Every teacher should occasionally take a class, not only for professional development but to be reminded how hard it is to be a student. (This advice goes double for professors, by the way.)

I’ve been teaching at Butler University for eleven years and taking classes for the last eight years. Here are three lessons I’ve learned about teaching from my recent experiences as a student:

Don’t mistake load for rigor.

Inject a professor with truth serum and ask them: “What are you afraid of?” One of their first answers is likely to be: “I’m worried my colleagues or students will think my class is easy and that I’m soft.”

Rigor! Toughness! Somehow these are the coins of the realm, especially in higher ed. The easiest way to achieve rigor is to assign a ton of work—but I would argue that this is also the dumbest and least effective way.

Piling on work does not help students explore the material more fully. A bigger workload does not deepen learning (if anything, it leads to more skimming, more exhausted hurrying, which results in less learning). As with everything else in life, quality > quantity.

Walk the walk.

If you ask students to read and do creative work/scholarship in your field, you’d better be doing that as well. Furthermore, you’d better find ways to show them you’re doing it. If you do show them, the message becomes:

• We’re all in this together.
• I’m not asking you to do anything I don’t do.
• These are life-long, life-giving activities.

If the students don’t see you doing what they’re doing, the message becomes:

• This is student work, and you can stop as soon as you graduate.

Reciprocate vulnerability.

If you ask to see early versions of your students’ work, you should share early versions of your own work. This is scary, I know. But it will humanize you in their eyes. And for most of them, it will be a surprise and a relief that your work doesn’t just spring out of your head, fully-formed. This will teach them about process and progress, and take some pressure off their own early iterations.

One final note: None of these lessons are subtweets at the professors who have taught me over the last eight years. In fact, these lessons come largely from positive examples, which I have shamelessly stolen for my own teaching practice. Credit and thanks to Butler’s College of Education for taking in a cranky weirdo from the English department.