Ten Things I Learned as a First-Time University Instructor

THE FXBG ADVANCE FRIDAY 6/10/26 MORNING READ

By Paul Cymrot, SPECIAL TO THE ADVANCE

Chris Lawton/Unsplash

I paraded through the iron gates of my university with a degree in hand 30 years ago exactly. That same summer I started my own business and have been running it ever since. The degree was in English and American Literature and the business is a used and rare bookstore here in Fredericksburg. Whether the first was the best possible preparation for the second is a matter of debate during quiet afternoons in the store, but there’s never been any doubt that my love for books and book-people has fueled it all, and made a happy life.

This past spring I was invited to teach an upper level English seminar called Adventures in Rare Books at the University of Mary Washington. They offered me a cozy classroom with an antique seminar table, a polyester polo shirt with university logo, and $175 for each 75 minute class, (not including preparation and grading), to teach on this subject that has been both my avocation and occupation. All this plus the lofty sounding title of Adjunct Instructor. Who could resist?

The offer came less than two weeks before the start of the semester, with ten students already enrolled in the class, and no syllabus to work from. I was invited to teach whatever I wanted, under the broad parameters of the name of the class…. Except it needed to fulfill the Literature Before 1800 requirement, so 51 percent of the course reading had to meet that criteria. This was a curve ball, but I still felt I could hit it out of the park. This is what I do, after all.

So I stepped up to the plate, little expecting it would become the most anxiety-inducing experiment of my adult life. I went to campus twice a week from January to May, plus the occasional field trip, studio workshop, and evening guest lecture. When I wasn’t on campus, I was at my desk dreaming up assignments, shaping the class sessions, grading student work, and wrestling with non-stop nervousness. I am still processing both the lessons both large and small from the experience, but here are 10 takeaways from my return to academia.

1) I’m not as charming as I thought I was.

I lead with this knowing that it may well color all the rest. In my mind’s eye, I am likeable, funny, and companionable, if a little odd. In the eyes of my students, however, I was a character to be looked on with suspicion and skepticism. I could see stranger-danger alarms going off in their eyes when I tried to make small talk before (or god-forbid during) class, or ask them about their opinions on whatever was filling their schedules and their minds. They made it clear to me that our time together in the classroom did not give me any access to their thoughts on pop culture, on-campus news, or upcoming holiday celebrations.

For the first few weeks, I would arrive in class half an hour early to go over my notes and greet students as they came in. I soon learned that they were so uncomfortable with this that I changed my routine. Instead of waiting in the classroom, I hid in the philosophy lounge down the hall until just moments before class, then came in only when everyone else was there and my allotted time with them had begun.

2) Trust (from student to teacher) isn’t given for free.

This might be a corollary to the previous lesson, but I think it extends beyond that. All semester long, the students could not seem to decide whether I was friend or foe, despite the fact that I had no motive for being in the classroom except to teach them about rare books.

Comments on their written work seemed to be taken as personal criticism rather than part of an academic process. When I circulated discussion threads on the class’s online platform, shared links to rare book auctions, or asked general opinion questions, they were ignored unless I attached a grade to them. In their eyes, everything seemed to be a trick question or a potential trap, approached warily or not at all, like trying to feed a potato chip to a cat.

3) Students don’t want to learn by trial and error.

The class was called Adventures in Rare Books, so we began the semester with the very broad question, “What is a Rare Book?” This fundamental query proved to be an insurmountable challenge. The first answers that we threw out on the table were, as you might imagine, just jumping off points: “A book that’s hard to find.” “A book that’s important.” “A book that’s worth a lot of money.” These were all true, but they didn’t entirely encapsulate the idea. As definitions, they were like a hastily constructed Noah’s Ark, boat-shaped and seaworthy, but without room for all the animals we needed to transport.

We came back to this question again and again as we read deeper, toured the Folger Shakespeare Library, spoke with the director of Keats/Shelley archive in Rome or the head of Special Collections at our own UMW library. Our makeshift definition never quite accommodated everything, because each expert concentrated on a different aspect of it. Instead of leaping into the conundrum and wrestling with it, making room for a pair of wildebeests when we found them, ejecting a surplus of lemurs, the students got frustrated and stopped trying..

Of course the point here is that there is no one catchall answer to the question, as will always be the case with subjective judgment, but the relationship the students had with the process of grappling with it surprised me.

Another example: On every written assignment, students could revise for additional credit after reading the comments. Of the 200 assignments turned in, only two were ever reworked and returned to me, even when I gave a bad grade and a clear path to improvement. I know that student schedules are busy, but surely adding citations to passages lifted directly from Wikipedia or reworking a clunky conclusion was worth fifteen minutes of their time.

