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Posts Tagged ‘Education’
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Normally, I write these blog entries a day or two in advance and then have them scheduled to automatically upload at a certain time of the day (usually around 11:30am). However, since there are a few random subjects that I’d like to hit on which don’t necessarily require a separate, standalone entry, I thought that I might create a quick, impromptu entry covering a bunch of random stuff.
To begin, at the beginning of January I began teaching for a well-known online/distance learning-based university. After doing this for about a month I have to admit that I’m not impressed. I thought the online teaching setting would give instructors a great deal of resources to utilize for their students to learn the course content – I was wrong. Or at least I was wrong with respect to the place where I’m teaching. I was handed a syllabus and told that I had to follow it. Then I was told that I had to utilize the online-based discussion forums and online submission tools in order to receive assignments. That wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t both filled with glitches that render their usage impossible. All in all, it makes the instructor (me) feel that I do not have much control over the class and its direction. That’s not a good feeling for an educator.
On top of it all, my pay rate (which is the least of my concerns with this arrangement) is a couple of hundred dollars per student enrolled in the course with an enrollment cap of 15. Not a bad pay rate really except that less than 5 students are enrolled in the course. Whoopie.
Two weeks ago, though, I began teaching a brand new course that I designed. This course is being taught at the local college and it has been good so far. I do have some concerns about the real-world preparedness level of the students in that at least half of the class chooses to not hand in assignments on time. I also have some concerns about the students comprehending the information that I give them in class. For example, one assignment asked students to identify a specific type of organization. We talked about these organizations for over an hour in class and two short reading assignments went in depth about the typical characteristics of these organizations. Again, more than half of the class chose groups that were not even remotely close to what the ones they were supposed to identify.
That’s somewhat troubling for the future workforce…
Hey – Lost is back on ABC tonight, huh? That’s pretty exciting. I’m looking forward to the final season of this show if only because I have to get it out of my mind! Does anyone think that all of the Lost fans out there will be completely satisfied with the “answers” that are given this season? I tend to think that the Lost writers have set themselves up for a catastrophic failure if they don’t answer every single question that is out there about the show. I guess that judgment should be reserved until after the season really gets into the swing of things. All I know is that a lot of people have invested a lot of time into watching that show and they better not blow it.
I will hopefully have some more encouraging news about my student loans coming up in the next few days. You can guess what that might be…
If you keep an eye on the market, then I’m sure that you’ve seen how Sirius XM is blowing up all over the place! For those of us that purchased this stock at a dime or two per share, we’re doing pretty good with our investment at this point. Last I checked, share prices were at 0.94. Not bad making 1000% return on an investment, huh?
And just think – if you listened to almost every big internet stock market website out there you would have sold this stock when it was down to a nickel per share. Talk about being shortsighted! That’s why I do my own research on the stocks that I purchase – the internet stock market sites have an agenda and I’m not interested in their garbage.
Oh, and I’ve been doing pretty well with Ford (which the internet stock market sites said I should have sold a year ago) and Barnes & Nobles (same story). The lesson learned here is to do your own research and trust your gut!
Eddie has been doing a fine job with running TBLWrestling.com. Hits are up an incredible percentage and I’m proud of his efforts. Good work, Eddie! I’ve been running TNAStars.com now for about a month and I’m pleased that it has already achieved some level of success. Both of these sites are hobby sites for Eddie and I and we only spend a few minutes each day putting up some updates. With such reduced involvement, I’m glad to know that the people out there like what we’re doing!
I guess that’s about it. See you tomorrow!
Posted in Entertainment, Random Entries | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Ugh… I’m getting tired just thinking about this topic. As you can tell from the title of this one, I’m going to write one or two entries about things that absolutely exhaust me. In truth, these are issues that last month which absolutely ran me ragged – to the point where I just wanted to curl up in a ball and go to sleep through New Year’s Eve! You guys know that feeling – the feeling of saying, “Ah, fuck it. I don’t need this shit.”
