The Mentor Is In

  • Geek Life: Getting Students Organized

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    09 Mar 2010 /  Uncategorized, advice, organization, teaching tips, technology

    Despite the many social and demographic changes that have resulted in colleges and universities welcoming a wider variety of non-traditional students (from returning women to life-long learners) the biggest chunk of our students will likely be relatively fresh out of high school, and still in need of a little in loco parentis to get them started.  Many of these hatchlings are still waiting for someone to tell them what classes to take, when to arrive, where to get materials for class, and how to study.  One area where we can contribute is in the arena of organization, and preparation.

    On the first day, in addition to going over the syllabus and reading schedule, I spend time discussing what I call ‘geek kits’; meaning  those varied sacks, cases, Ziplocs of supplies the best students keep handy in their bags.  I am prompted to go over this thanks to my own undergraduate days, where I might have won an award for LEAST prepared scholar, always cadging a pen and paper, or taking notes on my hand.  So what should go into a geek kit? At a minimum, students need pens, pencils, erasers, a sharpener, highlighter pens, white-out pens (http://www.witeout.com/pens/) and Post-It flags (http://www.postitflags.com/) for marking relevant passages in their books.  A portable three hole punch (like the Binder Buddy from ACCO) and a mini stapler are also essential.  While we are at it, a couple of USB sticks wouldn’t come amiss. Many students don’t think to backup their work and bring it to campus in the event of the inevitable ‘printer failure’ that comes at crucial moments.

    Do you think this seems obvious? Goes without mentioning? Is anal-retentive overkill on my part? I would have thought so too, until you spend fifteen wasted minutes while people run around asking each other for supplies so they can turn in a paper, or take a Scantron exam (in fact, my syllabus now mentions not only that they will need Scantrons, but the model number, the color, how many they will need, and where they can purchase them).  It was either that, or go out of my mind answering those questions several times per class, with six or seven classes, every semester.  Preempting them in this fashion makes me a calmer, nicer, professor.

    One funny extension of the geek kit comes from a student of mine, who created a ‘Finals Week’ survival kit to fit inside of an Altoids tin*.

    “1. Starbucks prepaid coffee card - while I normally don’t splurge on Starbucks, while studying for finals I just gotta have some joe.

    2. Rubberband - I need a rubberband to wear around my wrist. When my mind begins to wander, I snap myself back to reality and remember to focus-focus-focus.

    3. 4 No-Doze tablets - just in case I begin to fade too early, I’m too tired from working all day, or the library is really, really quiet, I can load up on caffeine pills and stay alert.

    4. 2 Advil tablets - all that studying gives me a headache!

    5. 5 Sticks of Juicy Fruit - to fight boredom and/or dry mouth.

    6. Half a dozen Altoids - for refreshment and/or to fight coffee breath.

    7. Two dozen sour lemon candies - to help focus, fight boredom, and counteract any Altoids aftertaste.

    8. 1 Think Organic Chocolate Coconut snack bar - to fight off any hunger pains and provide energy.

    9. A handful of paperclips - I like to use them to mark pages in my notes and text books that I may need to re-review several times (key concepts, graphs, etc.).

    10. A container of pencil lead - just in case.”

    *If you would like to make your own Altoids survival kit, as another student put it, “in case of a zombie attack, or an asteroid hitting the earth…” you can find suggestions at:

    http://www.fieldandstream.com/fieldstream/photogallery/article/0,13355,1225788,00.html

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  • Getting Your Students To Use Their Study Time Wisely (and Other Miracles)

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    03 Mar 2010 /  organization, teaching tips

    This column follows immediately on last week’s post about geek kits. Today, instead of materials, I want to talk about encouraging time management practices in our students. In my column about getting students to read, I discussed one aspect of this, that of setting expectations for the amount of reading they will need to accomplish in order to stay current with class lectures and discussions.  In this column, I want to get into the nitty-gritty details of how to keep them on track. I find that if I spend the time upfront, at the beginning of the quarter, getting my students settled, organized, giving them explicit sets of instructions and manageable expectations, I spend a lot less time managing crises throughout the rest of the instructional period. This advice is also primarily for introductory classes; upperclassmen I expect to have ‘gotten it’ by now. 

