Professors prepare for first day of school

Ipsita Banerjee is ready to go.

She’s arranged the coursework for her engineering class, Process Controlled Systems and Dynamics, read books and papers on the subject and prepared PowerPoint slides and lectures.

Still, Banerjee, a first-time professor at Pitt, can’t shake her back-to-school jitters.

“I am a soft-spoken person and it’s a big class — like 52 [students]. So that is something I have to adjust to — talking loud for two hours,” she said.

Like Banerjee, many Pitt professors say no matter how much they prepare, they can’t get rid of their first-day nerves.

“I’m scared to death. I walk into class, and I have butterflies in my stomach,” Janelle Greenberg, a history professor who has been teaching for about 30 years, said. “But I’m also really excited. … A new term is beginning.”

Greenberg, who teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, said she spends a lot of time reading and researching new material before her classes start.

“You have to make sure your syllabus is up-to-date, and that requires a lot of reading in the field,” she said. “Often, you’ll find that there is new material coming out that’s betteProxy-Connection: keep-alive

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than what you assigned, so you have to then reconfigure your syllabus to include this new material.”

Arpad von Klimo, a visiting professor of German and European history, said reading is key to being prepared for class. But, oftentimes, with time restrictions and a heavy workload, it’s not always easy to keep up.

“I’m bearing the whole burden of German history on my narrow shoulders,” von Klimo said with a laugh.

“I have to confess that there were moments that I was not well-prepared and I found a way — a trick to make students engaged — and they would do more than I did in class,” he said. “Afterward, they would tell me how great the class was … but I wouldn’t recommend this as a rule. I won’t do it again intentionally.”

Neither would Michael Baird, a part-time professor of chemical engineering. A poor lecture can lead to the dreaded negative evaluation, he said.

“I think the better prepared you are, it just makes it easier,” Baird said. “And I know you guys. If we are not prepared one lecture out of 20, we see it on the evaluations. You don’t like to read stuff like that, so you try not to let it happen.”

But things were a little different when these professors were students.

“When I first went to school, I was not a good student,” Cynthia Bradley-King, a professor of social work, said. “I was distracted. It was the ’60s. There was much going on to be distracted by — protests, marches — and I didn’t understand the importance of the balance of getting involved in activities as well as doing your schoolwork and having fun.”

Parmjeet Randhawa, a professor of pathology, said he didn’t always concentrate on studying as a student.

“I would just show up and I would probably make sure I was in the front rows, because ours was a very large and noisy class,” he said. “It was India, where education is free. So you enter college and you’re not paying for it, so you don’t actually really appreciate its value.”

Thankfully, though, Pitt students are different, Greenberg said.

“Pitt students are just excellent. … I was not nearly as good as Pitt undergraduates,” she said, shaking her head.