Teaching

matt b

Indexing all opinion
Yes and I am technically an independent contractor so they can fire me at any time for any reason... bad evals can be one... I think I will get enough good reviews to get rehired for next quarter though, but still, nothing like real job security. And they are forecasting a smaller student next year so the future is not exactly bright. Our generation's lot in life I suppose. They "redeployed" a lot of faculty last year, including some of the most popular ones, to make way for cheap hires such as myself, morale is not exactly wonderful.

Hopefully I can stay since I don't have job experience doing anything else!

i used to be in that position- v. depressing.

where i work now, no-one leaves unless they retire (almost literally).

the canteen food is really shit though.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Yes and I am technically an independent contractor so they can fire me at any time for any reason... bad evals can be one... I think I will get enough good reviews to get rehired for next quarter though, but still, nothing like real job security. And they are forecasting a smaller student next year so the future is not exactly bright. Our generation's lot in life I suppose. They "redeployed" a lot of faculty last year, including some of the most popular ones, to make way for cheap hires such as myself, morale is not exactly wonderful.

Hopefully I can stay since I don't have job experience doing anything else!

From what I can tell about your methods, I bet your students adore you--I would also think kids in that age range 18-22 might swallow the learning pill a lot more easily if it's being administered by a hip young teacher.

Gavin/Matt B, do you think teaching at the secondary/post-secondary level is fulfilling in general? I think it may be the only thing I can actually stomach doing, but I have no real experience yet. At very least it's an excuse to continue learning yourself, right? Or is this too idealistic?
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
Gavin/Matt B, do you think teaching at the secondary/post-secondary level is fulfilling in general? I think it may be the only thing I can actually stomach doing, but I have no real experience yet. At very least it's an excuse to continue learning yourself, right? Or is this too idealistic?

i absolutely fucking love it.

for real.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
My new roommate teaches high school while he's finishing his MFA, and he loves it, even though he teaches in really rough neighborhoods--he said the hours are amazing and really leave him feeling like he has a life and time for his own creative pursuits outside of work. He also seems very chill and fulfilled by it all.

I tried the "make big bucks" thing and it made me miserable. I've never been around more utterly unhappy and petty people in my life than in the private-sector.
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
From what I can tell about your methods, I bet your students adore you--I would also think kids in that age range 18-22 might swallow the learning pill a lot more easily if it's being administered by a hip young teacher.

Gavin/Matt B, do you think teaching at the secondary/post-secondary level is fulfilling in general? I think it may be the only thing I can actually stomach doing, but I have no real experience yet. At very least it's an excuse to continue learning yourself, right? Or is this too idealistic?

Haha, "hip young teacher," hopefully that is going to favorably affect my evaluations. Today was mostly bitching and moaning because I told them there's no word bank on the midterm.

Overall it's pretty fulfilling, although the idealism gets checked at the door -- teaching is often very frustrating and exhausting. Patience was the first thing I learned when I started (I was tutoring). The humanities can be rough, since most college kids just want to get a degree so they can get a job (haha suckers!), and most take the classes because they're required and see it as a waste of time/money. I often feel like I am struggling to communicate the ENJOYMENT you can get out of appreciating complex lit/art/etc. which is probably due to my own limitations as an educator.

Nice things: often challenging, and no two days are exactly the same (no matter how much you wish they would be sometimes)... As far as continued learning, I dunno, I guess there's some of that going on -- I've certainly learned more about ancient Sumer because I have to teach about it now.

When you have a good class you feel like a million bucks afterwards though.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Haha, "hip young teacher," hopefully that is going to favorably affect my evaluations. Today was mostly bitching and moaning because I told them there's no word bank on the midterm.

Overall it's pretty fulfilling, although the idealism gets checked at the door -- teaching is often very frustrating and exhausting. Patience was the first thing I learned when I started (I was tutoring). The humanities can be rough, since most college kids just want to get a degree so they can get a job (haha suckers!), and most take the classes because they're required and see it as a waste of time/money. I often feel like I am struggling to communicate the ENJOYMENT you can get out of appreciating complex lit/art/etc. which is probably due to my own limitations as an educator.

Nice things: often challenging, and no two days are exactly the same (no matter how much you wish they would be sometimes)... As far as continued learning, I dunno, I guess there's some of that going on -- I've certainly learned more about ancient Sumer because I have to teach about it now.

When you have a good class you feel like a million bucks afterwards though.


This sounds pretty close to what I've imagined. I've also thought a lot about the ability to slide into administration as you get more advanced in years and experience, which has a lot of "career" (in the sense of mobility, ability to be promoted, etc.) potential-- if I ever end up being concerned with that.

Your course sounds like it covers quite a range of material! Do you get to choose your topics, or are they assigned by the department?
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
The topics were served up to me on a (last minute) platter, but there's always leeway in what you discuss. We covered Chicago house instead of Western Art music.... Now I've had "All Over My Face" in my head for 2 days.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Ahh, I wondered if that's how they did it.