    During the first day, while discussing reading, I ask them to do a couple of things that may seem counter-intuitive to them.  For one thing, I do a little song and dance about the classic tradition of locking oneself up on Sundays to ‘study’ for the week ahead. I ask athletes in class how often they practice and the answer is always, at least a couple of hours a day. I ask them what would happen if they were to try and accomplish a week’s worth of training on Sunday and most of them just laugh, because they know they would be broken and hurting if they tried such a stunt. Yet students regularly subject their brains to the type of overload they would never ask of their bodies!

    So I ask them to consider reading just 30-60 minutes (maximum) for my class every day.  If they can commit to just one half hour per day, every day, they can probably manage a C in my course; and if they can commit to an hour, excellence is a distinct possibility.  As with fitness, extremes should be avoided in favor of regular, steady, progress.  Once they have completed their time, I then ask them to stop. Put away the book. Take a break. Go on and do something else. Pushing past that time is usually asking for trouble; and many folks have written on the decreased productivity that results (http://www.slideshare.net/flowtown/rules-of-productivity-2756161).

    Another area we can help students is distinguishing feelings of being overwhelmed from feelings of being unmotivated. Many students have a hard time getting started with studying, blaming it on under motivation. In fact, they are facing what seems like a mountain of unfamiliar work, and (at the outset of their college adventure) no end in sight. Egg timer to the rescue! I tell them, “Hey, no one likes tackling a tedious task,” but setting a timer gives one the sense that it will be done sometime before the crack of doom. Once they get started, they may be surprised at how quickly the half hour passes.

    They need to get a calendar, preferably software-based like Outlook or Google Calendar, and begin programming in specific work-times. If they wait until they feel like studying, the aforementioned crack of doom will sound before that ever happens. It is new to them (keeping in mind how young many of them are) this idea of scheduling life.  We have likely forgotten all of the things we needed to learn along the way through our undergraduate years on into graduate school.  I know I really only got serious about time management the year I had to plan for fieldwork in another country, along with prelims, orals, a Smithsonian internship, and finding funding.

    Finally, walking into the classroom five or ten minutes ahead of time to set up, have you ever noticed early-bird students sitting, nothing on their desks, arms down, staring into space, almost as if they have been powered down?  This is another potentially useful period of time. I remind them that, as adults, with multiple responsibilities including work, family, and social obligations on top of school, it is totally understandable that they get behind; but being adults also means finding slivers of space and time to get caught up in. If they just study those ten minutes before each class, three times a week, they have slipped an extra half an hour of reading in for each course they take. What kind of impact do they think that will have on their grade over the course of the semester?

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  • Competency versus Mastery: Are You Inflating Grades?

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    23 Feb 2010 /  advice, grading, teaching tips

    “C is for competent; it’s good enough for me.” I sometimes sing this little parody of Sesame Street in my head. What this means to me is that, getting through the day without screwing anything up is, in my book, a level of success that should be celebrated more often than is acknowledged.  It is a rare day when I could honestly say that I was outstanding in everything I attempted, from driving, to teaching, to parenting.  It would be a similar outlier to suggest that I fail at everything I put my hand to – even on the worst days, something has to have gone right, or I wouldn’t still be here.

    The same is true for academics.  Much has been debated about the ‘scourge’ of grade inflation (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2001/11/28/a-proposal-to-end-inflation-last/) and the role of adjuncts as epidemiological vectors (http://www.glendale.edu/chaparral/june04/gradeinflation.htm) but I think we need to situate a large part of the problem within the minds of our students – who have been led to believe nothing but an A will suffice, yet have been given no clear guidelines as to what an A might represent.  Working our way downwards, an A is supposed to represent “excellence,” while a B represents “above-average,” so there is nothing standing in our way of explaining that a C denotes competency over the material.

    I like to go over the concept of the bell curve in my class, and show how most of us will fall in the middle (or the average) no matter what we do, because that is how the norm is defined for most of us.  Taking the time to differentiate between the mean (arithmetic average), the median (middle value), and the mode (most likely outcome), I point out that getting a C (usually represented as somewhere around 75 percent) means they have “beaten” half of the class.  This is important information for two distinct populations of students: the too-worried, and the not-worried-enough.  The too-worrieds have no internalized benchmark for success; they tend to dramatically over-estimate the performance of their peers, and suffer disproportionate anxiety as a result of what they see as poor performance.  Explaining to them that their performance was “average” may not be the cherry on the sundae of their day, but it can go a long way toward relieving acute stress.

