Freeway Flyer

• Improving as an Instructor: Enhancing Your Own Educational Experience

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  16 May 2010 /  Uncategorized, organization, students, teaching, technology, time management
  This is it. This is the summer you will brush up on your teaching skills or your organization techniques. You know it will make your life easier and will improve the learning experiences of your students. But, where to start? If you prefer to go it alone with a good book or two on teaching, there are a myriad of books available. For example, the Adjunct Book Store web site http://www.adjunctprofessoronline.com/amazon_store?Keywords=adjunct%20faculty&SearchIndex=Books has handbooks for adjuncts and part-time instructors, books on teaching strategies and techniques, and guides for adjuncts who teach online. This web site has eight pages of books such as these.

  Perhaps, you would like to participate in an online seminar or course. A web site called Adjunctopia has many training opportunities http://www.adjunctopia.com/training/ Offerings in the near future have such titles as “Approaches to Managing Communications Effectively in an Online course” and “Creating a Syllabus and Beyond,” with prices ranging from $45 to $99.

  As a freeway flyer, you may have access to professional development offered through your different colleges. During the school year, you might have been too busy to pay much attention to this, let alone actually attend the classes or workshops, but you might have an easier schedule now. I have been tempted this week by some upcoming software classes in Dreamweaver and Moodle. There is a workshop called “Becoming a Champion of Change;” I don’t know exactly what that means in this case, but it sounds intriguing! Also, a couple of the colleges have fitness classes. This might be my chance, finally, to learn how to “Zumba.” Another college has everything from “Twitter Basics” to “Sexual Harassment Awareness Training.” If I have Saturdays free, I can attend classes at yet another college on “The Adult Learner,” “Active Teaching,” or “Plagiarism.” The nice part about using the facilities and opportunities offered by the schools at which you teach is that the price is usually right: free. Free is good, especially is you are in the process of paying for and squeezing in an occasional graduate course toward that terminal degree. Those classes are not cheap.

  And, speaking of cheap, be wary of spending a lot on money on teaching manuals and seminars about which you know nothing other than what you have read online. You owe it to yourself (and your wallet) to check into them before you lay out that very hard earned cash.

  Lastly, there are some excellent programs sponsored by colleges other than the ones where you are employed. Honolulu Community College has a list in their “Teaching Tips Index” that has dozens of interesting links: http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/teachtip.htm It is a delight. Then, there is Lower Columbia College with another impressive list called “Tips to Improve Your Teaching: http://lowercolumbia.edu/internal/faculty-resources/professional-development/tips_to_improve.htm This seems to demonstrate that there is a multitude of riches available for anyone with the desire to improve. It’s all there for you; you just need to take the time to check it out.

  Tags: Adjunctopia, Carol Weatherford, professional development, teaching

• The Frequent Flyer Law and Guilty Secrets

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  26 Feb 2010 /  organization
  The Boy Scouts of America have a motto that simply says “Be prepared.” There is an adage called “Murphy’s Law” that says “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” If you put this motto and adage together and give it a slightly new twist, you have the Frequent Flyer Law: Be prepared, because anything that can go wrong probably already has.

  There are a multitude of things that can go wrong in any given day. Some of them are beyond our control, and some are not. For example, there can be problems with technology. If GroupWise is “down,” you may be inconvenienced, but that is outside your control. If you leave your pen drive at home with the documents you need for a class, that was within your control and now you’re stuck.

  Then, there are all the opportunities for something to go wrong on the road to school. Frequent Flyers, by definition, spend a lot of time traveling from college to college. In my experience, at least once a week there is a highway accident big enough to stop traffic. The accident is outside your control (at least, let’s hope so), but leaving early enough to give yourself extra time if there is such an occurrence, was within your control.

  Frequent Flyers are at certain campuses infrequently, perhaps only once or twice a week, and possibly at night. They may be the last to know when something is changed. For instance, I recently checked a library web page on the college web site to make sure they were open until 8:00. When the class and I got there, though, the sign on the door said they were closing at 6:30 each day instead. I couldn’t control the hours, of course, but I could take time to read signs.

  It’s probably a good idea to point out here that although you are super organized, highly intelligent, and darned cute, you are still not perfect and will forget things or make the occasional silly mistake. To demonstrate, I will confide in you and tell you a guilty-secret mistake I made once. It was very simple; I put on brown sandals and left for class. No big deal, right? It only became a big deal when I got to campus and upon emerging from my car, noticed that I was indeed wearing two brown sandals, but they were from different pairs. Yes, it was embarrassing (please don’t tell anyone). And yes, obviously, wearing matching shoes was within my control.

