Opportunity Knocks. I Answer.

A sad fact of blogging is that the more that is going on in one's life, the less time and attention for blogging there is.

So I guess I'll just pound this out. Really it should be several blog posts. We'll see what spills out onto the—monitor.

Update on Daughter: She loves her new class. Her teacher requires no homework turned in, and her grade is based entirely on tests. I know, you're thinking what a terrible teacher. But she says he is really interesting and engaging as a lecturer, and she does well on tests, so for her, this is a perfect class. I bit my tongue about the whole testing-only thing because, as I reminded myself, if it works for her, it works. I have loved my share of great lecturers, too, and they will always have a place. Also, he has a disability which makes grading homework very difficult, so it actually does make sense. A good reminder that results trump theory. I just love that she trusts herself and chooses the teachers and methods that work for her. It's all about choice and self-directed learning, and she is really pretty damned good at this.

Job news. I hardly know where to begin. I tried explaining this via text before and the intrigue is thick. So it really doesn't translate to print well.

The pilot program is a flop, IMO. We prepared for 99 students from four different college prep classes. Only one of the four teachers was on board with the idea, and only 2 of his/her students decided to participate. They are going to get some hefty one-on-one help! So, any results from that are really going to be not terribly meaningful. In any event, the tutors can handle anything that comes along, so my attention does not need to be on it. I am very curious about what will happen next semester, and I guess I will find out, because the summer position I'm in appears to be turning into a temporary position for the next year. I am extremely happy about this.

It's temporary because when a tenure-track faculty position is vacated, it is no longer automatically filled. The position has to go through the approval process with the Academic Senate, which takes a whole budget cycle, one year. I don't know why this particular position didn't make it into the last cycle. I guess because of when the person left. But there is a year-long gap now. They are doing what is called "back-filling" the position, meaning they hire two part-timers to do the job. They could also post the job as a full-time temp position, but they often choose not to do that. I'm not clear why, but I am cynically guessing it's just more work to do that.

This is one of two of these positions, and last year, the other position was vacated as well, so there are two people, Miss A and Miss B, who split that job last year. Miss A is now permanently and happily employed in a different position in this same area.

Long story short, I am now one-half of the replacement for this job, which happens to be a job that I most voraciously want. Unfortunately, the other half of the replacement, Ms. B, is a rather highly qualified person who has done this before, and I am pretty sure she also wants this job. I think my only edge is the fact that I am going to kick ass on this job. Probably be some ass-kissing in there as well, let's be honest.

I've already started preparing. The aforementioned awesome woman who did this last year, Ms. A, got a good start on revamping many of the workshops. They had all been in Powerpoint before, and she's been making them Prezis, with embedded videos and links and various media to make them more interesting and non-linear. Her work looks very engaging. She's given me a binder of what she's done so far, and we're going to share the Prezis. Now, what was my password, again?

I've already taken over the academic integrity workshop for July, to her great relief, and I plan on taking on any and everything that they will give me this summer. The more prepared I am, the better I am going to look. I am a placeholder still, but I am going to be a damned good one. If I don't get the permanent job, it will not be because I didn't take my best shot.

Even if I don't get the tenure-track position—and let's face it, the chances are good that I won't, given their disturbing tendency to value outside applicants over those already here, in addition to the aforementioned highly qualified person likely to apply—this is great exposure. Workshops I will be presenting are taken by people all over campus, not just students. And I work in the same building with many of the people who are likely to be on hiring committees for jobs I want in the future. I'll be a known—hopefully excellent—quantity. Practice speaking to groups of people is precisely the weak point on my resume that I need to beef up, which is good for no matter where I end up applying.

A Spendy Pilot Program

It's kind of new to me, writing about where I work, so bear with me as I try not to divulge anything as I am, uh, divulging things. That is, there is likely information I should not share, and I'm not exactly clear on what that is yet. Erring on the side of caution is not my forte. However, the corollary to that is that I have a deep sense of integrity that guides my actions, especially pertaining to anything that is private or sensitive or has the potential to affect my or anyone's job situation. I try to stay in alignment with my principles, which is a good thing, and more important to me than external rules. The rules are not unimportant, but they are there to serve, not to be served, if you know what I mean.

So. This pilot project is about tutoring. There is a certain huge educational publishing company that runs the software, and we are trying it out this summer. The idea is a very good one: get incoming recent high school graduates up to the skills level they need to be in order to save time and money not taking remedial courses, which often derail the student and lower graduation rates. So far so good.

Some questions that have been brought up or are readily apparent to me: The same company that is trying to sell us this software runs the software we use for placement purposes throughout the district. This program is funneling students into testing software, and measuring how well they do on that is not necessarily relevant to how well they will do in actual classes. Do we as faculty have any say over that, in real terms? I'm guessing not. Do we simply do our best within a system that may or may not work? Or do we try to change something that I know took years and multiple levels of governance to create? Is that even possible? How is this system evaluated currently?