    The not-worried-enough, on the other hand, have the opposite problem.  They think that their work is just fine because they don’t see the wide distribution of performance that we do from our Olympian perch.  The bell-curve model is not as helpful for them, because it seems somehow “rigged.”  Keeping in mind these are often the weakest and least motivated students in the first place, coming from a system that keeps the product moving along regardless of merit, they lack many foundational understandings we may hope to take for granted in our students.  For this population, concrete evidence is best.  Group work, paper exchanges, detailed outlines of expectations for assignments, post-exam analyses and explanations, can all contribute to their comprehension of what competency, and beyond that, mastery, entails.  Still, for the least motivated, attaining a C may be all that they seek, and as educators, though we may not like or understand this stance, we have to respect it as a legitimate strategy.

    Can a student achieve an undergraduate degree with a C average? Absolutely.  Do employers check grade point averages? No. It’s a useless bit of information.  The only time a GPA comes into play after college is when seeking post-graduate education.  It is good to make sure that students understand the ways in which mediocre grades can hamper future plans, but beyond that, students have to make their own choices. Since we have a grading system that sets C in the middle, as the median, then we need to start treating C as the norm it truly is.

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  • Getting Your Students To Crack Their Books

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    16 Feb 2010 /  advice, teaching tips

    If you have been teaching for at least a semester, you may have noticed that students don’t do the reading we assign them, shocker, I know.  So what can we do about this? Should we throw up our hands, deciding that students are in charge of their own destinies? Do we turn punitive and bitter, writing exams that we know that they will not be able to pass? Or are there actually effective ways to get students to step up the amount of time and effort they put into reading?

    I believe that we can make a difference in how much a student commits to our course, regardless of subject, and that the way to do so begins with the first day of class.  I have noticed that it appears many professors still treat the first day of the semester as some sort of  ‘free pass.’  Now, keep in mind I am speaking from my own perspective and experience, and I would love to hear what you might have to share in the comments, but this strikes me as a criminal waste. 

    We are setting the tone for the rest of the semester, and the tone I prefer to set is one where the class will be jam-packed with useful information and interesting activities, there will be no slack-time, and we are neither starting late nor ending early, ever.  As a part of expectation setting, I spend a fair amount of time discussing reading, and the rubric established within California higher education.   Here in the Golden State, the expectation across the board (community colleges, CSUs, and UCs) is that students will complete three hours of reading for every hour spent in class. Surprisingly, the vast majority of students claim to have never heard this information before.  It’s an eye-opener for them to realize that when we call 12 units ‘full-time’ we aren’t kidding around – twelve hours spent in class, times three, is thirty-six hours of reading (plus the original twelve) for a total of a forty-eight hour week. Suddenly, they are into overtime!  Many students approach going to college as if the 12 original hours were all that they were expected to do.  They see this as a continuation of high school, where for many of them, just showing up was enough to get them through. By the way, this attitude is also to be found across ALL levels of the California higher education system.  Maybe you live in a happier state where this is not the case, if so, mazel tov.

    Another area of confusion is exacerbated by textbook publishers, who will make things jazzy with color blocks of tan, pale green, and lilac.  Students believe that these color-coded sections, rather than being called out for extra attention, means that they will not figure on exams and that they can be skipped. I like to point out to them that they need to read everything and use all parts of the text; including captions, footnotes, bibliographic references, ad nauseum.  To make the bitter pill go down easier, I remind them that, at the prices they are paying, it behooves them to squeeze all of the value out of those books like they were making juice.  Or they may as well have set a hundred dollar bill on fire for all the good it does them.

    In addition to not knowing the expectations, many students do not have a sense for where they fall in terms of effort and skill. If they see a friend whipping through a textbook and getting A’s, then the message they internalize is, “a chapter should take a half hour to read” and not, “my friend may have better reading comprehension skills than I do.”  I ask students to self-identify as pro or anti reading – you know, the folks who, given their druthers, wouldn’t read the back of a cereal box.  I have the happy readers talk a little about how much they read as a leisure activity, before pointing out to the unhappy readers that, we aren’t here to change their attitude, but that comparisons may not get them far. They will need to learn what their own reading comfort levels are. To facilitate this, I have students complete a study skills quiz (like this one http://www.morris.umn.edu/services/dsoaac/aac/StudySkills.html) and collectively discuss solutions to the problems they may be having. 