  My point is that while we do not have control over so many possible occurrences of day to day teaching life, there are things we can do:

  1. Don’t  be caught without an important document of part of a lesson. Follow your own advice that you often share with your students: save documents to your hard drive, your pen drive, and email them to yourself so you can access them anywhere. Remember, too, that pen drives do not last forever; they have a finite number of “fires.”
  2. Know alternate routes to all of your schools. Then, if you must exit the freeway, you can still find your way. Also, keeping county maps in the car for all of the counties in which you drive could be useful.
  3. Web sites are great, but they are not always up to date. Consult the site, but be smart and notice signs on doors, and send an email to check on what you need to know in advance.
  4. This one you already know: before you leave the house, verify that you have your wallet/purse/keys/school bag and so on. My last piece of advice is to look down and make sure your shoes match. Seriously, where do you think they got the idea that there are such things as absent minded professors? There are real life stories everywhere.

  Tags: adjunct faculty, Carol Weatherford, preparation

• Is the Organized Instructor the Effective Instructor? It Helps!

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  13 Jan 2010 /  organization, time management
  Organization is important for all college instructors, and is especially important for the Freeway Flyer. There are tricks that you can use that may simplify your professional life and make your personal life more relaxed.

  Color is a wonderful thing – it keeps our world beautiful; it reminds us to watch the sunset and mark another day. It also helps us begin a semester confident that we know where to go and when to be there. For example, use a simple spread sheet which shows hours of the day from 8:00 in the morning till 10:00 at night. Block out the time on the sheet for a particular class, say from 1:00-2:30. In that block, put the college name abbreviation (MSU, GOCC), the name of the class (ENG 110), and the time (1:00-2:30pm). Fill the one and a half hour block with color, perhaps blue. If the class meets twice a week, make the other day’s block and color that one with the same blue. That way, anyone looking at it can tell it’s the same class on a different day.

  Now do the same thing for your other classes. If you have five classes, you will have at least five blocks with colors that are distinct from each other. If you have classes with multiple meetings, you will have even more blocks. When you are finished, print one and put it inside your planner, somewhere you can find it easily. Then, print another one and hang it on your refrigerator or home message center so that others can tell where you are on which day. Your family will thank you. I also, for example, give a copy to my mother and sister. That stops them from worrying about when it’s okay to call me and whether they’ll interrupt me during a class. It’s embarrassing when the instructor’s phone rings during class, especially when the syllabus spells out dire punishments to be handed out when a student’s phone goes off.

  Color can be your friend on a very simple scale, as well. This trick I began using the first time I was to teach at three or more colleges: make a calendar using Microsoft Word. There is a template which shows four months on one 8 ½ by 11 inch sheet. So, page one has January through April, which covers most school’s first semester, page two has May through August (spring and summer) and page three has September through December, the traditional fall semester. Just print out the page needed at the time. Then, find some highlighters: if you are teaching at three different colleges, use three colors you can easily tell apart, say blue, pink, and orange. Use these to mark the days you have classes for a college. If you have a day class at one school on January 19^th, a Tuesday, color in the top half with blue, for example. Then, say there is a night class that same day at another school, for which you have assigned pink: fill the other half of the day in with pink. At the bottom of the calendar, make a key showing the name of the schools with the assigned colors.

  We’re not stopping here with our use of color. Office supply stores (and instructor supply closets) have 8 ½ by 11 inch folders in vivid colors, ones which put the traditional manila folders to shame. If you teach two sections of the same class, say a day section and a night section, use green folders for the day class and blue folders for the night class. At a minimum, you will want one folder to hold class lists and extra syllabus copies, one folder to hold papers to be graded, one folder to hold papers to be returned to the students, one folder for papers that need to be copied, and one folder to hold copies of class assignments. Impress your students with how quickly you can lay your hands on a certain piece of paper.

  Color coding those files also makes it possible to carry materials for more than one class in the same bag. This can sometimes be helpful in terms of reducing the number of items that need to be transported. However, it can be ideal for each class to have its own bag. That way, you can immediately tell apart the English Composition bag from the Technical Writing bag. Also, if you are trying to spare your back, one light bag carried in each hand is better for you than one heavy bag carried on one side.

  One last idea where color and organization may go together: those lovely Post-it notes have multiple uses as well. If it’s not okay to talk to yourself, (and I’m not saying it’s not), it’s certainly okay to write notes to yourself. Keep small packs of Post-its in all of your school bags and use them to write quickie notes. You can also use them just for their different colors (orange means a file that needs to be copied, blue indicates the need to see if a grade was posted for an assignment, yellow means something can be checked off).

  Try incorporating one or more of these techniques and see if it simplifies your days. Any time saved using these methods is time that is available for lesson planning, your own research, or another fun activity.

  Tags: adjuncts, Carol Weatherford, organization, tips

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