Category: Blogs

Blog – The Rewards of Grading

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend grading papers from my class.  It was their first foray into writing a philosophical essay for me, so it was an interesting indictment on whether I was effective in teaching for the first half of the course.  There were the natural ups and downs, but I suspect my grade curve falls in line with what is expected (I have two late papers yet to grade, so the jury is still out).

I jokingly grumbled about the extra work it takes to grade poor performances for me.

This isn’t to say that I look down on students who do poorly, nor do I want to make light of their performance.  For me, marking is an opportunity to help the student learn and develop.  When a student does well, I often feel less compelled to give a lot of feedback because there is little they could have done to do better.  I praise where it’s merited, but I don’t think the students are helped if I don’t offer something constructive to mull over.

Marking poor performance, on the other hand, takes significantly longer to finish for three reasons. First, as in the tweet above, when I’m dealing with plagiarism, I need to do more research to ensure it’s genuine cases of plagiarism versus sloppy citation practices.  I use the TurnItIn service to give a “sniff test” for the paper, but the majority of the cases of flagged plagiarism are merely properly cited references to the text.  Otherwise, I use context clues to determine where students might have plagiarized, such as changes in font, and changes in voice or phrasing the student uses in their writing.

The second biggest reason why it takes me so much longer to grade poor papers (and this will relate partially to my next point) is that I have to sufficiently document my reasons for awarding a poor mark.  This is to not only justify my decision to the student (and avoid seeming arbitrary), but it’s also to protect future me.  My annotations and comments help me in the potential case where a student wishes to talk to me about their mark.  After time has elapsed, I need memory aids to help me understand why I made the decisions I made while grading.

Finally, the most important reason why it takes me so much longer is that I have to identify instances where the student could have done better, and give them direction on how to improve.  It’s not enough to rely on quick notations to tell the student the problem (i.e. Awk or awkward phrasing, SP or spelling error, Citation Needed, Does not follow, etc.).  I have to take the next step to identify the problems and provide guidance for improvement.  This is why the process is so time consuming.  It’s an important process.  I remember how important that direction was when I was in school.  Without the time my profs took to help me through my papers, I doubt I would have won an essay prize in grad school.

Grading has its rewards, though.  Sometimes, you are amazed at the quality of the work that gets turned in, as happened in this tweet below.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

 

Blog – “You Look Tired”

This post is “late,” and there is really no excuse for it.  There are reasons of course: when I created a backlog of posts, I didn’t feel the pressure to write weekly, so things slipped in my mind.  But that’s not a good excuse for this being written about an hour after it should have gone live.

A colleague of mine just commented to me “You look tired!”  Which is true – I am tired.  I’ve been tracking my sleep since about November of last year thanks to my trusty Fitbit, and in that year I found I get an average of five and a half hours of sleep per night.  That’s well below the recommended eight hours.  Until now, I’ve managed things fairly well,  but with the addition of the third job (teaching) and maintaining a long distance relationship, things are really starting to strain for me.  I’ve noticed it for a few weeks now, but this weekend things are starting pile up.

I napped more this weekend than I have in probably the last two years.  I almost never nap.  I hate napping, in fact.  It feels like a waste of time, when I could be using that time (daylight) to do something more desirable than tending to my body’s needs.  And yet, this weekend I found myself napping for at least an hour each day in the afternoon.  I also elected to cut time short with my girlfriend to tend to some much needed cleaning at my apartment.  The alternative would have been more social engagements and an early morning commute back home to go to work.  She understood that I needed the time away and supported my decision.  It’s why she’s a great gal!

My focus has been off lately, too.  I keep talking about how I want to go back to the gym, but I haven’t acted on it.  Call it failure to plan, call it failure to action on an item, but I suspect the real culprit is depleted will power. No, I don’t mean that I’m not willing myself to the gym.  I mean I think have decision fatigue.  It’s a long accumulation of factors that have finally hit a tipping point: poor sleep, poor nutrition, too many demands on my cognitive workload, stress from things in life, added stress from social media, etc.  It creates a feedback loop that further breaks me down.  Because I don’t sleep well and still try to contend with normal daily activities, my will power and motivation wane; this leads to poor choices and procrastination through my favourite habit (watching YouTube videos), which keeps me awake, which makes it harder for me to do the things I need to do, which weakens my ability to force myself to go to bed at a reasonable time, which leads to lesser amounts of sleep, and the cycle continues.

I don’t have an obvious solution to this problem.  What I need to do is to critically evaluate my obligations, priorities and goals to find a better fit with my habits.  That will take longer than one blog post to figure out, but for the meantime, the best I can do is monitor my health and situation to guard against large scale system crashes.

Blog: Decisions in Life

A little while back, I swallowed some of my biases and checked out Tony Robbins’s documentary on Netflix, I Am Not Your Guru (trailer here).  I had prejudged him as something in between a vacuous motivational speaker and a charlatan.  I of course based this opinion on nothing and admit that it was incredibly closed-minded of me.

