I have been having fun reading some of the posts and comments from days gone by here at the Write 6×6. Thank you all for the fun and inspiration. I was especially influenced by The STEAM Hub’s work with Haiku poetry. I thought I’d give it a try. I’ve always been comfortable with syllables, almost effortlessly babbling my way through the day one syllable at a time. At a recent education conference, a colleague from Japan reported that if we’d only pay attention, we’d learn. At first I felt a chuckle at the obviousness of this, but in time I began to see the profoundness of it. How much of our lives is spent without attention? This semester, I began on day one by asking my students to “pay attention.” No matter how frighteningly complex, drearily mundane, or fabulously fresh our educational task, learn. Our successes and our failures, our laughter and our tears, they provide teachable moments. Pay attention, and one moment at a time, we find our way to all that we desire, for that way is paved with learning. Here’s the set of sobering syllables:
Tag Archives: Faculty
Why I Work Here.
As I look back on my life, I see that I have always enjoyed helping people. When I was growing up on the family farm I would often go over to the neighbors when I was done with jobs at our farm looking for things to do to help them. In school I always found myself helping my friends with their math. In fact, during my senior year in high school when we lost our math teacher (calculus class) and we got a permanent substitute, whose major was English, my dad, who taught math at PC, would teach me the math the night before and then in class I’d teach the students. At MCC I was a tutor. I found that I really enjoyed doing that. In fact, I had an experience there where a student tackled me one morning while going to class because she had just gotten her first A on a math test ever. That was the exact moment I decided, I need to teach 🙂
There is no better feeling than to see someone “get it” and you know that you were instrumental in their increase in understanding. That is why I do what I do.
My heroes have always been cowboys . . . I mean, teachers.
I like this prompt. It reminds me of my role models and my inspiration. Here are just a few:
- Carmela, a former ENG071 – ENG102 early childhood cohort student who had three kids by the age of 23, taught me that teaching is easy. Life is hard. Keep going!
- My education and ENG/RDG team members who challenge me, surprise me, appreciate me, and inspire me to serve our students in new and better ways.
- Mrs. Gleason, an energetic 86 year old who is still subbing in high school reminded me “Wear cute shoes so that students have something to look at when you’re teaching.”
- Mr. Pallack, my high school algebra and geometry teacher always told us “You can do this!” This is Mr. Pallack last year with our high school freshman group. We were celebrating his 90th birthday.
On Top of The World
What’s my dream job, you ask? I’m doing it! I’m on top of the world, literally and figuratively.
Thanks to technology, and for a reasonable price, I can access wifi on an airplane above the Atlantic! I am in my mobile office, grading and interacting with my online students.
My dream job is right here, right now. It is always now. My thoughts about my job are always positive. When they are not, I think again and make them positive.
I could choose to dwell on negative things if I wanted to. Every job has negative aspects to it. I could have a field day on negativity if I wanted to, but I’ve been there and done that and bought the T-shirt. But it does nothing for progress.
So I choose to look on the bright side, because it is good for me and it is good for the people I interact with. It is good for the soul. It is good for the psyche. It is good for the body.
My job affords me flexibility….not less hours or less productivity. I can teach on a plane, I can teach in the classroom, and I can take a walk to clear my head if I feel like taking a walk. I can take a whole summer off if I choose to (but I don’t) and I can choose to earn extra money teaching over the summer (and I do!).
I could go on, but I think I will leave you to dwell on the reasons you love your job on the days that you love your job! Actually, my battery is about to die…the technology irony….
Missing Frank
One reason why I love teaching at the college level is because every sixteen weeks or so usher in new classes, a new crop of students, and new possibilities. There’s not really time to get into ruts and coast.
Generally, too, I’m pretty flexible with change. New textbook? We’ll work it in. New course to teach in English? Why, yes, I’ll give it a go.
Some people fear change. What I used to believe I feared more than change were ruts. That said, I’ve had more than my dose of change these past seven months, and with these changes have come the proverbial lessons. However, I’m a life-long student, and, as such, I’m willing to learn.
My father died in July. While he’d been steadily declining for eighteen months, his death still felt unexpected. Since he’s been gone, my entire work life feels different. This was a surprise to me.
