Thoughts on Education – Continuing Education with Limited Time and Money – 7/31/2014
One of those interesting topics that comes up sometimes is the question of how and when those of us who teach can keep our job skills up to date. Admittedly, many who teach do not care about this at all, and they are happy to teach as they have always taught because it works for them. I, for one, am never happy with where I am as a teacher and educator. To my family’s ongoing chagrin, I am always reinventing, reconfiguring, rewriting, and reforming my classes. Only rarely do I run the same course again the next year as I did the year before. I am always making changes, and I am always seeking out ways to make these changes.
The problem comes in the question of what to change and how to make changes. In this case, my own desires for continuing education and change meets the ongoing budgetary crisis head on. We do not have the money for conferences or continuing education. And, as a community-college instructor who teaches full time with overloads and summer courses (essentially a 6/6/3 load), there is little time and money on my own for going to and doing things to improve my education. One of the options is, of course, books, but I find myself with little time and motivation to read professionally any more. This is sad, as I used to read history for fun, but now, after 8 years of graduate school and 8 years of full-time teaching, the idea of sitting down and reading a historical monograph is just not very appealing. I have had to confront this in myself, as my job is history education, and I should have the responsibility to be up on the latest scholarship, while also reading widely in topics relevant to what I teach. However, much like my students, if it is not required, I am not going to read it. In the spare time I do have for teaching, I generally read fiction, as it allows me an escape from everything else. Unfortunately, that means that one primary avenue for continuing education is largely unavailable for me.
So, with no money or time for traveling to conferences and not really being willing to read the things that I should, I have turned to taking MOOC courses through Coursera. Last Spring, I took University Teaching 101, and this summer, I am in two of them. The first one, which I am in the middle of right now, is e-Learning Ecologies, which looks at new ways we can think about the online learning environment. It runs for eight weeks, and it is week 5 right now. The other one that I am taking now is Learning to Teach Online, which takes a more basic approach to looking at how we teach in an online environment. I am hoping to learn more through these courses about how I teach, how I could teach, and what other ideas there are out there. I can’t say much more about them than that, as I am still working on them.
Those of you who teach, what do you do to keep updated with your skills? Those of you who do not, what else can you think of that could be useful?
Thoughts on Teaching – A Day in Summer School – 6/19/2014
Today was another day of teaching. What can I say. My wife always asks me the same question every day when I come home – Was work exciting? And, I really never have a good answer to that. Rarely is work exciting, but rarely is it dismal either. Going in to work is a necessary evil in many ways. I teach exclusively online in the summer, and your standard community college student taking online classes in the summer is very unlikely to make it to on-campus office hours. In three weeks so far, I have seen three students. Now, yes, if I was not there, those three students could not have come in to see me, but does tha make up for the rest of it? I don’t know. It is a 25-minute commute each way to get to work, and I stay up there for around four hours at a time for office hours. And, for the most part, I sit there and do work. Or not. It depends on my mood, my attentiveness, my concentration, my guilt, and many other things as to whether a day in the office is a good, productive one, or a bad, unproductive one.
But that’s the thing, it doesn’t matter really one way or the other. I am going to get my work done, but I am not necessarily going to get it done during the hours I sit at work. As I am teaching exclusively online right now, there is no physical bounds on my work. It can be done anywhere and at any time. And, of course, being on campus on Tuesdays through Thursdays from 10am – 2pm is probably the least likely time that my online-only students are going to be working on the course material, meaning that I am most available at the time they are least likely to need my help. But it is the requirement at my community college that we hold on-campus office hours, so I am there. But, again, is it exciting? No. Is it necessary? Apparently. Is it worth it? That depends on the day.
