I did it!

I just realized that I hadn't posted about this; my nervousness must've been greater than I realized. I just taught my first college class, and graduate level, at that. I did it. It's something I've wanted to try for a long time. Today was the final, and grades are complete. I had a healthy respect and nervousness for the process and about providing value to a room full of people with high hopes and expectations.

I did it.

I taught accounting for financial statement analysis purposes, the first course in the Masters of Finance and Economics program. The amount of work that went into preparing it was even more than what I anticipated; countless hours. If I'm invited to return next year, my (huge) investment in preparation will pay off exponentially. One hopes.

I got to know 25 very interesting, quite varied people.

There were no teaching materials other than a text. I'm used to teaching for a review course, and from prepared materials. This was all new. It's also a completely different ballgame to teach history majors pretty complex accounting issues than to teach them as review to accounting grads. Their beginning level ran from never having had algebra before to one CPA. They hung in there, most of them, and really learned a lot. My initial concern was that my course would be much too easy, and that we'd finish the material a few weeks early with me scrambling to fill the last couple of classes. Instead, we did not finish the material we'd intended, but I believe the students have a good foundation for their next class, as well as for reading and analyzing financial statements, which was our goal. I'm proud of them.

I'm also proud of myself.