    In a future post, I will write about how I follow-up on these suggestions with strategies designed to keep them reading.  As always, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

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  • Managing Communications

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    09 Feb 2010 /  advice, organization, teaching tips, technology

    For an adjunct, one of the biggest hassles can be managing diverse avenues of communication at multiple schools. At the beginning of every academic year I consider myself lucky if IT doesn’t accidentally bump me off the email list and I still have a phone number that corresponds to whatever is in the printed edition, or online. At last count, the five ways that students primarily reach out to us include email, online course management systems, voicemail, and our mailboxes, and office staff. Missing a message from a student can have upsetting consequences for both parties, so this post discusses some ways that I have sought to channel communications effectively – I’m going to tackle these from least to greatest in terms of student usage.

    In my syllabus, I begin the art of training my students to minimize out-of-classroom communication.  For one thing, many questions they ask in the hallway, on email, or in voicemails raise issues the entire class needs to be informed about.  I also stress that I do not need to hear about every missed class, that they are adults who make their own decisions about education and attendance; but that of course they should contact me if they will be missing several classes due to unavoidable circumstances.  I aim to direct their communications with me into the proper forum, keeping generic questions for class time, and managing personal and private issues after class, during office hours, or through these media under discussion.

    In the effort to handle student inquiries, office staff can be your greatest ally, or your direst enemy. To make them effective members of your team they need three things on a regular basis: information, praise, and rewards.  Be proactive in making sure they have your up-to-date information, diligently fill out those memos that circulate with annoying regularity, and if your school has such a thing, keep your webpage up to date.  If you would like them to cheerfully man your bulwark against students, good manners (please and thank you on every email, regular thanks for their efforts) go a long way towards enlisting their cooperation, and mentioned in a previous post, I was not joking about those Christmas presents. I have also taken lemon bars to administration, sent premium chocolates to copy editors, and contributed to every holiday potluck I can get my mitts into – pure D bribery and it works.

    To my mind, mailboxes can be the most frustrating aspect of campus communications. Depending upon the culture at your school, you may be either under-informed (adjuncts aren’t copied on any memos) or overwhelmed. If you are teaching online and never come to campus, you can be sure that is where important or even confidential financial information will languish. Unrequested books will pile up, raining down upon you when you already have your arms full. Plus, no matter how diligently you check your box (which moves every semester) you will find some ancient and yellowing phone message from a student with three exclamation points!!!  To be honest, I pretty much ignore my mailbox at this point. Almost anything worth knowing about comes through email anyway, so I think of it more as a lost and found, a place of last resort.

    Your campus may have a neatly integrated voicemail and email system, where they come to the same server.  If not, then I recommend establishing a routine for checking voicemails, and I also recommend it not be daily because one of the keys to effective work/life balance lies in batching your tasks (http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/10-keys-to-worklife-balance.html).  Weekly or bi-weekly has been often enough in my experience.  Make this policy part of your syllabus; it will help channel student inquiries to where you really want them, which is email.

    The reason email is the best of all possible worlds is that with a little finesse, you can get all of your disparate accounts to load into Microsoft Outlook on your desktop at home, rendering the chaos of multiple passwords and logins moot. The basic instructions can be found here http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art18419.asp; and there is a clear video tutorial here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFWp-3YIBOc.  As for online course email messaging, in some versions it appears that you can also forward the internal emails to another account, but here you pass beyond the doors of my knowledge and as far as I know fall off the side of the earth. Here be dragons http://discussions.blackboard.com/forums/. 

    Let us know your best ideas for keeping the lines of communication open and your sanity intact in the comments!

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  • Backup Plans

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    02 Feb 2010 /  advice, organization, teaching tips, technology

    My friends often comment upon my penchant for organization, but I tell them, the reason I am organized is because I am extremely lazy.  Investing the time up front frees me up both in terms of being able to schedule personal time, and also allows me to smoothly hurdle those small emergencies than can derail a class session. I am speaking, of course, of backup plans.

    As professors, we may have been enculturated to one form of course presentation, the lecture, and we may structure our classes around speaking for an hour or two at a time uninterrupted.  This is the most straightforward method, and also does not require much in the way of coordination of resources for effective delivery, except in the area of visual media: I have had overhead projectors disappear despite thick chains locking them down; I have arrived in the evening to discover the projector bulb burnt out and A/V nowhere to be found. I have had other faculty members jack up the connection to the internet (even had it sliced by a backhoe recently!) 

    So what is the intrepid lecturer to do?