So, when she asked me today, when I got home, if work was exciting, what did I say? Not really. I graded some essay exams. I went to lunch. That’s what I had to say. But, the reality is that I did much more than that. I got there a little before 10 and cleared my email inbox, answering emails from students, including two who wanted to drop the class (because it is now time to take the exam) and one who wanted me to look at drafts of the essay questions for the exam. I clicked through the rest of the emails, most of which required no specific action today but are things I want to look at later. I have a folder rule set up in Outlook to send all of the newsletters and informational emails to a folder to be read when I have the time and interest in reading them. Then I checked in on my online class, looking to see what had happened since I had last looked at the class the night before. I double checked what I had fixed at 8am this morning when the Testing Center had called with a question about the exam, where I had not set the closing time correctly. It was fixed correctly, luckily, and four more students had taken my exam since that point. I then checked to see if the fix that is due from the textbook publisher had come in that would allow me to grade the written submissions of my students had happened yet. And, it had not. So, the publishers’ program that I am class testing still does not allow me to grade what my students submitted, which is getting to be more and more of a problem. I went in to talk to my Dean about it, but he had taken the day off. So, I sent him an email about it. By that time, I had been there about 45 minutes, and so I took a few minutes off to do some random web surfing. I am in the office by myself by that point, so I had turned on some music to listen to. I then started grading. I can grade about 3 exams at a time before I have to take a break. So, in the time between when I started and when it was time to go to lunch, I got 9 exams graded. As the exam actually does not close until tonight, I figured that really wasn’t too bad overall, as I’m ahead of the game there.
I went to my usual Thursday afternoon lunch with some colleagues, and it was 1:30 by the time I got back to the office. I chatted about office politics and the like with some people in my office bay until it was time to go at 2. I made it home in time to help my wife get all of the kids ready to go to the grocery store with her. We then realized that our elder daughter had math tutoring to go to, so my wife took the other kids to the grocery store, and I took the one to the tutoring. I normally sit at Starbucks and work while my daughter is in tutoring, which is where I started this post. However, my wife had gotten locked out of the house, so I had to go back and let her in, leaving me to finish this post later in the day. I entertained the toddler while my wife made dinner, then I went back to get the other daughter from tutoring. We had dinner; I watered the flowerbeds and garden; I did some laundry; and now I sit down.
So, was the day exciting? You tell me, but this was fairly typical.
Thoughts on Teaching – Class-Testing a New Book – 6/4/2014
I am teaching this summer. The summer sessions are always interesting at a community college, as we get a completely different crop of students. While there are certainly a number of continuing students from the semesters, we also get a significant population of students who are attending a four-year university who take a class or two from us over the summer. Thus, in many cases, we get students who would not normally be in a community college here over the summer. I am not saying they are better students, although some certainly are, but they are definitely a completely different group of students.
This summer, I have decided to class test a new textbook. So often, the textbook choice time catches all of us completely off guard. We choose a new textbook every three years, and, so often, we start making that choice essentially at the last minute, relying on a quick glance at the book, a demo of the online material, and a visit from a rep. Sometimes that is enough to get a sense of a book and to choose a good one, but it has also led to some duds over the years. When approached this year about a new textbook from a different company than the one we are currently using, I decided to take it for a test drive to see how it might compare. I will leave the names of the companies out of this, but they are all major publishing companies for college history textbooks.
I am not trying out the new textbook and company because I think that what they offer is superior, I am trying it out because I do not have any idea if they are superior. We have used two different publisher’s books so far since I have been in my current teaching position, and I strongly disliked one and generally like the other. When this third company approached me, I couldn’t help but be interested because I want to see what is out there. I certainly have the time to go out and explore on my own, but if nothing is forcing me to, I probably won’t. So, a class test forces me to delve into a different book and online system in more detail. It also allows me to see how it actually works in practice.
I have launched on this with full openness to my students that this is a class test. They have to know it anyway, as only this class has a different textbook than the others, as we use a common department textbook. However, I also wanted to let them know, as I want their feedback as well. It is just as important to me that the textbook and online system be manageable and accessible to them as it is that it be something that works for me. It could be the best book in the world, but if they can’t deal with it, it is a failure.
The summer session started this week, and I have kept the students completely informed about the changes and expectations. In my course outline, this is how I explained it to them:
Over the course of the summer session, we will cover the first 15 chapters of the textbook, which is what is included in Volume 1. This section is what I am class-testing this summer. Thus, all of the assignments in this section are new to me, just as they are new to you. I will be working through them along with you, and I will be evaluating them from my own historical perspective as well as looking at your own responses and performance in this section. We class-test material such as this both to ensure that we are using the best possible material for our classes at Weatherford College and to evaluate new content that we have not seen before.
