[Each week at ProfHacker, George Williams hosts "Open Thread Wednesday," which is a space for readers to ask questions and also to suggest topics for future ProfHacker posts. The Commenting and Community Guidelines still apply.—Ed.]
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7 Responses to Open Thread Wednesday!
ianthomas - June 9, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Nels Highberg’s recent article on applying for adjunct work is excellent. In a similar vein, do any of you much more experienced professors have any advice or resources for first-time teachers who will be starting in the fall?
jgrafft - June 9, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Expertise in an academic domain does not transfer to the domain of teaching. When you’re no longer concerned your teaching skills won’t cut it you haven’t become competent, you’ve stopped caring.Remember where your students are coming from”Theories of the known, which are described by different physical ideas, may be equivalent in all their predictions and hence scientifically indistinguishable. However, they are not psychologically identical when trying to move from that base into the unknown. For different views suggest different kinds of modifications which might be made and hence are not equivalent in the hypotheses one generates from them in one’s attempt to understand what is not yet understood.”R.P. Feynman [1966], prefaceNeedham, Tristan. Visual Complex Analysis. Oxford University Press, USA, 1999.
george_h_williams - June 9, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Well, you should read over the archived posts in the ProfHacker “Teaching” category, of course! ;-)You might find useful some of the material in the various Teaching Carnivals.Look for the teaching-related books mentioned here.My other advice would be to talk with some of your new colleagues about their teaching, see if you can get copies of others’ syllabi and assignments and ask if it would be okay to adapt some of that material for you own use. (Always get permission!)Find out if your campus has a center for teaching and learning and ask what kinds of resources they make available to you. For example, do they sponsor teaching workshops related to your subject area?Consider having one of your colleagues observe you teach so that they can give you feedback and also so that they can write up a letter about your teaching to go in your file. (You don’t necessarily want student opinion polls to be the only things in there…)Diplomatically ask your colleagues if you can observe them teach to get an idea of the variety of pedagogical approaches taken at your campus.
thangen - June 9, 2010 at 4:31 pm
Here’s a question I’ve been saving up for Open Thread Wednesday. I’m only 2 years into 4-4 teaching and I’m drowning in course-related papers: binders of course materials, files, leftover student tests and final papers never picked up. I’m not sure what to save, and for how long, but I’m having nightmares of accumulating this much after 10 or 15 years. There wouldn’t be enough room in my office for anything else. I know, I know, everything can go paperless – and I do have electronic copies of nearly everything that I wrote (syllabi and course lectures and PDFs of readings) on my computer, yet I can’t seem to bring myself to throw out the paper entirely, or to surrender it all to an external hard drive.Suggestions for a more workable, less overwhelming course-management system on the professorial side of things?
drnels - June 9, 2010 at 6:38 pm
@ianthomas, thanks for you comment! I have nothing to add to George’s wonderfully extensive list of resources.I do have a question, though. We’ve had posts on digital imaging tools that are available online or for free/cheap download. What about a WYSIWYG HTML editor? I need to edit my one webpage, and I don’t know enough HTML to do it by hand. I’m thinking of something like Netscape Composer that I used back in the 1990s.
nmhouston - June 9, 2010 at 9:05 pm
thangen, your question is a really good one, as the papers will just keep piling up. I think I’ll take it up in a post sometime in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, you might look at the comments to one of Jason’s early posts where several of us on the PH team suggest different strategies.
jcmeloni - June 10, 2010 at 1:26 am
@thangen might want to see if your department has a policy about the amount of time you _must_ keep student work (at the school I just left, it was 2 semesters, so piles weren’t any greater than 2 semesters unless we chose to do so), then work off that. Doesn’t get at the greater issue, I realize.