Keeping One Day Ahead of the Students
Authored by: doctor_bob I've now taught about twenty courses at UC Berkeley in the 5 years since I supposedly "retired" from a successful decade working in Silicon Valley, but I will never forget the first course. I was asked by the Dean of what was then called the School of Information Management and Systems if I could teach a course about what I'd done in my two start-ups about electronic publishing and electronic commerce. He said "as long as you do more than just tell old stories about your Silicon Valley days, the students will find it interesting enough." It seemed like a manageable challenge that would give me something to do as I transitioned "into the sunset" after working 80-hour weeks.

But not long after I agreed to teach the course, which I called "Document Engineering for E-Business," I got very anxious about it. Even though I'd given talks at professional conferences and had travelled all over the world to speak to clients and prospects, I began to worry that I didn't seem "professorial" enough. I have an informal and passionate (some would say "intense") way of interacting with people and I was sure that this wouldn't translate well into the classroom. And I doubted whether I had enough to say to fill thirty 80-minute class periods.

I spent a month trying to plan a course and write my first few lectures, but the semester started before I knew it. My first day of class I found myself apologizing for my lack of academic experience -- even though I have a Phd and 2 master's degrees -- and I was sure that the students could tell that I was in way over my head. I expected that half of the students wouldn't come to the second class, but they all did, and they kept coming.

But instead of becoming more comfortable after the first few weeks, I still felt pretty anxious. I wanted my lectures to be perfect so no student could ever detect that I didn't know what I was talking about, so I spent nearly my entire week and most weekends preparing to teach just two 80-minute lectures. I'd finish a lecture on Monday morning for my Tuesday class, practice giving it on Monday afternoon, and then Monday night I'd decide that it wasn't very good and frantically rewrite it for hours.

About halfway through the semester I got so desperate that I asked a professional colleague who lived in Australia to help me by reviewing my lectures after I'd frantically rewritten then. You see, because he was 10 hours away in timezone land, he could review them while I slept and that way I'd get the benefit of his help without running out of time...

Somehow the students never figured out that I was incompetent as a professor, and I guess I made sense of the topics enough to be asked to teach again. I've now in my 11th semester here and I ended up writing a book for MIT Press about Document Engineering with my Australian friend as my co-author.


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