Freeway Flyer

• Summer: The Hot Semester

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  16 Aug 2010 /  employment, job security, teaching, time management
  There is often no such thing as the traditional summer off for adjunct instructors who are paid per class. Many adjuncts who need income during the summer need to line up as many summer classes as they can get. This can be a challenge, because colleges often offer fewer classes during the spring and summer semester, so there are fewer classes to go around for instructors.

  But, say you have been lucky enough to be assigned some courses to teach. Congratulations! Now, how can you have a successful, productive teaching experience without totally missing out on the summer season? The Freeway flyer, who has not taken a summer off since 2005, has some pointers.

  • Purchase an extra long extension cord. Use this to power your lap top computer so that you can take it onto your patio or deck. A table with umbrella will make a nice desk for you. You needn’t slave away inside; papers can be graded outdoors almost as well as indoors. Perhaps, even better.
  • Take advantage of the longer daylight hours. You can weed a flower bed at nine o’clock at night, or take a late walk with your dog. You are not bound by short daylight hours; you have more flexibility.
  • Keep some comfortable sandals in the car for driving. You can pop on the closed toe, professional-looking shoes when you get to campus.
  • Follow the European’s lead and learn to value “mini breaks.” If you are teaching Monday through Thursday, you can leave right from school Thursday night and drive to some place wonderful. For example, I am often fortunate enough to be invited to my sister’s lake cabin during the summer. A three or four day stay at the lake is great for relaxing; when I return, I am fresh and ready to teach.
  • Try to squeeze in some traditional summer fun, such as summer reading. Some light “beach” books can be good recreation, something you can pick up and read a chapter at a time.
  • Plant lots of perennials, the type of plants that need little attention after they are established. You can enjoy the beauty with less work. Then, when you look up from those papers at your outdoor desk, you’ll have something lovely upon which to gaze.
  • You can use some time to get a head start on planning for fall semester; for example, if the school is adapting a new textbook, you can read it and become familiar with it. Or not, after all, you are already working hard and should be kind to yourself.
  • Some of your friends and relatives are fortunate enough to have the summer off, and may be able to come visit you. They have more time than you do right now, so let them make an effort.
  • If you have children who are home for the summer, be sure to set aside time for traditional summer activities. Plan some day trips to the beach or a nice, cool museum. With older children, now is a good time to let them demonstrate that they are able to help out and share responsibility around the house. This is also a good time for them to practice cooking and baking; it’s fun for them and everyone gets real food to eat. Good things can come to those who sort laundry and wash dishes.

  Henry James said that the words “summer afternoon” were the two “most beautiful words in the English language.” If you play your cards right, you can have those summer afternoons, evenings, and mornings, too.

  Have a great summer.

  Tags: adjuncts, Carol Weatherford, Henry James, summer semester, teaching

• 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

• Email: The Love-Hate Relationship

  1 Comment
  19 Mar 2010 /  technology, time management
  I love email. I have been using it for over ten years and it has gone from an amusing novelty to one of the most important communication methods I use. While there are some people working in higher education who might say they are not technically inclined, almost everyone is comfortable using email. It has occurred to me that I spend a lot more time reading and sending email lately.

  This semester I have a personal home account, Group Wise accounts from three different colleges, and a separate email account from a fourth college. I check these email accounts daily during the week and at least once over the weekend to read and write emails for students, administrators and others. I easily spend over an hour a day in email land. As a good faculty member, I must respond quickly to emails from department chairs or deans. As a good instructor, I need to answer emails from students in as timely a manner as possible. At the beginning of the semester, I tell students I will try to get back to them with an answer the same day; If I receive their emails later in the day, they can expect an answer the next day.

  Evidently, we have trained students to expect answers within 12 hours, because that’s when I receive emails from students checking on earlier messages. That’s another reason I try to respond quickly — to keep the in-box from becoming cluttered. Students are not concerned that Freeway Flyers have multiple school accounts to keep track of; their questions are as important to them (if not more so) as anyone else’s.

  With all of this important communication going on, it is worthwhile to find ways to streamline and expedite the process. Here are some ways to make your life easier and keep everyone happy.