What that means for you is that the material is presented to you in a way that explores all of the different options available from XX [censored to not show what book I am using]. What I have seen appears to be a manageable amount of material, but I will be evaluating as I go along in case what is here is too much. I am very happy to change if necessary, as this is all about testing out the material, both in quantity and quality. I also will be looking at how the material is assigned and accessed. It appears to be fairly obvious what material is due when, and it appears to be clear what assignments you need to do. If there is a problem, I will work with the material to try to figure out what is going on. As of right now, the material is organized by chapter, with the exception of the introductory assignments at the top.
Again, I want to be as open with them, so that I can evaluate the book and they can evaluate the book. That way, when our choice comes up next spring, I can talk about not only the book we are currently using but another one as well. We can all make an informed choice at that point and come up with the best possible outcome for our department and our students.
Thoughts on Teaching – A New Semester and a New Beginning – 1/31/14
It seems like I am always starting blog posts off with an apology for not having written in a while. Since the birth of our daughter 15 months ago, spare time has been harder and harder to come by. However, she is settling down into a good routine, so I hope to do better this semester. I had hoped, after the post in November to be back on track, but shortly after that, we had a major family health issue come up that pushed out non-essential items. Now I think things have settled down, and I hope to be going again with my blog.
So, here we are, with a new semester (three weeks in but, hey, what can you do about that). I have, yet again, been given a double overload in classes, meaning that I am teaching 7 classes this semester for the second semester in a row. I have 4 online sections and 3 hybrid sections. My online sections are running as they always do. I am in roughly the 5th year of my current configuration of my online class, as so they can largely run without much effort on my part. That is one of the truths about online classes, that they are very involved and difficult to get going, but they can run pretty easily once you get them done. However, if you have followed my blog so far, you will see that I am rarely satisfied with how my classes are going. My online class is far overdue for a reworking, and I hope to start thinking about it this summer. I have made some changes over the last 5 years on the margins, moving assignments around and changing a few things here and there. However, I think it’s about time for an overhaul soon. And, the model that I will use for my overhaul are my hybrid classes.
I have started getting my hybrid class really going in the direction that I like. I am in the second year of working with this new hybrid format, and I am adjusting and working with the class as it moves forward. Following what I worked with last, this semester, I have moved into a model of weekly work and a long paper at the end. There are no exams, although I do have some chapter quizzing going on. The big part of the grade (about 45% overall) is discussion based, both online and in-class. Then, to keep the students on track, I have weekly, one-page response papers. I have returned to this model from what I did the first year, because I tried not having response papers last semester, and I found that students did not do the work if I did not hold them directly responsible. So, I am hoping that this semester they will do more of the work I expect them to do outside of class. I don’t have any great desire to grade weekly papers, but I want my students doing the work, and their grades will improve (hopefully).
As I have this hybrid model settled in well, I think I can use a lot of the ideas from this format in my online course. I would like to move beyond the exam model and include a lot more activities and discussions. Right now, the online class is primarily made up of reading lectures and the textbook and taking quizzes and exams. That is exactly the format that I have moved away from in my hybrid class, and I would like to move the online class beyond it as well. I hope that I get it together relatively soon.
Anyway, that’s a good start for the semester. Wish me luck.
Thoughts on Teaching – Failing the Semester – 11/26/2013
Yes, this sounds like I am going to talk about my students failing this semester, and, to be honest, I will in a roundabout way. However, in reality, what I am writing about is my own failure this semester. I tried something new, as I do every semester. And, I can honestly say that it has not worked. I feel like I have failed the students, although, in reality what I have done is to make it easier for them to fail themselves. As there is so much pressure on us to help the students succeed, I certainly do feel that I have done them a disservice and made at least a few of my students less successful that they would have otherwise been.
