Teaching

Teaching
I went to school last night for a faculty training session. It was about lesson plans. I have heard the presentation before. But, I got credit for my professional development; that is important for accreditation purposes. Since the program presenter loves my current lesson plans, I didn’t learn very much.

We also got fed. Instead of the usual pizza, we had spaghetti with tomato sauce, grilled chicken, I went with the un-spiced version of the grilled chicken, a kind of Caesar salad, and soft bread sticks. There was no dessert. I missed the dessert part.

I shrugged off the lack of dessert because I knew about the post bachelors’ thesis presentation celebration. There had to be something sweet there.

My department chair spoke to me and asked if I was interested in teaching two more classes in the December term. I said sure. Then, I asked what the classes were. He said Project Management. I said he could count me in for those classes. Now, I will have a full teaching load of five classes for a part time instructor.

I will have evening classes on Tuesday through Friday and then a Saturday morning class. The Friday evening and Saturday morning class sequence is the most difficult one for me. I had done this type of schedule before but never on a weekend. I know that I will have to struggle with attendance for these two classes.

I had a chance to look at the two new course syllabi before the training session. They appear to be brand new courses and I don’t think that they have been taught at the school before. On the plus side, there are the same six students for each class so we ought to have a very intimate class; I am thinking that this class should work well in a seminar environment. Learning these students’ names ought to be easy for me.

The bachelors’ thesis presentation went well in my mind. A couple of the students seem to run long on presentations that could have been better with judicious editing. These students have not had any formal training in making a professional presentation and their work showed. Some students had dark blue backgrounds with black type fonts and that was close to impossible to read.

Four of the six students were former students of mine. They did well; I had expected as much.

I had to make an evaluation of the students’ presentations. I thought I graded fairly, based on the criteria on the evaluation sheet. Two students received a score of 65 from me and two received scores of 80 and one received an 85. I also wrote a bunch of comments so the instructor and department chair would understand why I marked the students the way I did.

I think I surprised the department chair with my comments. I don’t think other instructors have been so wordy and detailed. The chair liked that part because he will put all of the evaluations in a file that the accreditation committee will look at sometime in the future.

Then, there was the after presentation celebration.

The food was much better than what we had for the faculty meeting. The cold sandwiches were from Subway and we very good. This was the first time that I have had a Subway sandwich. I usually go to Giuliano’s for my sandwiches.

The best part about the celebration was the chocolate cake with a milk chocolate frosting. That was great. I was also glad that I had my periodic blood tests completed last week.

I was speaking with the department chair. He told me that he was planning on having me teaching a Business Law and Regulation class for his paralegal studies students sometime next year. I love that class and I am so looking forward to teaching it.

I got home a little after 11:00 PM and crawled off to bed quickly. I was tired. I slept very well and didn’t wake up until 6:20 AM when I rolled over and went back to sleep.


Be well and stay happy.