Parenting Forced Me to Improvise—and it Improved My Teaching

Graduate school: there is always another conference proposal due, another article to read, another project to start. No matter how hard you are willing to work, there is always more to do. This never-ending workload—coupled with the expectations of excellence―often attracts a very specific kind of person: one who blends a strong (and sometimes unhealthy) work ethic with a meticulous perfectionism. Graduate school is also one of the only times in academic careers when an individual is expected to take classes, teach classes, and conduct research all at the same time. During course work, graduate students take classes with large reading and writing expectations (across my three classes at the Graduate Center I frequently reach between 300-400 pages of reading and ten pages of writing a week). Most institutions expect these students to teach their own undergraduate courses in their first or second year of graduate studies, which means they are juggling two separate class schedules: their own and those of their students. Student-teachers are expected to maintain the pinnacle of scholarly rigor by attending and presenting at conferences, with some departments further pushing students to subsequently publish this work in journals in order to be more competitive on the job market. Although young scholars getting hired out of their doctorate usually have only one or two article publications, each one takes months of research followed by (potentially) multiple rounds of revisions (if your work is even accepted). All things considered, each publication can easily be another 300 hours of work spread across one to two years. Such sky-high expectations necessitate untold hours of work and efficient management of these three academic pillars to maintain the edifice of academic rigor. Each of the pillars is a full-time job in its own right, and yet graduate students must balance them all. Such a system is predicated on the student devoting an entire life to the pursuit of success (all while often being paid very low wages); there is no room under such a structure for a fourth pillar.

Naturally, my wife and I decided to have our first child in the midst of this deluge, destabilizing the proverbial skyscraper. I knew going into graduate school that the rigors of academia were very much for me, but my wife and I also knew that we did not want to wait eight years before having kids. From my experience navigating and enduring the crushing years of graduate school (both with and without a child), I have found that the foundations of academic work culture are antithetical to parenting. Academia—and society more broadly—instills in us certain expectations for mothers and fathers. Given these characterizations, it would have been easy to become the stereotypical “working father”: always busy, trusting that my wife could and would take care of the needs of our daughter. I could feel the pressures of my job pushing me towards that life. It took purposeful and active choices within my own daily routine to resist this easier, expected path. All I wanted to do was finish my work so that I could refine it, gazing towards some far-off ideal of perfection. If I did not put as much time as possible into my studies, I feared that I would fall behind or perform below my professors’ expectations. This risked more than simple embarrassment; the professors I was submitting work to are the same ones listed as references on my CV. Although it necessitated working longer hours at times, ultimately, putting aside my work and making time for my family was just as important for me as it was for my family members. By leaning on my wife when necessary–but making absolutely sure to spend as much time with my daughter as I could–I managed to balance my academic expectations and my fatherly ones. During all of this, I feared that my ability to teach effectively would be compromised by this necessity; however, taking a step back from my work paradoxically led me to be both a better student and a more effective teacher.

The largest problem I immediately encountered was that, while one can grade and study efficiently, such practicality is impossible when taking care of a child. I remember getting into a rhythm while grading; seeing papers fly by as I grew comfortable with what I was looking for was incredibly satisfying. In comparison, my wonderfully headstrong daughter required exactly as much time as she needed and would not accept a second less. Preparing to go on a walk could take thirty minutes in and of itself. Simply putting on her sneakers to start the walk could easily be a fifteen-minute ordeal! We had to find the right socks to match her outfit (an outfit which required its own odyssey to pick out), check the UV index and potentially apply sunscreen (a difficult task in and of itself), and then coax her out the door—to name but a few of the steps. Unlike academic progress, each step invited further chaos on the walk itself. Would there be a tantrum? An unexpected diaper blowout? A bug we needed to look at for twenty minutes? A fun bird to point at? With all its amazing opportunities and terrifying unknowns, this was simply not an environment congenial to efficiency. So, in prioritizing my daughter, something needed to change. Since homework was still due and conference presentations marched ever closer, my only option was to get smarter about my lesson planning and execution.

Prior to this change, lesson planning had involved meticulously outlining content and exercises down to five-minute increments, trying to optimize my class time and my students’ understanding. The main problem I encountered was not just teaching music theory, but my advisor’s personal take on the topics (especially because my advisor was the one who designed the midterm and final). Tailoring my lessons to both my and her conception took quite a lot of time to do effectively: too much, given my new responsibilities. Before my daughter was born, I would scour articles and online resources for perfect examples in a variety of musical formats and styles. I could easily spend two hours planning out how each module of the class would flow into the next, picking examples from the bank I had created to emphasize the interconnectedness of class topics. To save time, I began to roughly outline the topics that I needed to get through within a class. While I still had to provide good examples for each concept, I got smarter about choosing them, relying more heavily on textbooks and encyclopedic resources for each concept.