4) Mastery isn’t the objective.

I had expected that a senior seminar full of future librarians and archivists would want to get their hands dirty. I brought old books and lead type and vellum manuscripts into the classroom for show and tell, but they lay on the table largely untouched and unexamined.

For the midterm project I sent them to the Special Collections room to find a book that was more than 200 years old and simply spend an hour with it. Hold it, smell it, visit with it, maybe (but not necessarily) read a few words to see if the author was speaking to them or someone else. After that hour, I assured them, each would be the world expert on their chosen volume. And I asked them to write about that experience, both the physical book and the way that their own story was now connected to this volume. This was an experiential project not a research project.

Yes, it did require that they flex their vocabulary muscles and try to use the descriptive words they’d learned. But mostly it was an invitation to venture down a path where theirs was the only light to see by. So long as you are honest about the experience you cannot go wrong, I told them.

What did I get? Recitations of Wikipedia entries about the importance of the book. Biographies of the authors. The reaction-paper equivalent of a shrug.

Seen in the best light, perhaps the students were using this class as a quick reconnoitering of a vast museum, speed-walking through the galleries to see what might be worth a second visit, some other day or year. But if a senior seminar on rare books isn’t the time and place to slow down and dig deep into the subject, I don’t know what is.

5) Everyone on campus is scared

While I hid in the philosophy lounge before class, I chatted with some of the philosophy professors and heard stories of tricky moments in their classes when they touched on controversial (and even long-settled) issues like evolution, abortion, and women’s rights. They knew these themes were crucial to the classes, and so did the students, but they still approached them with extreme caution for fear of complaints.

I had my own fright too. When I invited my class to my bookbinding studio to learn to bind books by hand, one student didn’t want to come and so asked for an alternate assignment. I corresponded with her by email to remind her that this was a bookbinding workshop, not just a place-filler, and that it was about the experience not the grade. She said she’d prefer a different assignment. I asked her what she might like to do, but she had no suggestions. When I continued to press, she told me that I was making her feel singled out, and “not in a good way.” I was stunned and silenced, because it suddenly sounded like the makings of a scandal and the language formal complaint. I let the matter drop, and no alternate assignment ever emerged.

This feeling of mutual wariness lurked everywhere. At the same time that instructors were guarding against offending the students, the students were afraid of a dozen ever-present pitfalls: making mistakes, getting bad grades, losing scholarships, not getting into grad school. Each class each semester required learning what a new teacher expected of them, in addition to the class material itself. There was rarely any solid ground beneath their feet, nor could there be, with each instructor holding all the power in their short and imbalanced relationship.

6) The teacher is just one more entertainment stream

I had one class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. That’s nothing. The fact that most teachers have several classes a day every day of the week is a miracle that can never be properly appreciated. We have to go over the reading, flesh out new concepts, hope that they did the reading, hope that everyone will speak up. We have to connect new material with old and discuss its relevance. You know, college stuff. Novice that I am, I expected that the class would jump in and participate and make the time fly by. So I was surprised when, week after week, the students would simply arrive, take their seats and look at me. No notebooks and pens at the ready, no laptops for writing or questions prepped for asking. They just sat and watched like they were at a movie. Or, as I began to feel towards the end of the term, like I was a television that happened to be on in a bus station they were forced to linger in until their bus arrived.

This was driven home most forcefully during the ice storm, when campus was closed and we had to hold class over zoom. No more seminar table and creaky chairs, just me looking at the tiny camera on my laptop screen. Seeing myself in that little window alongside the icons for Netflix and Instagram, I realized that I was just one of a thousand options for things they could look at on their computers for entertainment. But instead of a professional actor with a script, a production team, and the option to redo my mistakes, it was just me in my kitchen. How could I possibly make that worth their while?

It’s an insane expectation, when you think about it, that a lone instructor could write, produce, and star in a live 75 minute broadcast twice a week, to a captive audience of nine (did I mention that one of my students dropped out after one class?)

7) Predictable structure is everything

Like I said, I started this project without a syllabus to work from. I let the students know the situation and sketched out the shape of the course in broad strokes. The history of the book. Gutenberg and the spread of printing. The Church and the standardized texts. Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the free press. Benjamin Franklin and America. Jane Austen and the explosion of reading for entertainment. Archives and libraries. The rare book trade. Banned Books. Artificial intelligence.

It turns out that wasn’t enough detail for them. They wanted to know what we were reading and what would be required of them. Trying to accommodate, I filled in specifics as fast as I could. These chapters of these books, plus a 500-word reaction paper. I circulated a survey to discover the best day for a field trip. Asked for a show of hands for who wanted to do a deep dive into inconsistencies in different editions of Shakespeare, or who wanted to move on. Made a written request for suggestions for what to focus on after spring break. I let them know that they could steer the ship toward whatever interested them.