What I did this semester was I did not assign weekly writing assignments to check and make sure the students were doing the work they were supposed to. To be clear, I did assign chapter readings and chapter work, so I was checking up on whether they were doing that part of the work. However, as a part of the hybrid-class model that I am using, the students have extra work each week, whether it be watching a documentary, reading some extra piece, or even completing a history game. Last year, I consistently had the students complete a response paper each week. This mostly was used to check on whether they had completed the work they were supposed to and provided a basis for a regular check and grade on their work each week. In the evaluation of the course last year, I heard back from students that, while they did not like writing something every week, they felt that it was helpful in making sure they were doing the work they were supposed to. The students said that they felt more prepared to discuss the material when they had been required to write a response paper about it.
With that said, it would seem stupid for me to not assign those response papers this semester, but, when it came down to what my weekly workload would look like, I chose to take them out. I was assigned an extra class at the last minute this semester, meaning that I am teaching 7 classes this semester. Five of those classes are online, and so they are not affected by this change. It is only in my two hybrid classes that I decided to try running the class without the weekly responses. I was afraid of what the teaching load would look like if I added those extra grading pieces each week, and so I left them out. In retrospect, this was a bad idea. For one, my students have been noticeably less prepared this semester than last year. I have had to send them away twice this semester when I did go and check on whether they had done the assigned work, only to discover that they had not. The other reason this was a bad idea is that I have not been as burdened this semester by an extra class as I thought I would be. So, I could have easily done the response papers with little consequence on my overall work load.
What this leaves me with is that fact that I made students less likely to succeed, despite both knowing that they would do better with regular checks on what they were doing and despite having the time for the resulting grading. This is why I see this as a failure on my part. The check that I had built into the semester for them doing the extra work to prepare for class was that they have a discussion grade for the class that counts for 25% of the overall grade. It turns out that this grade is too abstract for the students to care about on a weekly basis. The level of participation has been lower this semester, and the quality of participation has been low as well. Given the opportunity to have no checks on whether they have done the work or not, most students have chosen not to do the work and not be prepared for class. I know this should come as no surprise, and, if I had thought it through more, I would have easily realized this. This, again, is why I put the failure on myself. I did put out the rope for my students to either grab on to or hang themselves with, and most of my students chose the latter.
I do not know how this class will fall out at the end, but I have a feeling that my grades and pass rates are going to be horrendous for the hybrid classes this semester. Obviously, I know what to do to fix it next semester. However, it still sits heavily on me that I have let these students fail out when I could have done something to help them. Sigh.
Thoughts on Education – Reflecting at the Drop Deadline – 11/17/13
OK. I know. I have not posted in a while. Shortly after the last post, I started my big grading session. I had about 90 essays, 90 essay exams, and about 150 discussion forum grades to determine. All of that took me a good part of two weeks, leaving me worn out afterwards. I did not post during that time, and, as I did not post then, I keep putting off posting again, because I think I need to go back and catch up on that period. However, I have finally just given up on that and am going to just move forward with the blog here and not worry about trying to catch up or recount. There are a few things that I will go back and talk about, so you will see some of that over the next couple of blogs here. However, today I’m going to write about that terrible point in the fall semester — the drop deadline.
The drop deadline in the fall semester at a community college is a very meaningful deadline. So many of our students are not necessarily meant for college, as we are an institution that allows people to try out college for cheap and see if it works for them. It is not unusual for me to lose a lot of students by the drop deadline, and I am not out of line from the norms in our department or among the various standard, introductory courses that our students take. As to who drops, there is no direct profile, as they come from all types. However, the most common drops are those who have simply stopped coming to class. This can be a large number of students overall, as I often have 50% or less attendance in any of my face-to-face classes by this point in the semester.
What is sad, though, is how many students have stopped coming by this point and do not drop. So, while I do sign a number of drop slips by students, a larger number of students will just take their failing grade by this point in the semester rather than drop. Some of this may be because of the relatively new restrictions on the number of withdrawals you can have in a college career, which is either 5 or 6, if I remember correctly. After that, you cannot drop a class, leaving you taking the F anyway. So, some students may figure that it is not worth it at this point to waste a W. However, I don’t think that is the big reason, as most of the students that I see are first-semester college students who are not thinking at all about their long-term college career. They are just starting and not thinking about their college career and not worried about the number of withdrawals.