I like the Arthur Russell version of that song, if it's the same one.
 

ripley

Well-known member
I'm feeling really hamstrung by being a teaching assistant. I'm a good explainer, but I can't really organize the section the way I would like because in the end they have to cover (and be tested on) the material the professor gives, on his schedule.

He's great, but he covers so much (US Constitutional History from 1750-2006), and so many students get lost that I spend a lot of time summarizing or getting them to figure things out, but the quick ones sometimes get bored. It's really hard when you have a range of skills (and languages) in the classroom.

Although I also love my research, I do really like teaching as much as I feel I have done it. I'm ready to make my own syllabus and get started on my own class though. Ah... the post-dissertation life.. whenever that will happen :/
 

Eric

Mr Moraigero
That's an interesting question---given a range of ability levels, should one pitch high or pitch low? I tend to go high on the theory that it's nicer for both groups: the smart ones get what they need and hopefully something that excites them, and (I think) it's more exciting for the slower ones as well to see something they otherwise wouldnt get a chance to (though you have to be careful to make sure everyone is more or less following along).

On the Japanese system, people are expected to work super hard through high school to pass entrance exams to univeersity, then when they arrive there they aren't required to do muich of anything. When you actually make them work they are a bit shocked (at least in humantiies). Havent let it stop me though---although I don't make my students read outside class much as it's a) unenforceable in this context and b) there is no good textbook in Japanese anyway for my area.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
I'm feeling really hamstrung by being a teaching assistant. I'm a good explainer, but I can't really organize the section the way I would like because in the end they have to cover (and be tested on) the material the professor gives, on his schedule.

He's great, but he covers so much (US Constitutional History from 1750-2006), and so many students get lost that I spend a lot of time summarizing or getting them to figure things out, but the quick ones sometimes get bored. It's really hard when you have a range of skills (and languages) in the classroom.

Although I also love my research, I do really like teaching as much as I feel I have done it. I'm ready to make my own syllabus and get started on my own class though. Ah... the post-dissertation life.. whenever that will happen :/

Didn't realize you were a TA, Ripley--do you mind if I ask which discipline you're studying? Don't want to just assume that you're doing history--would've guessed you for a Women's Studies scholar since you're so adept at that approach :)
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Havent let it stop me though---although I don't make my students read outside class much as it's a) unenforceable in this context and b) there is no good textbook in Japanese anyway for my area.

Your post reminds me of a couple professors whose pedagogical strategies seemed especially impressive (though I'm completely in the dark about teaching on in the professional level of pedagogical strategy, so clue me in if I'm way off base)--

One of my professors wrote out each entire class (the lecture portion, anyway, which came first--followed by the open forum discussion) as an outline on the chalk board, which was the exact outline he had written as the basis for his somewhat improvisational style. He asked that we copy it verbatim every week as our notes, with any of our own reactions in addition in the margins.

This was amazingly successful in terms of guiding us along on a "meta" level, where, even if he strayed significantly from the outline, or the discussion went down tangential pathways away from his intended topic, students were able to get a 'big picture' of what the course was supposed to be teaching. I found this especially useful as a reference resource when I was writing papers, which he assigned brilliantly was multi-part essay question answers.

So many students found this super-rigid, because so many other professors completely ignored making the "meta"-level on which the course was supposed to work as a facet of the education as part of an academic discipline and its hermeneutics. I could still use those notes to write an excellent paper on any of the thinkers we studied with him. Unsurprisingly, this course had discussions that tended to stay more on point than any other I took.

Another professor I liked very much firmly believed in only assigning excerpts or short works (I think 30 pages per week or less), based on the idea that it was better for students to read 10 pages of Derrida or one relatively short Certau article with comprehension and attentiveness than it was for students to be given all of Being and Time to read and flagrantly fall short. He claimed that current research indicated that students retain and comprehend material in smaller chunks assigned with "medium" frequency.
 
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Eric

Mr Moraigero
What I do is give a 2-3 page handout in each class and follow it relatively closely. First on there comes the question to be asked and answered for the day and its relation to the big issues of the course. Then we explore the question, possible answers, and possible objections, which leads to the next topic (next class).

The importnat thing to me seems, here as in research, to be the `arc': each class should have a storyline, with opening, development, and punchline, and the whole course should have the same.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Another firmly believed in only assigning excerpts or short works (I think 30 pages per week or less), based on the idea that it was better for students to read 10 pages of Derrida or one relatively short Certau article with comprehension and attentiveness than it was for students to be given all of Being and Time to read and flagrantly fall short. He claimed that current research indicated that students retain and comprehend material in smaller chunks assigned with "medium" frequency.

Bastards!
 
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nomadologist

Guest
The importnat thing to me seems, here as in research, to be the `arc': each class should have a storyline, with opening, development, and punchline, and the whole course should have the same.