Still not enough. They complained right up to the end that assignments were being sprung on them, that they never knew how to budget their time. They were not wrong, but there was never anything truly surprising. Each class required about the same effort from them: a bit of reading and a bit of writing and hopefully an interval of thinking in between. Sometimes I’d give them the assignment a week or two in advance. Sometimes it was at the end of class, so they’d have 2 or 4 days to work on it. This made them crazy.

I kept good records, though. After each class, I filled in the syllabus retroactively, with page numbers and detailed writing prompts showing what we’d done. It would have been better to have it ready ahead of time, but I was learning on the job. My coworkers assured me that there was nothing in it that was out of the ordinary or unreasonable. But the way it was doled out, a week at a time, pushed the students well outside of their comfort zone.

8) Students want answers, not more questions.

Every couple classes, I’d ask “So what?” What does Franklin’s press have to do with Adventures in Rare Books? What does a Sotheby’s auction catalogue have to do with Ben Jonson’s essay on freedom of the press? What does any of this have to do with any of you?

The pushback to this lasted long after the class ended and is splashed all over their anonymous course reviews. “Obviously it’s important because we’ve all chosen to be English Majors,” one of them wrote. “It felt like it undermined the whole class to constantly have to justify everything” said another. I hear them loud and clear, but I couldn’t disagree more. Asking the hard question about why something they’re studying matters is at the very heart of mastering a topic and preparing to move out into the world. If they can’t take a stab at that question now, in the safety of the classroom, how are they going to tackle it later when there is significantly more at stake?

9) The students don’t feel as though they’re part of something.

In one class, after my allusions to Huck Finn and Hamlet went unrecognized, I stopped the discussion to find some common ground. We tried to find a book that everyone in the room had read. Harry Potter? No, that was old news for these kids. Hamilton the musical? No, that was just for theatre geeks. Little Woman, Pride and Prejudice, Romeo & Juliet? No, no, and no. Gatsby? No, because of Covid. We had to go all the way back to The Cat in the Hat to find something that everyone had read and felt some ownership of. (Later, we also discovered that everyone had read Frankenstein for school, somewhere along the way.) But that was all we could discover. They seemed to define themselves more by what they had not read or had declined to read than by what they had.

That was not the case with TV shows and movies. They’d all seen many of the same shows and had strong opinions about them.

In another class around election time, I asked if they felt as they the government was working for them, if they felt represented and heard. They snorted at the idea. I asked if they trusted any news source (no), any corporation (no), or had high hopes for the AI-influenced future (no). I asked whether they could imagine a revolution in which they took a part and which addressed their concerns, and would it come in the form of an Instagram reel, a printed pamphlet, or a podcast? They shrugged. One said that all she wanted was to find a steady job in a library and just keep that small world in order, as best she could.

10) The faculty and staff and facilities are wonderful

Despite all my difficulties along the way to earning a 1.3 out of 5 rating as a teacher, the one inspiring constant was the cheerful support of fellow teachers, administration, and staff. The philosophy professors who let me hide in their cozy lounge, came out of their offices to chat with me before class. There were teapots and free coffee in every teacher’s nook in every department. When I needed transport for a field trip, the university gave me a van. When the email didn’t work, tech support was instantaneous. When I needed help in the library, every book I wanted was rounded up and delivered. Whenever, after a particularly challenging class, I needed someone to pick me up and get me back on track, other instructors threw open their doors and assured me that they’d been through it all themselves (or, which was more useful, that they’d never heard of anything like what I was going through). Everything that anyone needs for a great education is in place. All these expert people overflowing with ideas that they want to share. It’s truly inspiring, and I’m proud to have been a part of it.

I don’t know whether I’ll ever get the chance to do it again; the professor I replaced has returned from his leave of absence. Maybe that’s for the best. My hands are still shaking, just thinking about it. I haven’t begun to unpack all there is to learn from this experience. In a way, I wish I could get back in touch with the students for a cheerful re-cap, ideally something more fruitful than the “CYMROT, YOU WILL BURN; I HATE YOU” posted anonymously on Yik Yak. But lessons 1 and 2 on my list would seem to preclude any such thing. Still, I can’t help but wonder whether they’ll find jobs in their (my) field, whether anyone else will ask them “So What?” and make them remember our shared seminar table, somewhere down the road.

I don’t have a solution, nor am I altogether certain my observations are problems per se; but they are things that hit me hard in my time on campus.

So for now, I return to my bookstore and my own Adventures in Rare Books, bruised and bewildered but still excited every day I come to work.

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Paul Cymrot is the owner of Riverby Books in Fredericksburg, Virginia.