I think the bigger reason why drops are so common is that they are seen as so easy. The students can drop all the way up until mid-November, over two-thirds of the way through the semester. They can mess around in a class and see a lot of their progress before having to make any decision about dropping. So, they are able to keep putting off their decision until what is, in reality, the last minute. This should be an advantage for students, as they have many opportunities to succeed and should only have to drop when they have exhausted every possibility of getting a good grade in class. The reality is different, however. What I hear over and over from students is that they drop the classes when they get hard. They drop them when they get too busy with other things. They drop because they just don’t feel like going to class anymore. In fact, for a lot of the students that I see, the reasons for dropping are anything but the fact that they have tried their hardest and just come up short at the very end. I’m not denying that some students are like that, but it really does seem that the majority of what I see are students who get out when the going gets tough. The problem with that, as I see it, is that college is going to be hard. And, if students learn that they can get out when it gets hard, then they are learning a lesson that will not serve them well in their continuing education. As well, it is what leads to longer and longer periods in school. If students drop and drop and drop, they take that much longer to get a degree. The two-year degree we offer at my community college usually takes longer than two years, as students take 12 hours or less in a semester and drop classes regularly. Then, if they transfer, it takes longer there as well. All of that means larger college fees and larger student loan bills.
I guess my real objection is philosophical to the lenient drop policies. Again, I understand why they are this way, and I’m not going to get on a moral high horse and say that, back in my day, we did not consider dropping classes. But I do think that students are not given the incentive or reason to power through their classes and force themselves to succeed over time. I think it is too easy to drop and too easy to say that things are just a bit too hard, and to try again at a later point. I think it contributes to the rising student loan bills and the growing number of people who start but never complete college.
What do you think? Am I being fair, or is this just my perspective as a professor that does not take into account other realities out there. Let me know in the comments.
Thoughts on Teaching – Wrapping up the first Unit – 10/3/2013
Week 5 in my hybrid class was the final class of the first Unit of the semester. So, we have essentially finished a third of the class to this point. In wrapping up the Unit, I tried to do two things. First, I took some time out to talk about research. Second, I set up a discussion about what united and divided the colonies in the lead up to the Revolution.
For the first part of the class, I started what will eventually be a three-part series on how to write a history paper. This is something that I find we do not do at the college level. (And, based upon what I see, is never taught before college either.) The only class where we actually teach students how to write is the introductory English class, and the only class where we teach students research is the second English class they take. Since my students are often taking my class concurrently with the English classes, they may or may not have any of these skills by the time they are writing for me. And, in the past, I have generally assumed that my students will be able to write effectively for me without ever teaching them how. In fact, I think that is how it is generally approached in most non-English classes — namely that we give them a paper topic and the next time we see anything from them is when they turn in the final draft. We just assumed they could do that without any guidance. However, the quality of the writing from that method was always rather poor, and the opportunities to teach them how to fix their problems only came in the comments left on their writing, which most students never read anyway.
So, I have embarked on a mission to try and teach them what it means to write a history paper and what it means to use historical sources in a paper. Some of this comes from my college’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), where we are to teach research methods throughout the college. But it has also come just because I have grown sick and tired of never getting what I am looking for from my students. This first presentation, which you can see below, concentrates in on two things — the need for an argument and the method for reading and understanding primary sources. I started with the failings of high school education at teaching students how to make a historical argument, and I talked about what it means to make an argument. I showed them the difference between what I call an information dump paper, where you try to get everything you know down on the paper in the hopes that you hit the points the teacher will be looking for, and an argument paper, where you have an organized and coherent argument that runs throughout the paper. Then, I took them through a 9-point method for reading primary sources. This is key because students have very little experience reading documents from the past. They generally pick them up, read them, find them incomprehensible, and then put them down. Thus, when we assign them to read something, they come away seeing it as unnecessary torture to read something that they are not going to understand anyway. So, I take them through how they should be approaching a document, especially in getting them to think about the context of the document as a way to see why it might be something important. I stressed to them that I do not assign things out of spite or sadism but instead assign things that emphasize the ideas I am trying to get across in the course. I also talked about how it is important to try to read the document as if you were there in the past rather than as someone from today reading something in the past. This is a difficult thing to do, but it can help the students understand why I would assign something for them to read. As an example of this, I talked about William Penn’s “Plan for a Union” from 1697. That was something I had assigned for them to read, and it is something that is difficult and largely opaque to the students. What I pointed out to them was that if you considered the source and context, it could be a very interesting document, since it is a document that calls for political union among the colonies many decades before the Revolution.
