Something that I have noticed recently is that I approach classes that I am teaching myself completely differently from classes that I am working with others on. I taught a course on my own last fall, and that was definitely a learning process since it was my first time. Currently, I'm helping with a course with three other people, and I'm the Program Assistant so I'm not teaching or designing the curriculum but handling logistics of the course. And it has been dawning on me that the latter seems to stress me out way more and involve very different thought processes. This is a very unstructured post where I am thinking through these experiences and what I think of them.
With this more recent course, between this year and last year I tend to get so stressed while it is going on. I think part of it is that I am beholden to other people, and that I worry with all my communications that I am accurately portraying what we think as a team. But I think that there's also something more than that.
To be fair, these courses are very different. The one I do over the summers is aimed at graduate students and the course I taught was for undergraduates. This also adds to the differences where I try to expect the graduate students to be more on top of things. I learned last summer that they were not. With the undergraduates I know that they have a lot going on so I deliberately tried to help a few students as much as I could. The graduate students also require a lot of communication, I am emailing them after each homework to let folks know that did not get the assignment in, and I'm emailing about attendance after each session. It feels different though, maybe it is that I am mostly inclined to let the graduate students do their own thing as adults rather than the undergraduates, or because I am mostly passing on a message from my other instructors.
Potentially it is also in the nature of the course. The class I taught was for a grade and this summer course is for a certificate. So a lot of the communications has to do with the certificate requirements (attendance and homework) and just trying to encourage as many students as possible to meet those requirements. The course feels a little weird to me in that we only advertise the attendance requirement when selecting applicants so I think a few people join and are not aware of the rest, or think that it is not a big deal if they have to miss more sessions when it comes time. And this has been really frustrating for me since I have to constantly chase them down and try to encourage them to make up assignments or the like.
This certificate issue has come up already, I think I would communicate about this differently if it was me. So I wonder if the disconnect is there in that I'm communicating differently and having to deal with unclear instructions from others as well. Whatever the issue is, I am glad that I am getting all of these different experiences. It will only be helpful further down the line when I am teaching more!