One is never entirely ‘ready’ to be a parent. You can read every book and think through every scenario, but you will not know how it will work out until you take the plunge. Similarly with my teaching, I had to provide myself with the necessary materials and then trust that I could teach effectively from what I had gathered. When things did not work out exactly as I anticipated, I had to give myself grace, knowing that I was growing in my ability to adapt in the classroom. Though uncomfortable at first, my experience teaching collegiate music theory in both my undergraduate and first year of my master’s provided me a comfortable backdrop of experience to rely upon. This presented me with a unique challenge. I had one hour each week—during our team meetings—to osmose not just slightly different definitions, but methods, for teaching each concept. I had to improve my ability to recall the information I learned the week before so that I could answer student questions and teach information geared specifically towards their tests and quizzes.

As I grew more comfortable with my new improvisatory method, I found that spending less time on my lesson planning actually began to help my students. In preparing myself for class to the best of my ability, the resulting script was too exacting. My definitions were overly intricate, my answers to questions were both dense and niche, and almost none of my students could keep up. I knew the topics so well and spent so much time thinking about the correct way to say things that my instruction became more difficult to understand. In contrast, with only a few seconds to collect my thoughts after a question, the improvisatory answers were far clearer. It was not a matter of putting less effort into these situations, but of trusting myself to provide the information without trying to maximize every second with my students. This served both to streamline my lessons and to increase student comprehension while providing the flexibility to spend more time on challenging topics (as requested by students).

This is not to say that every lesson I put together worked exactly as I planned. I distinctly remember one lesson on sequences where, after putting together a list of ten or so examples to exhaust the list of potential scenarios, I could not find one of the sequences I had identified the night before. I was mortified. After floundering for some twenty seconds to find what I knew was there, I had to simply move on to the next example. I felt terrible for wasting my students’ time and I was afraid that students would think I did not understand the very concept I was teaching. I had to shake off these doubts in the moment to not plague the rest of the class, and ultimately the class still went well even given this hiccup. I learned the same lesson that day that I have learned over my first two years of parenting: we are not always going to be our best selves with our children (or our students). Sometimes my daughter decides her “cheesy noodles” (Mac & Cheese) look better on the floor than in her bowl, and I respond poorly. After apologizing to her, I remind myself to be my best for the people that depend on me. Will I snap in the future? Will I mess up in a lesson again? Of course. But I have to resolve to learn from my mistakes so I am better prepared next time.

With a ten-minute break between sections, I scoured the piece and found the elusive sequence. My second class—on the same topic—was then devoid of such a mistake. It is easy to blame lesson prep for issues such as this, but the truth is I could have experienced the exact same situation in my first class had I prepared for two hours rather than my thirty minutes. However, because I was working to embrace improvisation, I was able to overcome my embarrassment on the fly and still managed to deliver a successful class. This also allowed me to learn from the situation, instead of letting it bog me down. Ultimately, no teaching style leads to a perfect result the first time, every time. Though I initially found comfort in an exacting style of teaching, the improvisatory nature brought on by necessity ultimately led to not only a more encouraging environment for my students, but for me as a teacher. With a greater degree of comfort in my teaching, and more time to spend with my daughter, I managed to find a healthy balance in the midst of graduate school and parenting. (And my newfound improvisation made me a much more entertaining guest at her tea parties!)

Although the addition of my daughter necessitated a change to my priorities, this shift ended up being a boon to my work and my teaching. Finding a work-life balance is important for everybody, it just so happens that having a baby solidifies those boundaries very quickly. Taking on a more improvisatory teaching style helped augment my limited lesson-prepping time while also placing me just far enough outside of my comfort zone to drastically improve my teaching. Whether you choose to explore new teaching methods or you are dragged into a new method, being open and giving yourself room to explore your new space will undoubtedly benefit both your teaching and learning.

About the Author

Zachary Simonds (PhD Student, Music Theory)

Zachary Simonds is pursuing his PhD in music theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include heavy metal and twelve-tone music, with a particular focus on the intersection of these two disparate genres. His chapter “Unfulfilled Expectations: Theorizing on Terminally Anticlimactic Form” was published in The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition (2025).

What is the best piece of parenting advice you’ve received?

The story you assign to your child can affect how they view themselves. Referring to a child as your “shy/energetic/hard working/etc. one” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is the worst piece of parenting advice you’ve received?

Sleep when the baby sleeps.

What is the best piece of teaching advice you’ve received?

Do everything you can to project a love for the material you are teaching.

What advice do you want to offer Graduate Center student-teachers who are thinking about parenthood?

Be ready to plan ahead a lot. Scheduling classes and getting homework done gets infinitely harder.

What advice do you want to offer all Graduate Center student-teachers?

Assign as much homework as you can manage to grade and automate as much of the grading as possible.

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