Here is the PowerPoint that I used to hit these themes in my class: SourcesPresentation1. I don’t know how successful it was to talk to the students about these ideas, but I think it is important.
Going through those parts took between 30-40 minutes in each class. That left only about 35-45 minutes for the rest of the discussion. I put two columns on the board — Unites and Divides — and had the students talk about what they would put in each column to show the things that united the colonies and the things that divided the colonies. This is part of the bigger Semester Project that the students are working on, where they are asked to eventually write a long paper on the subject of whether we can consider the colonies/United States as united or divided. The main goal, and one that was met in all of the classes, was to get the students to see that all of the major issues could realistically be put in both the unites and divides column. As a specific example, I took the topic of religion. I wrote on the board the statement that the American colonies were founded on the Christian religion. Then we talked about how that could be seen as both true and false. The true part, of course, comes from the fact that 99.5+% of the people who formed the colonies were Christian, all of whom believed in the same God and read the same Bible. Colonial society, politics, and the like were all taken from a context of a people who shared very similar beliefs. Then, we talked about what might make that statement not true, namely that, despite all being Christian, the colonists were all from vastly different sects and backgrounds. In fact, many of the dominant sects very explicitly opposed each other and found the beliefs of each to be quite abhorrent. In fact, the varieties of religion could be considered to be so vast that calling them a common group of Christians basically elides the reality of religion in the colonies. As one of the students put it, it is not really a question of Christian values, but of which set of Christian values. I was rather pleased with how the students grasped this concept overall, not just on religion, but on the broader idea that most major ideas could be both uniting and dividing.
The other thing that I wanted to cover in some detail, but largely ran out of time on, was the question of who we were talking about. When we consider the question of what made the colonies united or divided, we are mostly considering the white, European colonists. I raised the question at the very end of the class about whether we should also consider the slaves and the Native Americans. We ran out of time to talk about this in any detail, but I was happy that I, at least, got to put the idea in their heads.
Thoughts on Teaching – Talking about Religion – 9/28/2013
I am, again, late on discussing what I am doing on a week-by-week basis in my class. This week, my excuse is that we had an accident last Friday. In the rain, we hydroplaned on the freeway and were hit by an 18-wheeler. Everyone came out ok, but the car is going to be in the shop for a while. So, blogging has been kind of the last thing on my mind as we’ve been dealing with the fallout from the accident.
But, I do want to talk about what I am doing each week in my hybrid class, and so, this is what we did in Week 4, even though we just finished up Week 5. The topic for the class was — religion. I set up the discussion with a disclaimer. From my experience, religion is something that is just not discussed in much detail in most history classes, except in a mostly cursory manner. I will take out two of the classes this semester and talk exclusively about religion, once with the First Great Awakening and once with the Second Great Awakening. Yet, discussing religion in class is hard. It is an extremely personal subject, and it is hard to discuss it without people making it about themselves.
To set up the discussion, I had the students do two things — watch part 1 of a documentary called God in America and read a sermon from the First Great Awakening. As to discussion, we approached religion in two ways. First, we looked at the impact of the clash of religions between the arriving Europeans and the people who were already there. There were two basic things we took from that:
- That you cannot believe in a religion without believing that you are completely correct and that people who believe otherwise are wrong.
- That the idea of evangelicalism in religion is a difficult thing to achieve, as it is based upon the assumption that you simply have to tell people who have not heard the good word before simply have to hear about your religion and they will then convert.
