July 2008

Think of it as an interview.

How can you show that you are a good teacher?

The students don’t know who you are. They assume some credibility because you are teaching their class, but they don’t know how far they can trust you. Let them know.

Create a shortened form of a resume (not a vita) on the board, an overhead, or on the computer. Give them your education, your teaching experience, and (especially if that is limited) any other relevant experience. This will let them know that you are an expert.

Why are you a good teacher for this class?

Tell them specifically why you are a good teacher of this topic. (If you aren’t, leave this part out.) For my comp students, I tell them that I have a PhD in rhetoric. For my literature students, I tell them I am a voracious reader and have studied a lot of literature.

Let them know some things you have in common.

If you are an alumni of the school, let them know.

If you can relate to them on difficulties in learning English (or any topic), let them know. I always tell my students that I don’t expect that everyone in this class will get As, though I think most of them can. I tell them that sometimes a C is the very best work the student can do and that, if that is true for them, they should be proud of it. Then I tell them about two Cs I made that I am very proud of (Genetics and Geometry). I do not tell them about the two Cs I am not proud of. They don’t need to know that. But I tell them how hard I had to work in the classes and how difficult it was for me. I tell them that I didn’t give up and that, in Genetics at least, I was one of only 9 students who finished the course out of 70 who started.

If you are taking classes while you are teaching, let them know. It’s good for them to know that this is a job for you and that your education continues.

Show your humanity.

Students like to know you are “real,” but they don’t want you to spend the whole class period all the time telling about your baby or your grandbaby or your tabby. I introduce my family when I tell my students about my experience as a homeschooling mother and then I say that both my sons are now in college. I don’t talk about them all the time, but I let them know that I am a person as well as a teacher.

Gary Rubinstein has a good discussion of how to tell if your students are getting in. Don’t just ask if there are any questions.

A lot more effective is to make up a question and ask a random student. If the random student gets it right, there’s a better chance than if you just call on the kid with her hand flailing. (At the bottom of this post I have a cool way to use Excel to generate a random name list)

If you really want to know if everyone gets it, you should ask one of the weaker students a question. If that student knows it, it’s likely most of the class does. I like the random student better since I don’t want the weaker student to think I’m picking on him.

But the best, and most fun for the students, way to instantly assess your entire class is to get a class set of mini-white boards. These are the greatest. You give each kid an 8 by 11 white board with a pen and a little eraser. Then you ask a question and have the class write their answers and hold them up. It’s like a game show.

Of course these questions need to be pretty low level on Bloom’s Taxonomy questions, but that’s OK. It’s still a great tool.

He also has a place to get cheap white boards. Very cool.

from Taylor Mali, a slam poet:

He’s not a college teacher, so some of this does not apply, but it is an encouraging presentation.

Note: Adult language.

MIT has an article up that I found very interesting.

* High-level skills in communication, computation, technological literacy, and information retrieval to enable individuals to gain and apply new knowledge and skills as needed

* The ability to arrive at informed judgments-that is, to effectively define problems, gather and evaluate information related to those problems, and develop solutions

* The ability to function in a global community through the possession of a range of attitudes and dispositions including flexibility and adaptability, ease with diversity, motivation and persistence (for example, being a self-starter), ethical and civil behavior, creativity and resourcefulness, and the ability to work with others, especially in team settings

* Technical competence in a given field

The first bullet point will, I believe, easily be met/enhanced by good English classes. I do not think a single class can do this, but a series of good English classes easily good.

In addition, the second should also be part of the education process in a good writing course.

In some ways, even the third can be and is taught in English class.

That’s a lot of goals to stuff into a single English class. But I’ve seen it done and done effectively.

Technical competence must obviously be taught within its own field.

The Chronicle Review talks about an economics book by two Harvard professors that says that the US is no longer educating its population well and that is why the demand for college educated students has risen.