The first and most exhausting issue (and the focus of this entry) that presented itself last month was grading my students’ research papers. Holy cow. What a mess some of these things were to read (if you can call trudging through these papers “reading”). I’ve been teaching a course at the local college for the last three years. This Thursday will be the beginning of my fourth year teaching at the college and each year the writing gets worse and worse. First, I thought it was bad when one of my students spelled “before” as “b4″ (yes, someone actually did that). Then, I thought it was bad when my students submitted works cited pages on opinion papers! But 2009 was a banner year for outstanding displays of ridiculousness.
I had students copy and paste directly from Wikipedia when they are submitting opinion papers. I will repeat that – and expand – for your delight. I assign a two page opinion paper to my students and ask for their feedback on certain issues. This paper is worth 5 points on their final grade. And some students used this as an opportunity to go to Wikipedia, copy and paste an entire entry on a topic, and submit that entry as their opinion. Are you serious?! Has the age of the internet and social media destroyed the minds of America’s youth to the point where they can’t form a fucking opinion?! Good grief!
But that was a two page opinion paper. What exhausted me last month was reviewing and grading an 8 to 10 page research paper where the quality of writing was generally less than high school level and the overall grammar, spelling, and flow of the papers was just as bad. Granted, of the papers that I read there were definitely two or three home runs and another three or four that were at least written at a college level. But the rest of them… to say that I was disappointed would not be doing justice to the life-sucking exhaustion that I felt reading through these papers. And the less-than-college-quality of the work spread across a variety of issues besides spelling, grammar, and flow. One student – in a research paper – wrote that members of a certain religion (of which I am a member) and white people are generally not offended or annoyed by the Nazi party.
Go back and read that last sentence again. Yes, that’s right. A college student suggested that one specific religion and people of a certain skin tone would actually condone the Nazi party. Absolutely outrageous.
Almost none of the students knew what it meant to properly cite their sources and even more had no idea what MLA or APA format meant. It was an exhausting exercise reading their papers – absolutely exhausting.
But I can’t say that these students haven’t made an impact on me. No, in fact they’ve pushed me to the point where I’m strongly considering reducing the amount of written pages that my students have to hand in each semester. Not to worry, though. I plan on replacing those written pages with presentations – another skill that students sorely lack these days.
Who said being an adjunct professor was easy?
Posted in College & Fraternity Life | 2 Comments »
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
Just to show you the lengths that I go to in order to cover certain topics on this blog, about two and a half months ago I bookmarked a page on the New York Times because I wanted to write about the topic. The topic, whether or not students should have homework in the summertime, poses an interesting set of questions for both the educator and the student and, ultimately, our society.
From a student’s perspective, isn’t summer vacation the long-promised break from the oversight of teachers and principals? I strongly believe that students of all ages should utilize their summer months to do everything that they should be doing. I put emphasis on “should” in the previous sentence because different students, at different ages, should be doing different things. For example, an athletic student in high school might be best served by spending his summers working a part-time job and spending the rest of his time preparing for the upcoming football or soccer season. Imagine if all student athletes had the benefit of three to four months of additional training during the summer. Wouldn’t that benefit their long-term goals as an athlete in college and beyond?
Similarly, some students should be spending their summer months working a little bit more than part-time jobs. Why? Because some students should be banking money to help bankroll their college expenses or to help their families succeed on an everyday basis. Which begs the question…how much is too much for our students to bear during the summer months?
Do our students really need to worry about how they’re going to score on a test during the first few days of schools when it is the middle of July? Further, for those students who must work a job or who have opted to take an internship in the summer – should they also be burdened with reading two or three books and putting together a book report on what they’re discovered?
Further, do educators need to be concerned about whether or not their assignments are being properly followed throughout the summer months? What happens when a student refuses to do their book report and other students see that he only gets a few points off his total grade in the class? Doesn’t the overall impact of summer homework then become less effective? And won’t students pass along that information to future generations?
I’m ambivalent towards the issue. Frankly, I think that instead of burdening our students with additional homework in the summertime, I think our society would be better served be educating our students on finding their own sources for information. In other words, teach our students at a young age that they should read the newspaper at least once each week and that they should read a news-based magazine at least once per month. And while on that topic, we should educate our students to understand that it is okay for them to read a magazine like Maxim or Glamour, but that they should not be using these outlets as their primary source of finding information.
