What we learn from teaching
Skills that go beyond the classroom
Hey there, I’m Emily! 👋 Welcome to Hired Humanities, a biweekly newsletter devoted to helping humanities students build careers on their own terms.
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I’m undergoing some exciting changes at work, but with new responsibility comes new constraints on my time. Ultimately, I want to provide you with the most impactful content possible, and I’m not convinced I can do that on a biweekly release schedule. So moving forward, I’ll be sharing new issues of Hired Humanities on a monthly basis.
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I can’t believe it’s almost been a decade since I worked as a teaching assistant for a travel study program on Ancient Greek religion in Greece. During the course, I spent a month visiting ancient archaeological sites all around the Peloponnese with eight students, a professor, and a local guide. I don’t think I can put into words how incredible the experience was, and it wasn’t just because I got to hike around Delphi or swim in the Aegean at sunset.
It was special because it was the type of class that pushed students beyond their intellectual comfort zone. Many of the students simply weren’t used to grappling with questions with no “right” answer, and as any Classicist knows, you have to be comfortable working with unknowns when you’re dealing with the ancient world. At the beginning of the course, you could tell that some were struggling with the knowledge gaps that come with passing millennia. It was difficult for them to grasp how we could know both so much and so little about the people who lived so long ago and their motivations for building the monuments we visited.
Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash
But by the end of the program, I sensed a profound shift in the way students were approaching the questions we asked them. They embraced the need to synthesize an answer based on available evidence and their own reasoning. They were no longer afraid of lacunae. They had begun to trust in their ability to chart a path in the face of the unknown.
Witnessing this transformation sparked my love of teaching, and it only grew deeper with the next classes I taught. It’s honestly the thing that I miss most about academia— and it’s the thing that prepared me the best for working outside of it.
Like many aspects of my academic career, I didn’t recognize the value of my teaching experience until long after leaving the academy. Sure, I liked to believe that I was creating valuable learning opportunities for my students, but I never thought that teaching was training me for anything beyond the classroom. It always seemed like a self-contained enterprise, something that began and ended within the confines of a campus or a semester.
My early days of job hunting only reinforced the belief in self-containment. Almost immediately hiring managers signaled that teaching was not applicable to work outside the classroom. Why should they care that I taught Latin, or helped lead a class in Greece? It sounded like fun (or nerdy—take your pick), but how would it help them solve actual problems here and now?
Both universities and businesses tend to gloss over what goes into teaching. Universities don’t tell graduate students that they’re doing anything other than checking off a requirement when they teach a class, and businesses often see teaching as one-dimensional. Yet in reality, teaching requires you to become competent in a whole range of transferable skills.
Without teaching, I wouldn’t have learned how to edit information. When you need to explain a complex topic in 10 minutes at an introductory level, you have to cut away all extraneous details while providing enough context so that your audience isn’t lost. Striking this balance is just as important in a conference room as it is in a classroom. It’s also one aspect of effective communication that many, many people in the business world struggle with.
I wouldn’t be as strong as a presenter as I am now if I hadn’t taught. I am among the 73% of the population that has anxiety about public speaking, but delivering lessons every day helped me contain, if not overcome, that fear. In turn, presenting is a skill that’s served me well in every single one of my roles, from PR to customer success.
I also credit teaching for showing me the importance of knowing your audience. Just as when you discover what makes your students excited to learn, unlocking a person’s motivation will open new ways of engaging with them. It’ll help you win the buy-in of your CEO in a critical moment or deescalate a tricky customer conversation, or write a successful pitch. It’ll also make you a better coworker and manager.
Teaching teaches you to be a multiplier, someone who raises others up by sharing knowledge. It also teaches you to be humble and to seek help when you don’t know the answer. It makes you organized and detail-oriented because you heck, have to get those grades submitted on time.
The list goes on and on.
It’s a shame that we don’t acknowledge all that teaching gives us as teachers. This piece is just a small celebration of all the skills that it helps us develop, but I hope that you too will start to identify and honor the skills you’ve cultivated while teaching. If more of us begin to own what we’ve learned from leading a class, maybe then more employers will start to recognize how special that experience really is.
A parting note
Thanks for tuning in this week! Please don't hesitate to drop me a line if you have questions or feedback. And, if you think someone else in your life would love to receive this newsletter in their inbox, feel free to spread the word.
As ever,
Emily
Reading List
A few of my favorite links
📣. Thank you, Stephan, for the shoutout in your end-of-summer roundup.
📉 It’s not just about the numbers — it’s also about soft skills.
⏱️ Alison Green has some advice for those of you who are waiting to hear back from a job interview.