Month: August 2016

Blog – Time Keeps on Slippin’

I should be working on my course.

I know this to be true, and yet I find the days are sliding past.  I am now less than two weeks away from delivering my first class and I feel woefully underprepared.  Perhaps I lack the  context to understand how far along the development process I am.  After all, I’m not developing a course from scratch; the topics and weeks are already set, and the readings are all available.

That, however, seems like the easy part.  I still have to finish committing it to my instructional plan and I have to develop the lectures themselves.  The lectures are what worries me.  I can whip up writing prompts and messages to the students easily, but standing in front of the students for 3-hours is a harder thing to wing.  I have to be teacher, councilor, entertainer and authority for almost half of a working-day.  And I have to do it smoothly, as if I didn’t need to prepare.

There is always a struggle between Present-Me and Future-Me.  Present-Me tends to waste time as if Future-Me has an overabundance of free time at his disposal.  Present-Me is bogged down by poor sleeping habits, a full-time job, a part-time job, family and volunteer commitments, etc.  Future-Me lives in a time where all of these concerns have passed.

The trick is supposed to be that you have to realize that Future-Me has his own concerns to worry about; that Future-Me will be equally bogged down by work and scarce free time.  I understand all of this.

And yet, I find it hard to get myself pointed in the right direction for those 1-3 hour blocks of time where I’m not at a job.  The little bit of downtime that I plan to commit to mentally recharging and allow me to shift from one task to the next gets stretched out as akrasia takes over.  I know I shouldn’t click on that next YouTube link, but dammit I’m tired and it’ll only take a moment, THEN I’ll get to work.

That probably sounds familiar to you.

I don’t have a firm answer or cute wrap-up to this line of thinking.  I need to plan things better and stick with it.  I need to be mindful and intentional with how I spend my time.  More importantly, I need to be mindful of my limitations.  I work a full time and a part time job, so that will impact my energy levels.  I need to respect those limits if I wish to work around it.

Back to the grindstone.

Stay Awesome.

Ryan

Fitness Progress Update

For all of my academic strengths, I knew the biggest hurdle I’d face if I wanted to become a paramedic is to get my health and fitness in line with the demands of the job.  To my knowledge, I have no medical issues that create real obstacles to hold me back other than my formerly broken ankle.  I have always been on the bigger side of life, but with exception to 3 instances, it has never prevented me from participating or completing anything in life.

As anyone can imagine, the job of a paramedic requires a certain level of fitness to both be effective and to safely carry out the job.  I knew that, if I want to be a medic, I would need to lose weight and to increase my general fitness (strength, cardiovascular, flexibility, and mobility).  I’ve been making steady progress, and have managed to reliably keep weight off.  However, this progress has not been without it’s lost ground as I try to forge ahead.

The problem with exercise and diet is that my long history with food means the habits I have ingrained are hard to break, so when my exercise and diet systems break down, it’s easy for me to undermine my progress.  Case in point: my trip to Scotland.

I had originally set a goal for myself: by the time I would take my trip to Scotland, I would be 275lbs.  This is 50lbs down from my heaviest recorded weight and would really signal progress on my path.  In the weeks leading up to Scotland, a number of priorities and events stressed broke my systems.  I stopped going to the gym, I was forced to cut back on grocery expenditures, and I was making poor eating choices.  My last recorded weigh-in before Scotland:

Jul 10th – 296lbs

Not bad, but fairly off my target.  Still, it was 30lbs down from my starting weight, and I was proud of that accomplishment.

There were two thoughts in the back of my mind regarding the Scotland trip: first, I would not be eating particularly healthy while I was travelling, so that would count against me; and second, I would be walking around more, so it should off-set some of my bad habits while I indulged on the trip.  Turns out, the former was true, but the latter was mistaken.  We spent a fair amount of time driving, which meant I was running substantial caloric surpluses.  The result?  My first weigh-in after my trip:

Aug 3 – 311lbs

Yikes!  I wiped out 15lbs of progress!  Granted, I know this is the result of a lot of factors, like water weight, that’s not just body weight, however it was still disheartening to see on the scale.

It has been over two weeks since I’ve come home from the trip and I still have not returned to the gym.  The system has ground to a halt.  This is not to say I’ve completely fallen off the wagon, though.  With re-establishing some of my diet systems, that 311lbs has dropped a bit, and I’m hovering around 305lbs, which is progress.

This process is certainly something that has helped me learn more about myself and how important systems are to my goals.  I can’t simply rely on hoping I make good choices in the moment, because so many competing interests are at play.  This has also re-affirmed that the gym is not as high of a priority for me as I had hoped, since it’s the first thing that gets jettisoned when my workload is overburdened (keep in mind, prior to Scotland, I was working a full time job, a part time job, two major volunteer committee commitments, sorting out personal things in my life, sustaining a long-distance relationship, podcasting, trip planning, and taking a distance education course).  These are not excuses, but reasons why I failed to hit my target.  Autopsying the wreckage will hopefully give me some insight on how I can do better next time.

In a future post, I’ll discuss what I’ve learned from health and trying to set up self-sustaining systems, but in the meantime, I need to get those systems back on track!

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Reflecting on Navigating Job Politics

In my attempt to make a career shift in the least risky way possible, I’ve had to expose myself to a bit of career politicking.  By this, I mean that in order for me to lay down the foundations of a future paramedic career, there are certain things I need to do now while also working to support myself.  I’ve read a few books recently that advise against diving head-first into your passion and instead build career capital that you can eventually cash-in when you decide to make the shift.  Cal Newport discusses in So Good They Can’t Ignore You how a person who is passionate for yoga should not quit their job to start a venture as a yoga instructor without first building a business foundation: getting certified as an instructor, gaining experience as an instructor, building a client-base, etc.  The idea is that you have to hustle on the side, until you can smoothly make the transition from one career to the next with minimal disruption to your income.  Larry Smith, in No Fears, No Excuses: What You Need To Do To Have A Great Career, takes a similar approach when he recommends researching and exploring your passions in a systematic, deliberate manner.

