I'm teaching courses I've never taken - do I tell my students?

For the love of god no don't admit you don't know the material. If a student asks you a question that you can't answer, tell them you'll look it up and get back to them. If it's something super simple/short, as someone who is inevitably on their laptop right then to look it up for you. If it's longer, write it down, and look it up later (and really do, I have very fond memories of professors who were willing to do this, and depending on the question either got back to me directly or said the answer in the next class).

When I was in graduate school, a professor of considerable renown once told me, "You haven't learned how to teach until you've taught a text you haven't read." Don't admit you're not an expert in the material (though you probably already know more about it than you think); if a student asks you a question and you don't know the answer, get back to them with one (but again, this scenario is probably less likely than you think).

Silly, that's why you've got a PhD. It's not that you know everything already, it's that you know how to find things out, how to interpret them, and how to explain them in the context of the field. So you ARE qualified.

"what do I do when students ask questions that I don't know the answers to because my background here isn't so good?" 1. Can anyone Google that real quick? 2. That's an excellent question -- I want you to research it and report back on Tuesday, for extra credit. 3. That is an excellent question and I have no idea. I will find out and get back to you with it next class. 4. That's a great question, but it's a little off the point of what we're covering for today, so let me get through today's material, and we can talk about that next class/at office hours/later on. I'm upfront with my students that my background is slightly off the topic of what I teach (I teach philosophy; my degrees are in law and theology), but don't ever tell them you're uncomfortable with the material! I freely admit to them when I don't know a specific thing, or if they bring up a point I've never considered, and (at least in the US) my students like that I don't pretend to know it all and that I'm not afraid to admit when they've stumped me. (It also gives you considerably more authority when you do answer questions, because if you admit when you don't know, students assume you have Godlike knowledge the rest of the time.) But yeah, we teach a standardized syllabus for the survey class and we used to use this HORRIFIC textbook where the metaphysics unit was obviously put together by an insane person. My background in metaphysics is weak to begin with, and I never, ever felt comfortable teaching that unit. We switched to a much better textbook last year and I feel sooooooooo much better in the metaphysics unit now, because it's at least structured in a sensible way. I just read some broad surveys of metaphysics before we got to that unit, studied up really hard on the specific readings, and crossed my fingers they wouldn't ask an easy question I was totally unable to answer!

Nthing that your impulse toward disclosure is misplaced here. As academics, we understand just how much is involved in really being an expert in a field - but undergrads do not. (I certainly did not, and I was an eager undergrad with lots of respect for my professors.) Plus the culture of academia is such that we're all inclined to say "well, I'm not a specialist in this" because we understand just how much more the specialists really know. But for undergrads, these distinctions are not meaningful. If you try to give a careful, scrupulous disclaimer about how you're not a specialist in this area, it's easy for them to hear it as "I am not qualified to teach this course", which you *really* don't want. You know more stats than they do, and you have better skills than they do for bootstrapping in this domain. You will be fine. If you come upon something you're not sure of, give your best answer or deflect and come back to it next time. "That's a tricky issue and i don't want to get into it right now; let me think about a good way to address it and we'll come back to it next time." (I.e., you're the kind of professor who wants to stick to his/her prepared notes, so if they want to hear about something else, they have to give you time to collect your thoughts and write up notes on it) Undergrads are bad at evaluating how much their professors know. Some of the most knowledgable specialists I've seen teach still get evaluations that say things like "professor x didn't really know the material that well" -- when the problem is something else (eg confusing presentation, being disorganized, presenting the information at too high a level). Undergrads just aren't well equipped to evaluate expertise because they're still learning the stuff themselves -- all they have to go on is your confidence, and whether they come out of it feeling confused.

I have been in a somewhat similar situation as a PhD student: I'm a physicist, and I got to spend a lot of time supervising engineering students in lab exercises. Coming from a different field is not something you have to declare --- apologizing in advance for an error you haven't yet committed will only confuse your students as to your standing, which is never good. If they ask you something you don't know, just tell them so and follow up later. Giving a wrong answer is infinitely more damaging to your image than a late one. You are probably already qualified for the job, so this should be a rare occurence. That being said, building your confidence in the subject matter is definitely a good idea. As a last tip, if your undergraduate students are anything like the ones we get here, their academic culture and scope is probably very limited, overwhelmingly shaped by whatever courses they have taken until now. If your background is very different from this, they will quickly pick up the fact that you are different from all their other teachers. Briefly familiarizing yourself with what your students have been taught so far will help you better prepare your course and anticipate the awkward questions: for example, if they are physics students and you are supposed to be teaching them electromagnetism, take a look at their vector calculus textbooks. Check out their other course materials, and look for possible overlap with your courses: this is where you can expect a lot of strange questions asking about hazily remembered stuff from their earlier course.

No, and not because you're trying to hide anything from them. I wouldn't be evasive about your background if asked, but there's nothing that turns a class off (and I've taught many professional classes, not university) like apologizing in advance for the class not being any good (for whatever reason). You never say "This material is really boring so I'll do my best" - you just influenced everyone to find it boring. Similarly, making your first impression be "I don't know what I'm talking about and I'm probably wasting your time," will make them believe you. Nth that you know more than you think you do. Besides that, teaching isn't always about being the subject matter expert anyway. A good teacher can teach a decent lesson plan without being very heavy on the material. That's because the subject matter expert part comes in developing the lesson plan, and it takes a very different set of skills to present it effectively. How many super-knowledgeable professors did you ever have who were also horrible teachers? You'll be the opposite. Just make a statistics-heavy faculty member friend who'll field questions for you when you need to get back to a student on something. The students will appreciate that a lot more than you think. You'll be fine. Don't sabotage yourself right out of the gate. It'll be fine.

In almost 20 years of teaching, I taught dozens of courses that I did not take as an undergraduate. For the intro course, there is definitely no reason to bring it up. However, I disagree about the advanced course. Twice, I have had to step in and teach an advanced seminar on a topic I did not know well. In both instances, I was honest with the students and we ran the course as a true seminar, where I was the "process" expert as opposed to the "subject-matter" expert, i.e., I designed the types of assignments and graded them based on a rubric that did not require me to possess in depth knowledge. And, we learned the subject together. We were co-learners. Both classes received good student reviews, and, as instructor, I felt both were excellent learning experiences for all involved. I am not sure it would have went as well if I had tried to "bluff" my way through it.

I would tell them. I think it sets a tone of mutual respect, and allows you to not have to bullshit them later on. And telling them lets them know that you are confident enough in your abilities that it won't be a problem. Let them know that your background means that your presentation is going to be from a mathematician's perspective -- this allows you to answer questions that you are uncomfortable with by saying you want to get a statistician's perspective. As procrastination says, you'll need to overprepare -- but you are probably going to do that anyway, because you'll be nervous about what you know.