March 2010

I am now at three phone interviews this hiring season.

Maybe: 3
No: 2

I was the last phone interview (again) for a place. I think it went well.

They asked me:
1. Why would you want to teach at a small college?
2. How have you used technology in your classroom?
3. How do you deal with the challenge of people of diverse ages in the classroom?
4. Discuss a specific situation where you helped a student who was struggling.
5. How have you contributed to the department/school outside of teaching?
6. Discuss one of your assignments and how it matches your teaching philosophy. (I went WAY over on this one. And the phone cut out, so they had to call me back on my office phone.)

I asked them what they liked about the school. They said:
family feeling at the school
know all the faculty and work closely with them
flexibility to try new things and tweak if something doesn’t work
everyone (staff, faculty) jumps in to get the job done, step outside their job description

I also asked them to discuss their student population, which was much as I thought it was.

I have to say that after talking to them I am much more inclined to like their school. They had a lot of good things to say and they really like their work. I would love to be a part of a school where the faculty feel that way.

Not only did I have an article accepted, but the editor wrote a wonderfully positive note about it. The note included (among other things) this statement, which made me smile:

I’m pleased to inform you that I’d like to publish it in the journal. Our review process for these short pieces is, obviously, rather streamlined. When I read one of these, slap myself in the forehead, and say, “Now why haven’t you been doing this all along, dummy?”, then it’s pretty clear it ought to be published. I’ve already added the three websites [referenced in the manuscript] to my bookmarks.

The “What Works for Me” article will be published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College sometime soon.

When trying to get accepted at a conference, especially an important one in your discipline, there is a tendency to over apply. That is, if you can speak twice, you apply for four slots in the hopes that at least one will be accepted. You want to speak and doubling your chances seems like a good idea.

I do not recommend this for a couple of reasons.

1. You don’t know that you aren’t going to get acceptances to more than you can speak at. You don’t want to have to turn people down and have them notice that you are there speaking. That’s a problem. You will gain a negative reputation.

2. If they all turn you down, it will hurt even worse.

What I recommend instead:

1. Pick the two you most want (or need, for the sake of your career) to do.

2. Look up sources for background on the topic you want to present.

3. Begin putting the paper together. Concentrate on the links to the information already out there.

4. Now create your abstract, citing relevant sources.

Personal experience:

Last year I applied for multiple slots at a conference. I didn’t realize there was a limit. I received a “no” and was relieved. I didn’t want them all accepted. Then I received three yeses. It wasn’t until the third yes that I learned you could only do one. I had to back out of two.

You do not want to have to do that.

Wish I always took my own advice.

Jakob Nielsen has anarticle on Low Literacy Users.

I think this might be very helpful for developmental writing students as well.

lower-literacy users can’t understand a text by glancing at it. They must read word for word and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words.

Then, there is this point:

lower-literacy users often simply pick the first hit on the list, even if it’s not the most appropriate for their needs.

This explains why sometimes students have a hard time finding sources.

I wonder how much this would apply to college composition courses:

usability isn’t a small tweak at the margins — it doubles a website’s ability to meet its goals.

I enjoyed CEA. I just got home, about ten minutes ago.

I heard some really good presentations. Laura Brandenburg from Tech gave an excellent presentation the last session. Arleta Craft had some great ideas. Do I want to write a novel in a month while my students look on? Sean and Alice from UT-Austin made me think I should go back to school and take their classes, so I can offer them later.

My session went well. Five folks from the two colleges I teach at were at CEA as well. I didn’t go to any of their presentations, though.

People aren’t reading online.

They’re skimming.

With that in mind, your goal should be to make your text easy to scan.

Highlight keywords*
Use meaningful headings and subheadings
Use bulleted lists
Limit paragraphs to one idea
Use the inverted pyramid, putting the most important information at the beginning
Use fewer words
Use simple, clear language; readers hate marketese and gobbledygook

found on Writing, Clear and Simple

See also Jakob Nielsen’s Writing for the Web tips.

Update: I have added this to the graduate students category because if the students are writing on the net for future schools or employers to read, this is important stuff to know.

I had a twenty minute teaching demo on critical thinking. I did my ethos lecture, with the handout and the lego blocks. The students do better with the legos than the teachers did.

They asked 12 questions. Let’s see how many I can remember:

1. How does your teaching demo relate to your view of writing classroom instruction?

2. What have you done for your department/college outside of teaching?

3. What class would you like to teach that you haven’t taught or haven’t taught for a while?

4. If you were given $1500 for development, what would you spend it on?

5. How have you helped your students?

6. What would you do differently now about question 5?

7. Do you have any questions for us?

8. How have you dealt with diversity in your classroom?

9. How have you dealt with technology in your classroom? What else would you like to do with technology in your classroom?

They told me they would call me whether I was moving on in the process or not. It will be a while though, because their last interview isn’t till April 6. I figure I won’t hear for at least a week after that.

Note: I believe they have six on-campus interviews.

Soldiers in the Classroom by Mike Rose at Inside Higher Ed addresses the situation the MLA session I was in, Trauma and the Composition Classroom, was expected to comment on. Instead, the papers the session received were other topics related to trauma.

However, the article has some interesting points:

What the classroom full of veterans wanted most was, as one of them put it, “to help our families understand what we went through.” The course was in communication, and it was part of an educational program for veterans of the Vietnam war. The teacher – my colleague in the federally funded program – had asked them what they most wanted to learn, and that was their primary answer: to explain to those closest to them the hell they endured….