However, for my father’s entire career and my entire life time, he worked in higher education as both an academic advisor and an instructor. When I was an undergraduate student, I attended and worked at the university where he worked for over thirty years, Wayne State University, and received half off tuition. My professors were his colleagues, and I worked hard after underachieving spectacularly in high school. My dad was proud of me. I found my niche in the English Department, specifically in creative writing, and I worked on the literary magazine my senior year and did poetry readings about the Detroit area my last two years there. I also minored in anthropology and Spanish. As a social scientist who loved language himself, my choice of studies delighted him.
I continued on to graduate school, and for a little while after I graduated, I even went back to Wayne State and taught English 101 as an adjunct. My dad and I met every Tuesday at a Lebanese restaurant on campus for lunch.
My dad followed my career with great enthusiasm and interest. Even after I moved cross country, he called me at least weekly to check in. My working in academia was absolutely a common ground for us, a way of for us to connect on several levels: intellectually, professionally, even pedagogically. While I don’t think I ever took this connection for granted, I also don’t think I realized how profound it was until it was gone.
When the new academic year started this past August, I wandered around GCC’s campus feeling lost. Even though my dad lived back in the midwest, and I’d been teaching west of the Mississippi since 1999, I still felt his absence acutely. When I received my first full-time faculty position in northwest Colorado, he was so excited that he even helped me drive the U-Haul across five states to get there. When we pulled into the tiny town that sported a community college with dorms and one traffic light, so different than the Bronx he grew up in and the Detroit he worked in for decades, he pulled over on Main Street and said to me philosophically, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to pretend you’re in the Peace Corps.
With my father gone, I had no one to review the batch of new students with, the new semester’s classes, or my latest research or poetry project. At first, I couldn’t understand my own situation. How could a father’s absence feel so acute when daily he lived so far away? I not only felt lost, I also felt confused by my disorientation.
Obviously tbe degree of change varies, and some of how we respond to change has to do with the magnitude of it. When my father was declining and I thought about his being gone, I never considered what effect it would have on me professionally. However, the effect has been large and daily. What I realize only now is this: change, when it’s self-initiated, is a form of control. I can pick my new classes, and often, depending on the course, I can choose my textbooks. Although I don’t pick my course outcomes, I pick the curriculum that helps meet them. But certain changes, the kind we can’t at all control, bring loss and thus grief. And for me grief is the most mysterious of emotions–appearing and then lingering when least expected. This academic year has indeed been a lesson for me in change–the hardest kind. The kind, I guess, that makes me more independent and, inevitably, a stronger person. But it’s also the kind I wish I didn’t have to face.
Learning to Let Go
Like many, I am back in school trying to meet the new HLC qualifications while pursuing a yoga certification. Although I am no spring chicken, there are always new things to learn if we stay open to the possibilities and let of of ego.
Last year, I signed up for an intermediate-level asana class. I had been doing hot yoga for five years prior to registering and thought that I would claim the coveted teacher’s pet award. After all, I had ten years of youth on my classmates and am incredibly fit. I have run marathons, competed in triathlons, and spent years on a swim team. On the first day, I showed up in my new Lululemon top that showed off my muscular pecs, and I was ready to downward dog with the best of them. I took a wide stance, threw my rear in the air, and put myself into the pose. As I was mediating in the pose and relishing some inner glory, I heard the teacher yell across the room, “dear God, someone help that new student”. Being the helper that I am, I pulled out of the pose and was ready to instruct the student with the poor posture. To my surprise the misaligned student was me!
I spent the rest of the class, actually the rest of the semester, with an aide who properly adjusted me into EVERY single pose. After five grueling years of practice, I had strengthened nothing except my ability to do every pose incorrectly. My first instinct was to withdraw, but my fierce sense of competitiveness with myself would not let me quit. I persisted, perspired, and complained for sixteen weeks. I did not experience one minute of enjoyment through the two-hour workout.
I am glad that I put my ego aside. I have since graduated to an independent practitioner and the yoga assistant has found a newbie to readjust. Every once in a while, I hear the teacher grunt-good work, Mary.