If we could manage to restructure our educational system to educate our students towards real world ways of gaining new knowledge, we might be able to fix the growing gap between the test scores of American students versus our counterparts in Japan, Germany, and other Western countries. It all starts in youth, though. In this digital age, we need to teach our younger students how to find out information on their own and to know the difference between hard news, opinion, and entertainment.
Once we achieve that, we won’t have to worry about assigning homework in the summertime.
Posted in Random Entries | No Comments »
Friday, October 30th, 2009
As a member of the adjunct faculty at the local college, I receive an e-mail whenever someone from our institution is in the media. Most recently, I received a message stating that a professor and one of the administrators at the college collaborated on a piece discussing whether college students or professors were to blame for poor performance if, and when, it occurs. From the article:
This conclusion that students are not “all right” often takes the form of lamenting students’ lack of motivation, lack of interest, lack of preparation, excessive partying, excessive socializing, and a lack of enthusiasm for our teaching. Worse, some make broad claims that students in general “don’t read,” “can’t write” and “can’t think,” especially compared to students of yesteryear. But are these novel complaints? A faculty report once concluded that 25 percent of students admitted to Harvard in 1897 did not have the writing skills necessary to succeed in college. This does not bode well for progress in higher education over the past 100+ years.
Unfortunately what this does suggest is that the phenomenon of blaming students is more ubiquitous and may not be limited to teachers who are exceptionally egocentric, narcissistic, burnt-out, curmudgeonly, or those who would rather not teach at all.
Among the many items that I like in these two paragraphs, I think special attention should be paid to the description of certain professors as, “exceptionally egocentric, narcissistic, burnt-out, [or] curmudgeonly.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve had professors that fit all of these adjectives (and sometimes all at once!). I had a racist and sexist professor (who I’ve blogged about before) who was “exceptionally egocentric” while being narcissistic at the same time. It was amazing. This was a woman who actively worked against student learning if you were a white male in her classroom. It was unbelievable, though in some respects I think that her arrogance and downright racism and sexism have caused me to be a better educator today. I am now keenly aware of my treatment of minority students and my interactions with the male and female contingencies in my classroom.
Getting back to the article, I think that the writers (Gary W. Lewandowski Jr. and David B. Strohmetz) do a great job of explaining how professors may easily forget how they acted while they were college students. This is another issue that I try to be aware of as I’m teaching my classes. When I look at the students and I notice that a bunch of them are either not paying attention or have their heads down, I immediately change up my lesson plan to get them more engaged in the classroom. I believe that teaching should not be a process that is set in stone, but rather it should adapt (as/if necessary) to the environment. Luckily, I rarely look at the students and see them bored en masse though I do catch one or two of them going to town on their BlackBerries or text messaging like crazy. Which brings me to another portion of Lewandowski and Strohmetz’s article:
Students in our classes today do check their cell phones excessively. When we were students, most of us never would have dreamed of doing such a thing (mainly because there weren’t cell phones). But, if you had such a device as a student, I suspect that you may have found it difficult to avoid checking for text messages about that night’s social activities as well. Now that we do have these devices, how many of your colleagues (if not yourself) check their BlackBerrys or iPhones on a potentially excessive basis? Although there may be generation differences in the available technology, students and teachers of yesterday and today share the same desire to learn useful information, to be financially secure, to lead a happy life, and to be efficient, and to avoid wasting time engaging in seemingly meaningless activities. Ultimately, if we focus on the similarities rather than highlight the differences, we will be more effective in helping our students to learn.
Alright, point taken. And, in fact, I’ve even found myself sitting in the back of the room during my classes checking my text messages as they come in (though never responding). Oh, sometimes I sit in the back of the room to change up the atmosphere in the classroom. Throws some of the students for a loop, but it allows me to focus on seeing the lesson as they see it. I think I’ve done this twice so far this semester.
Again, I would recommend that if you have any interest in the college classroom or if you are a professor, teacher, engaged student, or just someone interested in knowing more about the relationships in the classroom, then I suggest reading this article. It is both interesting and thought-provoking.
Posted in College & Fraternity Life | No Comments »
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
For those of you that don’t know, I’ve created the word “snnngt!” to represent the noise that a person makes when they suck in their boogers instead of blowing them out into a tissue. Think about it and try to match the noise to the action. Go ahead, I’ll wait… There you go. Keep that in mind until I explain why it is relevant below.