With those two things as our base starting point, we worked from there. We discussed how religion shaped the colonies as they developed, looking at the assumptions on both sides and the rise of a religious idea in the colonies. We then moved rather quickly forward to the First Great Awakening, talking about what the older forms of religion had become by a century or so later and what the new ideas of the Great Awakening were. We talked about why the people in the Awakening felt that there was a religious problem in America by the mid-1700s and what their solution was. I did not do as good of a job here as I would have liked to, as I never really brought in the sermons explicitly. That’s a bad idea, as I need to hold the students directly responsible for the readings that I assign them. Still, the discussion went reasonably well, especially with the two points above in the bank already. We talked about the importance of the ideas of the Awakening in moving toward a new form of American religion as well as the push toward a break with old English ways that would be important for the ideas of the Revolution.
Overall, I think the class went reasonably well. We finished up tying everything back to the theme of unity or division in the colonies, and we left with the good historians answer — yes and no. The Awakening unified because it was a common experience among the colonists, yet it divided as the Awakening ended up dividing many in America over religious ideas. I closed everything with my final thoughts on the Awakening, that it was one of the most important pre-Revolutionary movements that is really not talked about very much in a lot of history classes.
As I mentioned above, the only problem I really have with it is that I did not actually directly discuss the documentary or the readings that much. I need to be holding them more directly responsible for the assignments that I have set for them. It is hard, as I know that a lot are not doing anything, yet, I am encouraging them not to do anything by not holding them responsible. It’s a bit of a catch-22.
Thoughts on Teaching – Presidential Visit – 9/7/13
No, not that president. I’m not that important. The college president stopped by and visited my class on Thursday. He did this last school year as well. I asked my Dean about that last year, and he said that the president considered it to be his right to stop in and see any class he wants to. At the same time, I don’t know of anyone else who has been visited, and I certainly don’t know of anyone who has had two visits in two years.
What was interesting, however, is that, unlike last year, the president talked to me this year afterwards, in an email. He made three observations:
- The students showed a striking lack of critical thinking.
- There was one student who was very disruptive.
- There was one student who was smoking a vapor cigarette in class.
So, how did I address those things.
For the first one, I confirmed what he saw. I said that students come to us from high school with very limited skills. They have very minimal critical thinking, writing, or reading skills. The nature of high school history in my state is dismal, with history generally being one of my students’ least favorite classes when they come to my class. Then, I talked about what I do with my students, that this is one of the big things that I emphasize over the course of my class, and that it is a very slow process to teach them something that they have not successfully learned in the 12 years before that. I also said that if I have the chance, that I generally see the biggest improvements when I have them for two semesters at a time. This is absolutely true. The students who stick with me and work through the assignments in my class over two semesters come out stronger. I’m not trying to brag, but when I can work with the same student for a whole school year, I can really start to make a difference.
On the second one, it was easy. I have an autistic student, and I have been warned by the college that he is likely to be disruptive. As he has as much of a right as any other student to be in my class, I have to manage it as best I can. The president agreed that I was doing the best job I could on that one.
The third took a bit of back and forth. The school policy is no tobacco products, and we have no policy on the vapor cigarettes. They apparently give off a water vapor when smoked, and, when I first saw it, I thought we had a fire in the classroom. After it was explained to me what it is, I really had no idea what to do with it, so I decided to let it go. However, the president was adamant that I should have stopped it in class, as it could be considered a distraction. What I replied back is that when we have no policy on those things specifically, then I really don’t know what to do about it. And, so, the result of that is that, as of Friday, we now have a policy on them that says we do not allow them in class.
So, it was an interesting day. Again, I don’t know if there’s any agenda in the president visiting my class two years in a row. But, like so many other things, I don’t really have any choice in the matter, and so, like so many other things, this is what we do.
Thoughts on Education – Teaching Mistakes 2 – 8/9/2013
Here’s my second post covering the ideas of teaching mistakes from the this article. You can find Part 1 here, where I talked about the ideas behind this post and detailed the ones that I agreed with.