Yoga really is about letting go. Through this experience, I have learned to let go of my pride and realign my expectations. I have learned that it is okay to need help. Had I held onto my ego, I would have never grown or pursued my passion. I have four classes left before I graduate and can call myself a yoga teacher. Yippee.
Namaste,
Mary
The Circle of Learning
As an online and hybrid instructor, I’m always glad to learn something that can help to improve my classes. One of our adjuncts in English, Paul Moore, first made me aware that after embedding YouTube videos in our courses, students can be face with “related” videos that may come from a browsing history. They may then continue to watch videos inside your course in Canvas. I think if any of you have spent some time on YouTube, you understand that the term “related videos” can be interpreted quite broadly. I really don’t like the thought of my students watching something “related” inside the Canvas course as if it were supplied by or endorsed by me. And I know how easily I can be distracted by cat videos, so the last thing I want to do is make distraction easier for my students.
Paul emailed me a short video he made explaining how to eliminate the related video by adding in a bit of html code to the embed code that YouTube provides. I thought this was great to know since I do use a few short videos in my online class, Survey of Gothic Literature. And I thought I was done. I learned something pretty cool from Paul–who made it really easy to understand–and I could go in and change all the embed code in any YouTube videos I used.
But I wasn’t really done. Shortly after hearing from Paul, I noticed that our CTLE posted Paul’s video on Twitter. Since I liked it so much the first time, I retweeted it and noted its importance for online instructors. Done and done. But then I got a reply to my tweet. Cheryl Colan, from our CTLE, gave me another handy tip on the same issue, even easier than Paul’s. And so just today, I embedded a YouTube video for my students, and I applied the new tip. It was so easy to shut off the related video that shows after a video is done playing. As Cheryl’s tweet says, when you want to embed a video and you select “share,” if you click “embed” and then you click “more,” you’ll see some boxes where you can select/unselect certain features: related videos, player controls, video title and player actions, and enhanced privacy. Easy.
I have to say I was pretty satisfied by the whole experience involving embedded YouTube videos and related content. The instruction came to me via email, tweets, video, and more tweets. I didn’t seek out any of this new learning, but it found me because I make a small effort to be connected and because my colleagues like to share what they know. The synchronicity is sweet.
The Perfect Lesson, Or What I Learned This Week in the Pool
Yesterday, I graded ENG 102 papers. *Why aren’t they getting it?!* I kept asking myself. *Why is analysis so hard for the freshman writer?*
In my frustration, I thought to take a break. I thought to swim.
Having grown up in Detroit, I still marvel that I live in a place where I can swim outside in February. I marvel that I can walk across campus right in the middle of my day, jump into the pool, swish around and get my heart rate up, and then go on with my day like swimming is my own secret I carry with me everywhere I go.
In a way, it is. I have been an avid swimmer my entire life. I don’t much remember life without swimming. My mother cannot swim, but her daughters swam competitively. We even did synchronized swimming in the summers. My mother’s girls can swim.
After shivering for years in the unheated city pool where we swam on cool June mornings in Michigan, I finally understand that through her own inability in the water my mother gave me one of the best life skills I could ever have. There are many times I doubt myself in any given day, but I don’t doubt myself in the water. On one vacation about five years ago, I even found myself in choppy seas treading water trying to help another person who was having a panic attack. We were supposed to be snorkeling and we had no business being out in the water with such high wind and waves. But we had paid our fee, and the company took us out along with a few other tourists. I was the one who didn’t panic. I knew enough to be mindful of the danger I was in, but I also trusted myself enough as a swimmer to keep myself and others safe.
Yesterday, I took a swim lesson. This was probably a full forty years after one of the first ones I ever had.
At first I thought: What could I possibly learn about swimming? Well, apparently a lot. After forty years of swimming, what I know really well is my comfort zone, and when I’m not in the high seas attempting to snorkel on vacation, I generally stick to what I know. Yesterday, I Had to Do a Different Stroke. I had to use kickboard. I held on to the red foam float-able like I was six again and tried to imitate the motions that our instructor gave us. I moved no faster than a canoe going against fierce rapids. At one point, I actually looked at the numbers on the side of the pool’s walls to confirm that I was going forward. Why wasn’t my body working right? When it came time to add the arms, my lower body and upper body wouldn’t cooperate with each other. It was complete discord. I was failing in the pool.
