Introductions Are In Order
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!