Yes, a great way of saying it, I couldn't articulate this very well--these outline notes created a very reliable narrative for us that made it abundantly clear what our learning objectives were for the course. Sadly, this professor retired so most courses in the department have bowed down to newthink where every class situation is supposed to be discussion-based, so that even the most complex and abstract "genres" of philosophy classes end up sounding a lot like an episode of "Crossfire."
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Bastards!

Teehee. This was during my undergraduate years, however, so there was less heavy lifting in general ...although thinking about it, my undergraduate courses were great preparation for grad work. I've found that I already have a solid enough basis from these years (granted with the help of some auto-didactic reading pre-college...ok A LOT of pre-college bedroom brooding) that my graduate courses seemed like a breeze. It really freed me up as a grad student to dig deeper--watching classmates who hadn't had the same luck clearly frustrated by and struggling with texts like BARTHES' MYTHOLOGIES (!!!) made me realize I had a truly solid foundation to build on.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
I'm dreading having to read 60 pages of Hegel in a single week (on top of lots of other stuff). It takes 2 hours to read 10 pages... and even then to be honest you need to re-read it multiple times to get all the subtleties... sigh.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
At least you don't have to read it in German!!

Seriously, I had my first "Media Studies" class in the German department with one of the worst and most outrageously assignment happy couple of professors ever. For starters, it was a 200-level (which usually means it's for second years students) course, but scheduled three times a week, Mon Wed Frid, for 1 hour and 45 minutes each time. On top of this, we had a film screening every week on Sunday. (This actually adds up to an illegal amount of class time.) PLUS a quiz on Friday, weekly workbook assignments, and a literal "chat with germans in a fruity hypertext environment and write a diary entry in German for every session to correspond with it" assignment per week.

The syllabus and teaching style were a completely disorganized multi-media mess involving MOOs and other well-meant but completely unsuccessful "progressive" methods--usually low quality clips from propaganda films and DDR musicals projected onto a screen--but we students were all expected to on our game. Did we get to translate "See Spot Run" for our language reqs? Nope. We got to read Freud, Kafka, Weber, and Hegel in German and write our monthly critical essays on them. Most of the kids in this class couldn't even understand these in English, but they'd all get excellent grades because most of them had lived in Germany as military brats and would feign second-yearness in order to get an easy A. Our final involved not only creative writing in German, but COMPUTER PROGRAMMING a multi-media presentation into the MOO environment in teams-of-three GROUP WORK PARTNERSHIPS.

I almost reported these professors to the Dean for flagrant academic sadism and incompetence.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
At least you don't have to read it in German!!

Seriously, I had my first "Media Studies" class in the German department with one of the worst and most outrageously assignment happy couple of professors ever. For starters, it was a 200-level (which usually means it's for second years students) course, but scheduled three times a week, Mon Wed Frid, for 1 hour and 45 minutes each time. On top of this, we had a film screening every week on Sunday. (This actually adds up to an illegal amount of class time.) PLUS a quiz on Friday, weekly workbook assignments, and a literal "chat with germans in a fruity hypertext environment and write a diary entry in German for every session to correspond with it" assignment per week.

The syllabus and teaching style were a completely disorganized multi-media mess involving MOOs and other well-meant but completely unsuccessful "progressive" methods--usually low quality clips from propaganda films and DDR musicals projected onto a screen--but we students were all expected to on our game. Did we get to translate "See Spot Run" for our language reqs? Nope. We got to read Freud, Kafka, Weber, and Hegel in German and write our monthly critical essays on them. Most of the kids in this class couldn't even understand these in English, but they'd all get excellent grades because most of them had lived in Germany as military brats and would feign second-yearness in order to get an easy A. Our final involved not only creative writing in German, but COMPUTER PROGRAMMING a multi-media presentation into the MOO environment in teams-of-three GROUP WORK PARTNERSHIPS.

I almost reported these professors to the Dean for flagrant academic sadism and incompetence.

That does sound quite sadistic. Though to be honest the work schedule for undergraduate law at Oxford (if you ACTUALLY did what you were supposed to) was just as brutal (but without computer programming/writing in German). I fail to believe that a single person actually did tho.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
That does sound quite sadistic. Though to be honest the work schedule for undergraduate law at Oxford (if you ACTUALLY did what you were supposed to) was just as brutal (but without computer programming/writing in German). I fail to believe that a single person actually did tho.

Hmm, I'm sure, but really, that level of study would, I'm guessing, have at least been presented well and the curriculum was undoubtedly excellent. These professors did fuck all on their end, just delegated all of the learning to us in the form of bullshit busy work, while giving us readings on a level that, even within the department, was so very clearly considered above 200-level reading comprehension skills that a couple of times I even thought the assignment reminders they sent us were a "piss-take" (is this the right was to use this?)

I suppose I may have been spoiled, since I never had to do any work in my other classes to do well :slanted:
 
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