I quite enjoyed the documentary, and I felt that I was captivated by his charisma.  While I know a lot of the business involves crafting a certain persona and message, and that the documentary is edited to create a particular narrative, it softened me to him and I wanted to check out some of his other works.  I’m not interested in investing the money to attend his events (I’m not *THAT* open-minded), but I thought I’d give one of his books a shot.  He also recently appeared in a podcast episode with Tim Ferriss, whom I’ve started to trust as something of an authority figure.  Anything that Tim Ferriss says, I’m willing to listen to.

So, I checked out Awaken The Giant Within, by Tony Robbins.

There was a really cool perspective he shared that has stuck with me since hearing it.  Explained the etymological origin of “decision” or “to decide.”  Without getting technical, it splits the word into “de” and “cision” or “away” and “to cut,” or in essence, “to cut away.”

Ok, that doesn’t sound very insightful.  But then he framed it in terms of what a proper decision entails.  He notes that when we talk about “making decisions” in our lives, we often are speaking as if we are expressing wishes.  To him, people “decide” to lose weight all the time, but never follow through on the execution.  In other words, when someone says they’ve decided to exercise and lose weight, until they follow through on that action, all they are saying is “I wish to exercise and lose weight.”

To make it a proper decision, you have to essentially make a cut and discard every other alternative.  When you decide something, you are firmly choosing not to entertain any other alternatives, and you are committing to that course of action.  To decide is to cut off those alternatives.

Framing it that way made a lot of sense to me.  It’s a criticism of myself that I’ve heard flavours of for some time, and it’s something I try to be mindful of.  This past year I’ve been reading books and reflecting on myself in order to live more intentionally.  I’ve had a few decision points so far that are opening up interesting futures to me.  Right now, I’m looking at career moves; should I continue to become a paramedic, or should I commit more fully to teaching.  I don’t have an answer to that questions yet.  It’s still really early in the process and I’m fine to live with that ambiguity for now.  I have plenty of time yet to explore my options.

There are other areas where making decisions has become important.  For the sake of being cryptic, I cannot divulge them at the moment and I apologize for that.  I’ve had a decision weighing over me recently that I finally pulled the trigger on.  But there are other “decisions” that are manifesting themselves as “wishes” and I’m not forgetting about them (I’m looking at you, exercise!).  I still haven’t followed through on committing to exercise, so for now that’s is my personal shame I carry around.

What I’m starting to wrestle with is how to take ownership of deciding my life’s course and what it means to be a person of character and commitment.  It’s not a strength of mine historically, but it’s a virtue I seek to cultivate moving forward.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Blog – Week Two of Teaching

I’ve received some feedback that my readers like my posts on teaching and want more updates on how I’ve been progressing.  Since this blog doubles as a record of experiences and things I learn, I’m more than happy to share more of my thoughts on teaching (so far).

General Reflection

Week two ran a lot better in my mind than week one.  I felt more prepared and more excited for the lecture material, which I think translated into a better experience for my class.  There were some concrete steps I took to make things better this time too:

  1. I practiced better self-care.  I slept a little better, ate lunch before teaching, was better hydrated, in more comfortable clothes, etc.
  2. I had a guest speaker, which changed up the pacing a bit.
  3. I showed clips from YouTube to make my points, rather than using lecturing alone.
  4. I had a better sense of the lecture flow I wanted to achieve.

There were, of course, elements that I want to improve on, such as practicing my transitions in speech a few more times, or being ahead of the game in terms of my preparation.  However, I think I am overall doing well.

Shadow Work

I also graded my first round of assignments this past weekend.  I have to be mindful of how much non-teaching time I devote to the course because I’m only, technically, paid for the 3-hours of teaching I do per week.  The rest of the work is factored into my wages, but not actually paid out as hours logged.  I’m not overly worried at the moment because the items I’m marking took me around 2-hours to complete Sunday morning, so it’s not a huge burden at present.  It will, however, become a concern when I have to mark essays and the final exam.

Connecting with Students

I’m receiving positive feedback from students that they are enjoying the class so far.  I’m hoping to gather more formal feedback in an upcoming poll/questionnaire.  As a person who values real-time feedback for self-improvement, I feel waiting until the end of the term to get feedback is a missed opportunity.

Lecture Material

I was super jazzed about my lecture content last week.  I challenged the students’ conceptions concerning health and disease/disability.  I wanted to open their minds to the idea that health and disease are not mutually exclusive.  Disease gets cached out as a deviation from “normal,” but normal is fairly hard to pin down outside of fuzzy concepts like “statistical normality” aka, bell curves.

I opened the chain of thought by discussing how our biases of viewing the world will often distort our thinking, whether we are aware of it or not.  As a fan of The West Wing, I showed the class this clip as a fun but straightforward example of how we react and value parts of our reality without consciously thinking about it.

