Long before I began teaching full time, I was required in a graduate course to write a statement of my teaching philosophy. In my statement, I worked in a plethora of passionately idealistic sentiments and several very insightful (I thought) references to fortune cookies, the butterfly effect, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and received an A. Now, six years later as an assistant
... [Show full abstract] professor of psychology, I've been asked to provide a statement of my teaching philosophy once again, this time as part of a midtenure review. Suddenly I find myself daunted by an assignment I once completed with such ease and enthusiasm. I still believe much of what I wrote in that early paper, but I can no longer bring myself to be quite so unabashedly idealistic. The truth is that there are times when I think my primary guiding principle in the classroom would be more appropriately labeled a philosophy of survival than a philosophy of teaching. There are days when success means getting up in the morning and getting through all my classes. There are other days when success means not giving up on students who seem convinced that although buying the books is compulsory, reading them is optional. It is absolutely success if students leave my class at the end of the term at least as interested in the subject matter as they were when they registered for the course --and even that doesn't always happen.