An issue that was raised: there are no calculators allowed on any of these tests. Our students have been using them throughout their school careers, and will most often be allowed to use them in their classes. How well are these tests measuring skill levels, and more importantly, how well are they placing students to be poised for success? Are they actually holding the students back? I feel like I need to find out more about this issue from students and faculty alike. You can bet I will ask my daughter about the test again, with this new information I have.

The English portion is less useful, as you can imagine. Because the classes these students will be taking are designed by teachers, to teach writing. The tests focus on sentence structure and reading comprehension. There is a disconnect. With this, too, I want to know how they are measuring the correlations between placement and student success.

I am oddly tangential to the whole situation, as I am really here to satisfy legal requirements for a faculty member to be present in the tutoring area, but I am not the usual faculty in this area and I'm kind of an interloper. Although my name is on the course, I'm not really the person in charge of the pilot program, the director of the assessment center is. And my ideas may or may not be seen as helpful. It's a fine line to walk, especially for someone who hopes to be hired full-time one day. I mustn't burn any bridges.

Stay tuned!

Things That Need Saying

My daughter started college in the Spring semester. I came to realize soon after that I needed to blog about it.

Background: In her junior year, she decided that high school was not serving her educational needs. Being utterly unlike me in key ways, she did not decide to simply spend a lot of time goofing off, obsessing about boys or partying. She came to us—both sets of parents—and proposed to quit high school and immediately enter community college, thus saving a lot of frustration and time. None of us could think of a good reason that she should not do so, and even if we had, I don't think we could have forced a decision on her. So, in that way, she's my girl!

It worked out well, with a small glitch which meant she could not start in the fall, but she did save half a year of her life anyway.

But like all college students, she was disappointed in some of her classes for reasons that are very germane to my line of work. I am adjunct faculty at the college where my daughter is a student, and I have a masters in educational technology. This seemed like a unique opportunity and lens through which to filter our ideas and experiences. So far I have not been able to interest her in helping me write this, but perhaps if I screw it up enough I will force her hand.

At some point, I will recap her last semester, but I thought I'd toss this up while it's fresh in my mind.

Honestly, I think this is going to become a blog about what not to do. I wish it were otherwise. Sorry to spoil the ending.

Through various snafus involving her bicycle, Daughter was unable to get to her first class of the summer on time without my help. (Oh, how I am hoping the lesson of preparation is sinking in, but I think it's gonna take awhile) I offered to get her there on time, which is not as simple as it seems, as she is taking courses in an outreach center 15 miles away at the same time I am working on the main campus. But this class was one she was thinking of adding, so it worked out. I dropped her off and told her to text me to let me know if she got into the class or not, then I went to In-N-Out for a burger, as one does.

So, the call came. She was not going to take this class. My inner parental grump was annoyed. Seriously, why was she so picky? (Oh, yeah, totally my fault. That's not the point. Focus!)

Prepare yourself for this stupidity: the professor grades students on the notes they take, among other things. I was gobsmacked.

I had run into this problem in another form back when I was taking the second chemistry class I needed...for a career that never happened, but that's another story. The prof had insisted that we write out all the labs longhand and not on the computer. Which would have been fine if the labs were a few pages long, as they were the previous class. But she wanted us to write out all the instructions that she had typed for the lab. This was pure busywork for no reason whatsoever. The factory model of education. Punishment, in my view. I dropped the class.

And to both of these women I say, "What the hell is wrong with you?" What possible goal is achieved through requiring this sort of thing when we have computers, and recording devices, and the magic of the internet at hand? How does this positively affect student outcomes, and even if it does, at what cost? At what cost to the students for whom note-taking is an arduous task: those who are non-neurotypical, those who have figured out that paying attention matters more than writing down what the prof says, and, hell, how about those who just want to be treated as adults who are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves how they best learn and study? And how about you stick to actually doing your job of teaching, hmm?!?

It's a shame, really, because both of those women have valuable content knowledge. Daughter said this prof has been involved in all aspects of her field, and had a lot of interesting things to say about it. She regrets not being able to take the class. But, as she said, "I'm not going to college so I can submit to a binder check again!" She will take the class from someone else.

On a mostly unrelated tech note, she said there was a smartboard in the classroom, which is great, except that it's positioned so that only part of the class could see it. <headdesk> This is a brand new building. This is why the tech needs to be integrated, people. It's not a sticker you put on after the building is complete. It needs to be a part of the process.

And really, it's not so unrelated. It really speaks to the lack of vision—and the lack of involving those who do have vision—into designing the educational process from start to finish, from the buildings to the technology to the professors. It's late not to have this figured out, and young people suffer for our attachment to the past.