  • Have all of the individual accounts forwarded automatically to one home or other main account. You will be able to read them all at once and still be able to answer them from the individual accounts. You can set this up yourself, or your network manager at school can assist you as well.
  • Use Microsoft Outlook to configure multiple accounts. There are many other programs available as well, including Pegasus or Mozilla’s Thunderbird. Most are free.
  • Send mass emails to students. Often, you can download a student email list from the roster section of the school web site.
  •  Use Blackboard or Moodle to post messages and answer questions. It will save you time from weeding through emails looking for ones that are related to a particular class.
  • Get high speed internet at home if you have already not done so. Where cable internet is unavailable, check into satellite. It will be worth it to you.
  • Make sure your SPAM filters are set correctly for all of your accounts. A lot of emails are a waste of time and do not even need to reach you. It will save you the trouble of moving them to the delete folder.

  The joys of technology are only joys if they improve your effectiveness and make your life easier. The time it takes to put these changes into effect can definintely be worth your while in the long run.

  Tags: Carol Weatherford, email, technology, time management, tips

• Keeping a Sense of Humor: Yes, You Can (and must)

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  12 Feb 2010 /  teaching, time management
  The early weeks of a new semester can be a challenge to smile through when an instructor is on a different campus or college each day. At one college, the books for a new class are coming in to the bookstore, but seemingly, only three at a time. At another college, the parking pass is not working and you can’t get into the parking lot. At still another college, someone with whom you were to meet left a little early; can you come back tomorrow? All of these problems would be minor if you worked at the same college every day and were there to take care of these annoyances, but you don’t work at the same college every day: you’re the Freeway Flyer.

  Fortunately, there is a technique that can work in many cases to help you deal with frustration. With practice (and it takes practice), you can de-stress your life and impress your peers. Attempt to look for the humor in a situation and appreciate it. Almost any state of affairs has something funny about it; challenge yourself to find it. Emily Dickinson’s dear friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, said “There is no defense against adverse fortune which is so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.” Make it a habit to look for the amusing aspects of a situation.

  In the Seventies, I had a crush on the Mash television show character, Hawkeye Pierce. It was not only Alan Alda’s good looks; it was his knack at finding something funny in every situation. It occurred to the young me that humor gave one a sense of self-control. Also, if you can throw out one-liners, you may not come across as vulnerable as you feel. Humor is right up there with spring breaks as a way to stay sane and keep from hurting yourself. Comedian Bill Cosby says, “If you can find humor in anything, you can survive it.” Finding the humor may just take practice.

  Now that you’re a comic genius, you can share the humor with your classes. After all, studies have shown that students shown cartoons and jokes related to the concepts taught received higher scores on multiple choice exams than students who were not taught with humor (Ziv, 1988). For fun, check out “Fifty fun things for professors to do on the first day of class” http://www.ahajokes.com/profun.html and then don’t actually do most of them. But, reading about them will give you a laugh.

  Of course, this doesn’t work for everyone and humor should only be used by instructors who are comfortable doing so and are good at it. Avoid the use of sarcasm: it can have a negative effect. Be careful, too; there have been times in the past when I have been accused of being sarcastic when I thought I was only being exceedingly clever. Humor, like most things, is in the eye of the beholder. Know your audience; in fact, what’s sauce for the goose at one college isn’t necessarily sauce for the gander at another. Once I received a humorous email at College A, which got a major laugh at College B, but received dead silence at College C. Different reaction, different day.

  Share the joy if you like, but remember that laughter is good for your own mental health. Try to find the humor in day to day situations and see if your stress level goes lower as a result. Also, try to end your days with a laugh. There is a good reason to watch late night television. For example, tune in and watch David Letterman’s nightly Top Ten List. If you can’t stay up that late, check out the web archives. http://www.cbs.com/late_night_show/top_ten Or, have fun keeping your spouse awake while you are busy laughing at a Janet Evanovich novel. And, finally, try not to take it all too seriously; after all, today’s fiasco will be forgotten tomorrow and you will have new challenges to put into perspective.

  Ziv, A. Teaching and Learning with Humor: Experiment and Replication. Journal of Experimental Education, 57, 1988.

  Tags: Carol Weatherford, freeway flyer, stress

• 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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