know how to teach.”. I still feel sad when I see some non-pedagogic teachers in our institutions, where students should benefit of an interested, structured, and effective teaching.
What could have been done differently?
Although it was an exceptional situation, my first thought is that there should be a system backing a teacher’s first year in a new subject. For example, there should be a mandatory feedback on the exams to make sure that the exam is feasible, so that your students don’t get hit by a truck halfway in the semester. I think in general there is a tendency in Universities to hire great researcher but to forget about the pedagogical aspect of their job. Which makes me sad. But now it motivates me to always make an effort when I teach.