 

I then moved into real world examples of how biases in our thinking affect how we interact with other people, and how it can have devastating consequences.

 

 

Then, because I thought the clip above brought the mood down a bit, I ended with a fantastic video that challenges our ideas of ability and disability.

 

 

I was pretty happy with how this section of the lecture seemed to land with the students, and I hope it had the intended effect – that our approaches to problems are often bound up in unconscious biases that can limit our thinking.

Anyway, I should get back to prepping for this week’s lecture.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Blog – Reflections on my First Day (Teaching)

Last week, I taught my first class at college.  It was quite the experience to say the least.  Even now, I’m split between knowing that I did somewhere between “adequate” and “well,” and allowing the super self-critical side of me to autopsy the wreckage.

Wreckage is a gross overstatement because things weren’t *that* bad.  I’m mostly critical over some common themes.  First, I feel that the transitions between ideas could have used more intentional thought to make things smoother.  Second, the second half of my presentation was fairly slap-dash in construction and could have spent less time buried under procrastination as I prepped.  Finally, that my oration could have been better performed (read: slow down!).

The biggest observation was on just how exhausted I was when I finished.  There are a number of reasons why I was so drained by the end, all of them preventable in hindsight: I didn’t sleep well the night before, I hadn’t eaten food all day prior to starting class, I hadn’t consumed any caffeine like I normally would have, I wore a moderately heavy sport coat for the first half of the class on an already humid day, I’m very animated when I speak, and teaching just takes a lot out of you.  Only the last thing, I would say, is something I can’t control and will need to learn to manage.  Everything else, yup, that was my fault.  Next time, I’ll bring a lunch.

Those were the “bad” things.  Almost everything else about the experience was great.  I seemed to connect with the students.  I felt that I was able to convincingly show that the students should take these issues in philosophy seriously.  I feel like I earned their attention, despite it being a class from 1-4pm on a Friday.

Of the feedback I’ve received, students enjoyed my class and are looking forward to the rest of the term.  That may be because I did my job well, or it could be because they feel less pressured by the work of the course.  Time will tell on that front.

My final verdict for my first day of teaching is probably a B-.  I made a fair number of points and supported my claims with evidence.  The flow and presentation kept the audience entertained while sticking to a path that was clear to follow.  There is room to improve, in that this felt like a first draft and could use a few more rounds of editing for coherence and to remove repetition, but otherwise a solid entry into the gradebook.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

My Post at “The Financial Diet”

A post I wrote for a financial website I follow, The Financial Diet, was published today.  You can find the article here.  I give a brief recap of how I secured my job as a college lecturer (my first class is tomorrow!), and some important takeaways I have from the experience.

Even if you don’t read my post, I still recommend checking TFD out.  They post a lot of great articles and tips for living more frugally, which is what drew me to their site in the first place.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Blog – Sound Pedagogy

Happy Labour Day Monday!  I hope you are all enjoying your long weekend.  My weekend has been jam-packed with course prep and dealing with a sudden surge of patrons at the bar as students move back into town to start the new school year.

I’ve learned to embrace the adage that “if you want to learn something, teach it.”  By this, I mean that there is no better way to learn and master a concept as when you must transmit that information to someone else in a way that makes sense to them.  Not only do you need to know the material inside and out, but you must also learn to fill in gaps as they arise.

At present, I’m trying to finish up my instructional plan for my course.  The first lesson is this coming Friday, and I’m both nervous and excited.  I’m nervous because I fear that I’ll be an inadequate teacher for this crop of mostly first-year students; that their introduction to philosophy will be botched by my inexperience and poor planning.  But I’m also excited, because I have some confidence in my skills, and it’s a new and exciting challenge that I want to face.

student

With less than a week to go, I have 27 students enrolled in my class.  When I look into their various programs, I get a wide range of learners, from science, recreation, business, IT, security, etc.  All of these faces are unique individuals who will need to sync with my lecture material.  My challenge is to teach philosophy to a class of college kids who probably are taking my course because it sounds interesting and they need breadth courses to graduate.  In other words, I need to pluck philosophy from the clouds and bring it down to the “real world” in a way that makes sense to them.  I can’t just stand at the front of the room and pontificate in their general direction.  I’ll need to be smarter than that if I have any hope of them passing the learning objectives.

Instead, I’ll need to engage them dialectically.  I’ll need to choose non-academic examples to connect their experience with.  I’ll need to prove to them that these questions and problems are not only relevant to them, but incredibly important to their lives; they need to take the material seriously.  In an age of constant distraction and competing media on their attention, I’ll need to come to class prepared every Friday afternoon to fight and earn their attention.

Talk about a tall order!

Oh, and because a lot of this material is stuff I wasn’t exposed to in school, I also have to teach myself the course material!

Oh well.  Here goes.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

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