    I have created multiple sets of the visual material, produced in a variety of media, and I also have them stored in a bunch of secure places.  No matter what they (the dark forces that conspire against us) throw at me, I will be ready, huzzah! Imagine me at this point triumphantly lifting my spear into the air.

    I have transparencies for the odd overhead projector, and their cousins, the paper copies for document cameras, all in one binder per course. Many of these come from the publisher, as do some Power Points, which I sprinkle judiciously throughout the semester, but I have also developed my own overheads, which are saved on flash drives (top ten are reviewed here http://usb-flash-drive-review.toptenreviews.com/). Since I am your typical absent-minded professor, and scatter flash drives like hair pins, I have lots of them, and keep one on my keychain, another in my wallet, and still others in my briefcase. I also have backed up my most essential documents on my Skydrive (http://windowslive.com/online/skydrive). Some I make public for students and other interested individuals, others I keep close to my chest. There are other services, and here is a review (http://online-storage-service-review.toptenreviews.com/) but for simplicity’s sake, I believe in keeping on the good side of my feudal lord, Microsoft. 

    Of course, the best backup location is in your head, and I am prepared to do any and all lectures on the whiteboard (I detest chalkboards and their squeaking and their dust, my hackles are rising just thinking about them). So I carry a ton of whiteboard pens in a spectrum of colors, as well as my own eraser and cleaner spray. I could use the grody eraser with no oomph left in it, and cross my fingers and hope the janitorial staff will clean the board sometime before academic year-end (and then they have to use the right stuff, ever notice how sometimes they are greasy, or streaky, or gummy?) or I can just do it already and give myself a pleasant slate to write upon.  By the way, I have also brought WD-40 to unstick windows, and cleaning wipes for desks during the flu season. Yes, I have an enormous tote bag.

    All of this is another reason to branch off from the lecture circuit and develop some in-class exercises that can be thrown into the mix at a moment’s notice.  I have had to conduct classes while IT guys dangled precariously from the ceiling, tippy toes on my desk, to replace the aforementioned overhead projector light bulb (costing about $300 each so they aren’t kidding about turning those things off http://lamps.projectorsuperstore.com/product_details.cfm).

    At that point you are kind of left with a “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” sort of atmosphere and it helps to have alternatives. It can also help student attention spans to throw a little physicality into the mix, always keeping disabled students’ access and participation in mind.  In my Introduction to Physical Anthropology class, I have my students sort themselves by gender and height to demonstrate individual variation and sexual dimorphism. It gives them a chance to stretch, chat, and mingle briefly before refocusing.  In Cultural Anthropology, after one quiz, I usually schedule a Survival Exercise, where students head outdoors for fifteen minutes in ‘bands’ looking for edible plants to identify on campus.

    In any given session, I aim to change up the activity about once every 45 minutes, leaving about five minutes for transition time. Depending on class length, I may have room for three different segments. Being able to mix it up, responding to the mood of the class, keeps things fresh and is best done with an arsenal of backup plans.

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  • Who Are You?

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    25 Jan 2010 /  advice, teaching tips

    This post is about thinking through and crafting your teaching philosophy. You may be in a discipline where this is a common practice, but even if you are an old hand, please feel free to read what I have to say and leave your comments so that we can learn.

    My discipline, anthropology, is not one where it is common. I did not learn about writing Teaching Philosophy Statements until I needed one for a job application (http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Write-a-Statement-of/45133).

    Since then, I have revised mine several times, and find the activity useful for structuring the underlying logic of your teaching practice. Once you know ‘who you are’ as a teacher, then it is easier to make decisions regarding hands on teaching issues like classroom management, grade disputes, late work, and make-up exams.

    The first aspect to tackle, especially for folks new to the podium, is one of classroom persona (http://chronicle.com/article/Constructing-Your-In-Class/45186).  We all have one, whether we acknowledge it or not. We all ‘edit’ ourselves for pedagogical consumption, or we should: unless we live extraordinarily bland and uneventful lives; which does not describe the adjunct population I know!  This persona may be, as in my case, a little bit sterner than is my wont among friends, or maybe you work hard on being your most compassionate self, but whichever it is, this persona will be a key piece of evidence in identifying the underpinnings of your own teaching philosophy.