Couple of points:
1. Have we ever educated our whole population well?
2. High school is different from college, generally. Though if you went to an excellent high school and a terrible college, you might not have found it so.
3. Why is this about expanding college rather than fixing high school?
4. My husband’s boss only hires college grads to fold boxes because he figures if you can get through four years of school, you have learned to come to work and can fold boxes. The boss only has a high school education, but he knows his own work ethic. He doesn’t know anyone else’s, so he uses college to tell.

Got Medieval has a story (about what the students thought of medieval) and a challenge (How would you sum it up?)

The story is charming and frustrating at the same time. And the end of that section made me smile.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t tell this story to shame my students–or, rather, I don’t tell it merely to shame my students (who you shouldn’t feel too bad for, since almost all of them left the course with A’s or A-’s, because, hey, that’s Yale). I tell the story at cocktail parties to lawyers to make them feel better about what they don’t know about the Middle Ages. And I tell it here on my blog, because I’m actually curious about this one. If I had to boil it down to seven, what are the seven things that people ought to know about the Middle Ages?

My history buff son:
feudal lords, princes, priests, Crusades, armor, castles
“What defines the Middle Ages is warfare and kings. And priests.”

My first thoughts:
black plague, Church control, fall of women’s rights, Crusades, Magna Carta, laws, Vikings

It appears that there is a confluence of the Old English/Anglo-Saxon period with the Middle Ages by the reader. Being an Old English buff, I would not normally do that. It would be way more fun to separate them because then you get fourteen words.

I think I finally came up with

laws: common law, St. Augustine and Aethelred, Magna Carta
Church: Crusades, saints, and monasteries
rise and fall of women’s rights
black plague
books: kennings, alliteration, plays, romances
conquest: Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans
feudalism

Community College Dean has a post on limiting adjuncts to a certain number of classes.

I have been working on responding to it and writing about it here, but my mind goes in a dozen different directions so I haven’t been very coherent. I am starting over.

1. Why do we have adjuncts?

Originally, I believe, the adjunct position was created so that people who were professionals in their field could teach a few classes. So, for example, my father could teach a corporate law course and A’s husband could teach an engineering class.

This benefits the students by giving them “real world” teachers and benefits the school by adding some prestige to a department that cannot, perhaps, afford to hire a big name corporate attorney or a six figure engineer.

Now, however, adjuncts are a financial decision. As a college administrator, for example, I can pay Dr. Davis $1600 per course to teach eight courses a year and she makes $12,800. Or I can hire Dr. Davis full-time to teach ten courses and she makes $50,000, not including benefits. For the same cash cost, I can hire 2.5 part-time adjuncts and have almost 2.5 times the class coverage. That is great for the college.

2. Why the caps on course load for adjuncts?

Here’s what happens if the caps are on:
An adjunct who is trying to make a living takes three classes at college 1, because that is how many they allow. She teaches TTh afternoon and a T and a Th night.

Then she goes to college 2 where she teaches three classes. It is thirty minutes from her home instead of ten and she goes from 8 am TTh until 1:30 and then she eats lunch and heads for her other school.

She is now making $9600 a semester.

This is not enough to live on in any major city in the US, which is where she lives so that she can be around lots of colleges, so she goes to another and teaches three classes there…

And very soon you get “burnt out adjunct” who moves on to something else. Which is financially the best choice for the adjunct. But a motivated teacher is lost to the world. (Who else but a motivated teacher would live that way?)

Here’s what I’ve seen happen when the caps are taken off:
If the college hired full-time-part-time adjuncts (as one of my colleges calls it), giving them a full course load and office hours, and only paid $10,000 a semester, then the adjunct makes $20,000 and the full-time teacher makes $50,000. That’s good. The college has saved $30,000. But the adjunct can’t support her family on $20,000, so even though she has a full five-course load, she also has to teach somewhere else.

She takes an extra three classes at another college and makes an additional $5,000 a semester, which allows her to buy insurance for her family.

Now she’s working as an adjunct at two colleges and she’s surviving.

There’s no reason for either college to pay her more and there’s not a whole lot of an incentive for her to do something else.