In this post, I wanted to note the ones that I feel are either misguided, incorrect, or just do not work for me. In a list of the 67 worst teaching mistakes as posted by actual instructors, there are going to be a lot of general ideas that work and specific advice that people have that works for them but is not applicable in the broader sense. Most of what I have here fall into the latter category, as in something that one person has discovered that they think is a truth, while it, in reality, is really only relevant to very specific circumstances. The other big category are the overly broad pieces of advice. We have all fallen into that category before, someone asks for you opinion on something, and you give them a general statement. Then, it’s published somewhere, and you think to yourself that you should have said something more specific. Or, maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the ones that I think are misses from the list:
1. Lacking professional variety – I wish we all had this choice. Where I teach, I am allowed to teach two classes. So, I teach them over and over. It would be nice to follow this advice, but some of us have no choice.
5. Failing to see the influence of Cultural Imperialism – OK, so this made me throw up in my mouth a little. I can absolutely see exactly who this person is, as I knew many in graduate school. They are so tied up into theory and the like that they have forgotten how to just teach students. They are so concerned with having all of the latest things at their disposal that they lose track of what they are doing. What’s more, they lose track completely of how to teach undergraduates, who could care less about all of this.
15. Making a course so easy that almost no learning takes place – This one is not bad at all, but the type of people who would do this are not going to be reading a post about teaching or ever think about reading about education, pedagogy, or the like. They care so little anyway that this advice is useless.
25. Not knowing every student’s name by the second week of class – OK. I fail at this every semester. I teach 80 students in class and 120 online every semester and 90 students online every summer. I wish my brain worked to where I could remember them, but not all of us work this way. I have never had a student complain about this, and I am not sure how relevant it is.
34. Adopting a new strategy just because it is popular, or everybody is doing it, without thinking it through as to whether you really are committed to that strategy – This one is so general as to be dangerous. The idea is not bad, but it also can lead to never changing at all. I see more people in academia who are convinced they know it all and always do things the same way no matter what more than I see people who fail at this I would like to see more people take chances and do something new, even if it happens to be popular rather than having people still lecturing from the same notes they copied from their professors in grad school.
35. Making a hard and fast deadline for every major assignment and allowing no make-up or extra-credit alternatives to meeting course objectives – Honestly, it was this one that inspired me to divide this post into two parts. I mean, come on. If you have no deadlines and no consequences, what is the purpose of teaching? I see this attitude that there should never be any consequences in the education my kids are getting now. They can turn in anything, anywhere, at any time, and with no consequences. If all we want is for everyone to complete with an A, then why not let this happen. But, when students get out into the real world, they are going to find that there are deadlines, and that there are consequences for not meeting them. By being infinitely flexible, you are setting them up to expect that in everything. The “get things done when you can” attitude is a killer in real life. I have strict deadlines with no make up and minimal extra credit. However, I am not blind to the fact that students do lead busy lives, especially for nontraditional students. What I do then is have everything open for multiple days and have a syllabus that is laid out clearly from the beginning so that they have plenty of time to finish the material and can plan ahead.
37. Ignoring the Affective Domain – Again, I might gag a bit here.
59. Destroying the students’ inborn, natural desire to learn through competition and grades – Ahh . . . to be young and idealistic. Oh wait, the person who wrote this is retired. So, yeah, no grades would be nice, except then how do you decide who succeeds and who fails? Oh, yes, I will just magically know. And, I’m sure that when I decide, based upon my own intuition, who has succeeded and who has not, I’m sure that no students will protest that at all. Teaching at a community college, I get very few students who are there because of their “inborn, natural desire to learn.” Instead, they are there for a concrete goal, and my required survey course is an inconvenient step along the way that they have to survive. While I don’t necessarily believe that everyone needs a college education, if we left it up to only those with an inherent desire to learn our subjects, I imagine most of us would be out of a job quickly. As well, I think this swerves dangerously toward a very elitist system of education, like the early stages of college education, where the only people who get an advanced education are those well off enough to not have to work.
OK. That’s about it for now. I could hit more, but I’m a bit tired and have a headache, so I will stop there. Thoughts?
Thoughts, Ideas, Ramblings, and Other Things 