    So, why am I not the lovable cut-up in the classroom that I am around my oldest pals?  Because the core goal I have as a professor turns out to be ‘fairness’ and seeking this quality in the classroom has helped me construct the parameters for my courses.  Being fair means quashing signs of favoritism. Students are extremely sensitive to signs that one person is getting more attention from the professor than they are, one reason that I call on people regularly, using my attendance sheet to help me at the outset until I learn their names. This helps distribute the onus of participation, rather than either allowing a few students to dominate the discussion or conversely, placing the burden for carrying the conversation on a few students’ shoulders.

    In another example, fairness means that I serve different learning styles (http://people.usd.edu/~bwjames/tut/learning-style/styleres.html), interspersing lectures with videos, playing music, having students do deep breathing, and hands-on activities like pottery or drawing.  I often joke about my classes, “Come for the tamales, but stay for the drum circle”  because in my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class, students read “Why Migrant Women Feed their Husbands Tamales: Foodways as a Basis for a Revisionist View of Tejano Family Life” by Brett Williams, they bring in tamales to share, and discuss regionalism, recipes, and oral and family histories.  Meanwhile, in my Native Californians class, we have had guest speakers/singers, fieldtrips, and a day where we made pottery and decorated it using traditional Chumash designs.

    Fairness means providing several pathways to success in my course.  Some students will be great on exams, but poor on attendance, while others will be present and accounted for, working hard, turning everything in, but still fail to make headway on objective exams. Weighting assignments and exams such that neither student-type has an outsized advantage over the other; you can get a decent grade either way, while an outstanding grade requires that a student manage all aspects of the course competently.

    Fairness sometimes means making tough calls in order to make sure all students get the same chances – holding all students to the same standard, and expectations, even when it makes you look like a hard-case.  A classic example means requiring paper backup for stories of hospitalizations, funerals, and traffic tickets before allowing make up exams, or extensions on papers.  People who legitimately have these problems will have no issue with you asking for proof, quite the opposite as they can see you are applying campus/syllabus rules to everyone, equally, all of the time. 

    Besides, asking for paperwork can provide you with moments of unintentional comedy. Like the time a student came in with five minutes remaining on a quiz claiming he was unfairly stopped for a traffic violation outside the parking lot.  Did he have the ticket? Oh, not on him? I’ll wait while he gets it from the car. Oh, you can’t find the ticket you were just given? This quiz aside, you’re going to need that for traffic school, you know.

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  • And They’re Off!

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    18 Jan 2010 /  advice, organization, teaching tips

    For many of us, the year opens like gates at a horse racetrack.  To outsiders, it may have seemed like we got a ridiculous amount of time off over the holidays (nine to fivers of my acquaintance worked BOTH Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, the horror) but we know better. This post is about how to organize your prep to minimize personal stress.

    In the fall I teach on the semester system, so my last final is on or about the 18th of December. That means that any grading takes place over the next week, taking me right up to about Christmas Eve.  Then I have the week between Christmas and New Year’s for my checklist:

    Checklist for end of semester (in alphabetical order)
    Attendance sheets – bring up to date
    Binders – Stash
    Copies – Recycle
    Keys – Return
    Grades – Turn in
    Mailbox – Clear out
    Media – Return
    Paperwork – Sort, store,
    Supplies – Re-stock

    Some of you started on the fourth of this month and I offer you my condolences.  I was lucky enough that this semester my term started on the 11th.  That gave me an extra week  to prep the three classes that start right now, all intro classes, standards I have taught for years.  Still, that doesn’t make it any easier, does it?  Because I still have this list to get through:

    Checklist for Start of Semester (in alphabetical order)
    Attendance Folders – Create (I use red or purple so they stand out as they go around the room)
    Binders – Updated, new material added to master documents
    Copies – Handouts to Duplicating by Week 2, get codes if necessary
    Evaluations – Any due this semester?
    Grade sheets – Create
    HR – Sign forms? Deposit and payroll on-track? TB test? Sexual harassment training? Flex?
    Keys – request
    Lab Materials – Need any? Do I have all the keys for cabinets?
    Map – to any new locations
    Mailbox – verify location
    Office Supplies – where are they, what do we have?
    Online Accounts – make sure it is up to date and accessible
    Parking – make sure permits are valid, visible, in correct cars
    Room location – verify/locate
    Rosters – get from mailbox or online
    Scantron machine - Extra forms of 882s, re-fill stash of analysis sheets
    Syllabus – updated, sent to Campus Copy Ctr, copies to secretary
    Schedule - updated, sent to Campus Copy Ctr, copies to secretary (optional)
    Videos – reserve, or check out from library or other owner
    Voicemail – up and running? Need to request?