Some of you may have picked up that I take a class on Thursday nights at the local college. It’s a great class and, though it’s pretty long and thus exhausting, I do think that I’m making some good contacts and learning some interesting aspects of communication theory. But as you might expect, there is an certain aspect of this class that completely irritates the hell out of me – the person who I sit next to seems to be constantly sick!
It’s ridiculous! This woman sits there with a variety of crumpled up tissues and “snnngt!’s” all throughout the class! Then she coughs and hacks up a lung every once in a while. And after all of that, she lets out these long, exhausted breaths – think of the sound that, “Uuuuuhhhhhhhhh…” would make. It’s gross!
What the hell is wrong with some people? Look, I understand having to “suck in” the snot if there is no tissue around, but if you’re going to be sitting in a classroom (that is a SMALL classroom, by the way) you don’t have that option any more! You’re invading everyone else’s learning environment by constantly sucking in your goobers instead of blowing them out! And then to sit there and cough along with it? Really?!
Here we are in the midst of a nationwide discussion on whether or not we are going to be hammered by swine flu and part of that conversation is how college students need to be particularly aware of their health since the swine flu attacks younger people more harshly than older folks. And this woman comes to a class on a college campus hacking and wheezing and coughing up a lung? Seriously?!
Anyway, this unnecessary complication probably bothers me more than it does the other students in the class because she and I essentially share the same desk space so I’m right in the combat zone. It’s gross and it makes me want to vomit. The moral of the story is that you should not come to class if you are sick – stay home and e-mail the professor for the work, damn it.
Posted in College & Fraternity Life, Idiots, Morons, & Fools | 1 Comment »
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
Every once in a while I’ll be engaged in a conversation with someone who never went to college or who didn’t finish their degree program. Sometimes, these conversations hit a brick wall when that person makes a reference towards how they don’t need a piece of paper to be smart or knowledgeable on an issue. On its face, this is a really awkward statement – I’m not sure if there are any people in this world who believe that obtaining a piece of paper will make them smarter. Well, maybe some of those people who think that Harry Potter is real would think that a piece of paper makes them smart, but they are few and far in between!
Whenever this comes up in a conversation, it’s usually a pretty depressing point in the discussion because it shows a severe lack of understanding as to what a college degree actually does for a person. Obtaining a piece of paper that says “Bachelors of the Arts” or “Bachelor of Science” in any particular discipline does not make you a know-it-all genius on that topic. Yeah, you may know more facts and figures than the average person, but that would be expected, right?
The real benefit of getting that piece of paper is gaining access to an opportunity. That’s right – access to opportunities is what that college degree gets you in the real world. How many times have you looked at job descriptions and they say, “Bachelor’s Degree required?” Even if you’ve seen that requirement just once, you’ve seen how that piece of paper can grant you access to an opportunity that non college graduates cannot access. It’s just the way the business world is these days.
That’s not to say that there aren’t a multitude of excellent, high-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree. And many people from older generations would argue that the best way to gain better access to opportunities is to enter the military. I would probably agree with that for certain segments of the population today, too. But that doesn’t negate the fact that a college degree is a tremendous help in obtaining access to certain opportunities.
What many college graduates will tell you is that there are other benefits to going to college. In particular, they’d probably cite maturing socially and beginning to build a broad professional network as the top two non-academic benefits. These two benefits can be achieved in any number of ways including joining certain on-campus clubs, fraternities, sororities, student government, honor societies, etc. Those students that choose to engage in a meaningful dialogue with their professors outside of the classroom are probably the smartest students on campus. Why? Well, if you’re a young person starting out, why wouldn’t you want to connect with a professor who might have come from the business world and thus has a large network of seasoned professional contacts? Talk about an easy way to get an internship or a job out of college!
That aspect of the college experience has worked for me. I received my adjunct professor job through the recommendation of two former professors who I got to know outside of the classroom. One of them has also gotten me an online teaching position at a different university. I would have never been able to get these teaching gigs without the network that I built while in college.
There are a lot of aspects of college life that are beneficial to the eventual graduate (and even more benefits to the eventual masters degree graduate or doctoral graduate).
Posted in College & Fraternity Life | No Comments »
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