So she does more work than her colleagues for a little bit more than half the money.

And when she gets the scut courses, the service courses, the classes at the odd times that no one else wants to teach, she knows that even the work she does isn’t valued.

Anyone would be welcome as long as they have a master’s and eighteen hours in her field. They don’t even have to be a good teacher.

3. If the pay bites so badly, why does anyone become an adjunct?

Some people become adjuncts to pass on their love for the field. These are people, again, like my father or my friend’s husband. They are the historical adjuncts and they are a blessing to any college.

Some people become adjuncts because they have a full-time job and want to make a little extra money. These are the people who are usually teachers at the local high school or at another college. They come and adjunct to have money to go out to eat or take a vacation. These people are also a blessing because they are already dedicated teachers.

Some people become adjuncts because they have a full-time avocation and want either the more adult interaction or some extra money. This is how I became an adjunct. As a full-time mother, I felt shut off from adults. Even eighteen year olds are more mature (usually) than six year olds. But I didn’t want a full-time position because I felt being a mother was my full-time work. These people are good for the college because they can bring the passion of a full-timer with the freshness of a part-timer.

And some people, the ones the caps most matter to, become adjuncts because they don’t have a full-time job. They might be in an area with lots of high credentials, such as a small town with a major university and faculty spouses abound, or they might be in a field where there is a surplus, such as English, or they might have a commitment to a certain area where full-time jobs are all filled by relatively young faculty and so there are no openings. These people want a full-time job. Perhaps they need the money and do not want to leave teaching. Perhaps they don’t know what else they could do. Perhaps there are no full-time jobs of any sort in their area, because of the demographics or the economy.

Taking away the caps won’t matter for these people because they need full-time pay and unless you as a college are willing to let them teach eight classes a semester and two or four in the summer, then they’re going to be teaching somewhere else anyway.

1. Good Practice Encourages Contact.

Frequent faculty-institution contact is the most important factor in faculty motivation and involvement.

This lets out the adjunct faculty. Usually we see the boss one time a semester.

2. Good Practice Develops Reciprocity and Cooperation.

Good learning, like good work, is collaborative and social, not competitive and isolated.

Again this is often and easily a problem for adjuncts. We’re not in any groups, on any committees, or working any other way that gets us in touch with the teachers.

3. Good Practice Encourages Active Learning.

Faculty must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives.

I think this blogging helps with that.

4. Good Practice Gives Prompt Feedback.

Knowing what you know and don’t know focuses learning.

This is essential. I had a large group of students who went to large public university tell me that they didn’t get their English papers back till they had turned in three to five papers (depending on what teacher they had). That’s atrocious. I would hate it.

5. Good Practice Emphasizes Time on Task.

How an institution defines time expectations for students, faculty, administrators, and other professional staff can establish the basis of high performance for all.

6. Good Practice Communicates High Expectations.

Expect more and you will get more.

I like this idea. It worked well at CC2 this semester. But at CC1 it has been working less well in the evening classes.

7. Good Practice Respects Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning.

There are many roads to learning. People bring different talents and styles of learning to college.

Absolutely. But how do we pull them together in a single classroom?

Chickering, A.W., and Gamson, Z.F. (1991). Applying the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education . New Directions for Teaching and Learning. Number 47, Fall 1991. San Francisco : Jossey-Bass Inc.

The points via Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume VIII, Number II, Summer 2005
University of West Georgia, Distance Education Center

If you are going on the job search, only buy a suit as you have an on-site interview scheduled. Or, if you are having to come from out of town, buy only one per day at the interview.

I got carried away with my job search this last year and bought three suits. Two of them I wore to two interviews at the same school. The third one I bought because it was pretty.

It’s been only three months since the interview and I got out the third suit to try on. (I have a meeting as an adjunct at the college.) It is so loose it almost falls off.

So don’t buy suits in a euphoria thinking “I’m going to get this job!” And don’t buy more than you need.