This is what I learned from this week’s failing moment. It was simple. It was profound. No matter how good we are at something, there is always another aspect of that something to learn. There is always another way to become the student, yet again, and learn about learning.
I watched as my lower body told my upper body to take a hike. I watched myself struggle. Mary Jane Onnen in the next lane over watched me struggle, too. It was the perfect lesson, returning me to a state of gratitude, and returning me to that group of ENG 102 papers later that evening with a lot more understanding and humility.
Finally Got it!
I came from Panama City, Panama, where communication is very indirect and implicit. As an instructor who lives in the United States and teaches students who use different ways to transmit a message, I thought it was crucial to learn the different ways in which we communicate. I wanted to be able to understand my students better and make sure I was sending the right signals while teaching. It is true that I had knowledge of these two contexts, but never understood them clearly enough until, I had to teach a class in the Dominican Republic, with 10 students from the US, about intercultural communication. This was very important because I know that I can’t teach American students the same way I teach Hispanic or Asian students. Understanding the mechanics of the low context communication vs. the high context communication have helped me understand the dynamics in my classroom and in my house. Here you have the main differences:
Low Context Communication is the way my students communicate.
- Students are more explicit
- Students tend to be more verbal, and it does not mean they are disrespectful.
- Students feel the goal in communicating their thoughts is clarity.
- Students feel written communication is important.
- Students are skilled at asking questions to get more information.
- Students are skilled at processing a lot of verbal and written information.
- Students feel challenged to know how to read the environment.
- Students tell people what they need to know in order to understand them.
High Context Communication is the way I communicate in my culture.
- I pay more attention to the situation, environment, and the people with whom I communicate.
- For me understanding is derived from context.
- I pay attention to non-verbal cues as they are important to understand meaning.
- I know when to ask questions.
- I feel overloaded with so many communication cues.
- I used to feel like a child because people used to spell everything out to me.
After understanding the mechanism of these two ways of communicating, and knowing what my students wanted to have to get the message, I began to be more understanding, more patient, more explicit, and above all more cognizant of writing my instructions, and repeating more often to clarify an important point in my lesson.
Flipping the Classroom, One Video at a Time
The “flipped classroom” is all the buzz lately. I really like the idea of it, and I have tried to get students to prepare ahead of time so we can do interactive activities during class. In addition to this, I assign projects that require students to apply the knowledge from their study.
Last summer, my ACE students were struggling with an activity and asked for more time in class to do the project. I obliged, with an agreement that they would have to watch the lectures outside of class. I spent the better of two afternoons recording the lectures using Screencast-O-Matic and Power Point slides. They were not perfect, but they worked, and the extra in class time to help students apply the material was awesome!
Last week, as we were working on an in-class activity about the atmosphere, one of my students remarked, “I wonder what it would be like to be a storm chaser!” Many others responded, and a great discussion ensued (I love when that happens!). I do know a storm chaser, in fact, she is a former student – and I even have had her come as a guest speaker before. So I contacted her, but unfortunately, she is now working a “real” job, and cannot get away during my class time. The next best thing is to make a video of her presentation.
…Here I go, trying out something I’ve never done before. Oh, wait, isn’t that professional development?
This time, instead of talking over Power Point slides, I thought it would be more engaging if my speaker could do her talking in front of a green screen and then display her photographs or video behind her. Lucky for me, the CTLE can help with that. I met today with Cheryl Colan to learn more about how it’s done, just to see if it is a doable project. We had so much fun! I even made a video of myself with instructions for my speaker about what she should prepare when we are ready to film. It took about an hour to film and publish the very short video. I even put one of my own storm pictures behind me. Here I am, finishing up the recording (Cheryl suggested I put this picture in my post):
The CTLE has a recording room, complete with green screen, computer loaded with the right software, camera and microphone, special lights, and even a teleprompter. Cheryl also told me that when you reserve the recording room, you are also reserving her services – that way she is available to help you through the process.
I definitely learned something new today! I know this video will probably be the only project of this kind for this semester, but little by little, I might just end up with a collection of them.