    Over the years I have learned a few things to help manage this process, first among them is leaving enough time for all the prep-work, and backing out the dates from when you actually need stuff in your hot little hands.  Allow one day, one full eight hour day, per course (not section).  Maybe to some of you that seems like a lot, while others consider it not enough, but if you take the extra time now, you can save yourself stress and heartache later on.

    I would feel naked without my syllabus, at a minimum, that first day.  I know there are a lot of different ways to tackle a syllabus, and I’ll talk about this in more detail in another post, but I always create a separate schedule of readings and activities, with days of the class meeting, dates, and helpful notes, in Excel.  This accompanies what I consider to be a syllabus, which has the basic information about the class (meeting times, location, dates of final exam), as well as things like the course description, grading procedures, and expectations.

    The schedule is the trickiest part of the entire course, since dates, holidays, breaks, and final exams are all subject to change every time.  Once I have the schedule down, I use that to enter dates for the following into Outlook right away:

    Final exams
    Date I need to send quizzes and midterms to duplicating
    Date I need to have grades for quizzes and midterms back to students
    Dates for one-time activities like labs, field-trips, guest speakers

    Once you are done, it is time to send your work to the duplicating/lithography center, and this is one time of year when you have to abide by their request to give them a week for delivery.  I further recommend making a nuisance of yourself and follow-up with whoever is your contact.  Of course, since you made sure to include them on your Christmas gift list, this won’t be any issue at all!

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  • Introductions Are In Order

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    12 Jan 2010 /  advice, teaching tips

    Welcome to the start of a New Year and a new blog here at AdjunctNation.com! My name is Susan Mazur-Stommen, and I will be writing here weekly on the topic of teaching tips across the higher education spectrum. I am a cultural anthropologist from Inland Southern California, where I teach at both community colleges in diverse communities, as well as several of our state universities, the CSUs. I am a product of the California educational system, from K-22. I attended public school, then community college, then San Jose State for my B.A. in anthropology, and finally University of California, Riverside, where I earned my M.A. in cultural anthropology in 1998, and a Ph.D. in the same field in 2002.

    I have been teaching since my second semester at graduate school in 1997. I have been teaching on my own since I was at the University of Rostock on a Fulbright in 1999-2000. The University of Rostock is one of the oldest universities in Europe, and it was quite a change from Riverside, where our campus is barely 50 years old! Since then, I have taught about fifteen courses a year, so if you figure on average 30 students per class, then something like 4,500 students have passed my classroom doors since I was let off the leash.

    When I started graduate school, like many, I didn’t really focus on the fact that I would have to be teaching most of the time. At that point it is all about the research, but I was lucky in that the UC system has an excellent peer-mentor training program called Teaching Assistant Development Program, with meetings, one on one tutorials, video-taping (ugh), and evaluations by other graduate students who had both been through the process and were acknowledged as stellar. This framework was of enormous help when I was finally thrown into the shark tank to sink or swim.
    Another reason I perhaps did not originally realize how much teaching I would be doing was that I was actively fleeing the possibility. I come from a maternal line of educators – my grandmother taught Kindergarten from 1928 to 1969, while my mother focused on slightly older kids. I had nothing against teaching per se, but I had no desire to join ‘the family biz.’

    Turns out, though, I love teaching. I love my students, and I am quite happy as an adjunct. I deliberately stepped off of the tenure-track job search three years ago, after looking at peers who had full-time TT jobs, and realizing, many of them aren’t happy! As an adjunct, I find that I can successfully evade campus strife and tension, and just focus on doing a good job. Teaching at both two and four year colleges gives me options in my career that keep me engaged; for example, I have developed my online skills at community colleges, while the CSUs allow me the opportunity to teach upper division and graduate level courses in my main fields of research.

    In this blog, I plan to cover teaching from a holistic stand-point. That is, I want to look at how we teach from the position of the whole person, much as we might look at our students. This will include topics like: stress management; organization and priorities; our communication skills and familiarity with technologies such as social media; the physical aspects of the job we often contend with, as well as traditional teaching tips and ideas. I have quite a few templates and handouts that I hope to share with everyone, as .pdfs available for downloading; and I hope you will treat this as a forum and share right back. In fact, class, your first assignment is to let me know the kinds of topics and questions you might like to see covered in this blog. I look forward to creating a community with you as members and citizens. Till next time!

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