I’ve been largely following this attitude by reading widely on medicine, researching schools, taking the biology course to ensure I have the prerequisites to apply to school, etc.  Some of this I can do on my own, but some (like getting my boss to sign-off on an employee tuition discount for the biology course), requires me to share my plans with others.  This has lead to an interesting tension between my current opportunities and future options.

My boss knows that I have aspirations to go back to school.  In fact, she supports the effort.  However, this leaves her in a difficult position.  Because she knows there is a chance I will be resigning my job if I get accepted, she’s hesitant to expand my role at my job.  Even if this is a small chance (less than 3% based on admissions statistics), she does not want to increase the scope and responsibility of a job tailored to my strengths if she will then need to replace me down the line.  While I’m not saying this is a problem that should concern me, I empathize with her dilemma.  The job I currently have is unique at my place of employment.  To my knowledge, no one else has a job exactly as I do.  My job has evolved over the last three years based on my outcomes, skills and strengths.  In order to replace me, she would have to find someone that is essentially me, or have to dramatically change the nature of the job, which she’s not inclined to do because I’m currently solving problems for her that would then have to be addressed down the line.

I say all of this without the intention of making me sound more important than I am.  I know I’m not special, and I am easily replaceable.  What I’m saying is that this level of uncertainty in my boss’s mind about my future is also impacting the present opportunities extended to me.  Even if my boss doesn’t want to punish me for thinking about leaving (quite the opposite, my boss has been very supportive with the idea of me advancing my career within the College, including changing roles and growing into management levels), she nevertheless will think twice before updating my duties with more responsibility.

So far, I’ve been dealing with this by remaining transparent and keeping an open mind.  I assure them that I don’t have an intention to quit before I receive an acceptance.  If I am accepted into a program, then I will have to make the decision to carry on down the path, or stay where I am.  If I’m rejected from all the schools I apply to (again, each program is incredibly over-subscribed, with over 1000 applicants vying for 30 spots), then I will keep working at my job and reevaluate my plan.  I’ve also kept an eye out for further opportunities to improve myself, such as taking on a teaching job for the Fall to try it out.  If it works, there could be more avenues opening up for me.  If I discover that it’s not for me, then I’ll have a fun story to tell about the time I was a college professor.  But, the point to keep in mind is for me to be cautious and deliberate in how I move forward.  Otherwise, I’ll end up screwing myself over and closing doors that never needed to be slammed shut.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

Education – Who do I want to be as a teacher

Before the summer break, I spoke briefly about being hired to teach a college class in the Fall.  On August 4th, I accepted my teaching contract for the Fall term, and thus set in stone the deal I hashed out with the Program Chair a few months back.  With this turn of events, you will probably see an increase in posts about teaching and pedagogy on this blog.  Fear not, I am still exploring the paramedic career, but I still firmly believe that even tangential experience will feed into making me a better medic.  I hope you find these digressions interesting and informative.

Having said that, I’m incredibly nervous about this new opportunity.  It’s a pretty big step for me and it will really test the idea of a patchwork work history.  Normally, people who come to teach will have a lot of career experience, or they have higher terminal degrees (specifically a PhD), and therefore are way smarter than me.  I got the job because of my eclectic work history and my attitude/perspective; or in other words, the Chair liked me.

Now that the contract is set, there’s no going back now.  I’m all-in to teach my first class (tentatively set for September 9th, but scheduling can be tricky at the post-secondary level).  This means it’s time for me to plan out my lessons and start visioning how the course will fit together.  Thankfully, I will not need to build the course from scratch; I will be able to start with the materials left by my predecessor (who, in a marvelous turn of events is a friend and former colleague of mine from grad school!).  Still, there is a lot of work to do on the course.

What also needs some work is to figure out what kind of teacher I want to be.  Here are some of the questions I’ve already started posing to myself:

  • What will my persona be?
  • What are my teaching values?
  • How much unpaid labour am I willing to give?
  • How flexible/inflexible do I wish to be?
  • What style of delivery will I use?
  • What is my power-point strategy?
  • What are my expectations on the experience/my students/the college?

I don’t have formal teaching experience, so I’m trying to figure out who I am and what I’m going to do on the fly.  There will be some wiggle room, a lot of mistakes, and some short opportunities to road test material.  But all-in-all, I’m driven to figure these things out because I’m scared that I’ll fail my students; that I will be inadequate.  Or worse yet, I was a poor choice to be put in front of the students.  I had the same worry in grad school – by me being here, I’m depriving someone else of the opportunity to do great things in their live and career.  It’s a game of trade-offs, only instead of me considering the trade-off between short term gratification and long term benefit, I would be trading-off my employment for the student’s long term success.  That’s a heavy thought weighing me down.

I know I’m not alone in these thoughts.  Plenty of people whom I look up to as teaching exemplars undoubtedly went through the same angst when they were first starting out.  The best thing for me is to act as a sponge and soak up as much wisdom as I can.

I stumbled across one such instance of someone who is wrestling with their teaching identity.  In a recent blog post entitled Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto from the Tattooed Professor, author Kevin Gannon opines on the values he wishes to uphold in order to be the best teacher he can.  The post is short and well worth a read.  There is plenty there he’s learned from experience that anyone can take away.  I’ll certainly be stealing some of his ideas to get me started on the right foot.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan