Tag: Blog

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

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

 

 

 

Careers: An Answer to the Experience Problem

This blog is primarily about my path to becoming a paramedic.  I take as an assumption that I will at some point enter school, work to receive my credentials, and eventually find work as a medic.  That is the single focus of my career planning at present.

However, I would be negligent if I did not keep an open mind towards other paths and alternate routes.  There are a number of ways a plan can go wrong, and if I place all of my eggs into one basket, rest all of my progress on a few key milestones, there is a good chance I will be frustrated by setbacks, barriers and challenges.  Therefore, on the advice of the paramedic program’s coordinator, I am keeping an eye out to other opportunities that I can invest time and energy into that will pay off down the line.

This passed week, I became one of the latest faculty at my College and will be teaching a philosophy course in the Fall.  Depending on how you stand, that might be the furthest thing from my plan as you can get.  Instead of becoming the student, I just took a part time job as a teacher.  I am excited and incredibly nervous about delivering a course to people barely out of my peer group range, but I think this is a positive experience and will pay off in the future.

This all serves as a preamble to a realization I had this morning on the question of experience in young people.  Job seekers everywhere I plagued with a common problem: how am I expected to have experience for jobs that all seem to require experience to get in?  This problem is the bane of the young person’s job hunt because it is often the biggest weakness in their candidacy when they apply for work.  It is the first thing that selects them out of the pool, and no matter how charming they are in person, a lack of experience is the blemish on an otherwise beautiful package.

It’s understandable why experience is so important to employers.  The are spending huge amounts of money to try and hire people, so without knowing anything about a candidate’s work habits and results, the employer needs some signal that they are not wasting their money to hire someone that will be released after a few months.

How does a young person resolve this issue?  The short answer is you need to learn how to tell a story about yourself.  You need to learn how to stitch together your work history into a story that demonstrates you are a good bet for an employer to take.  This obviously assumes you have experience to draw upon.  If you don’t have that, you need to get some.  I’m sorry, but it’s the only way to progress forward.

Would you walk into a store and buy the first expensive item you’re looking for based solely on how it looked?  Imagine shopping for a high-end purchase like a car or a computer, and you bought it purely on looks.  Generally speaking, you probably will not.  You’ll take the time to study the specifications, the deals, consumer reports, tests, etc.  Employers do the same thing; they look for evidence that you aren’t a lemon.

I’ve now been hired for two jobs at the College having none of the classical markers of experience that were advertised for: I did not have any administrative assistant experience for my current job, and I have almost no formal teaching experience.  How did I pull this off?

I understood what the job required and demonstrated how I already had what the employers was looking for.  In the teaching case, it went like this:

Interviewer: I see you have never taught before at a college.  Do you have any experience?

Me: I know I don’t have the teaching experience you might be looking for, as you saw on my academic resume.  If you are asking if I have experience teaching a 7-1-7 teaching block (7 weeks of lectures, 1 reading week, 7 weeks of lectures, or a 14-week course), then no, I have never done that.  However, I have done all of the individual parts; I have:

  • designed workshop plans and delivered the content;
  • assessed students based on those workshops;
  • written speeches and delivered public talks;
  • designed and delivered a guest lecture in grad school; and
  • acted as a teaching assistant and grader for 5-7 university courses.

I was able to demonstrate that I had experience, even if I’ve never taught a college class before.  This does not guarantee that I will be a good teacher, but it assures the interviewer that I am not unaware of the level of work and care that is needed to do the job.

This is one solution to the problem of job experience.  You need two things to sidestep the problem.  First, you need to have some sort of past experience that you can draw upon from a related field.  You need to demonstrate that you know something, or that you can easily figure the problems out and solve them on your own.  Second, you need to learn how to tell your story.  Lacking experience and having gaps in your employment record do not have to signal the death knell on your advancement if you know how to reframe the problem and still give an answer that shows an appreciation for the question being asked of you: If I were to hire you, how could you make my problems go away?  Really, that’s what an employer is looking for.  Someone they can pay to solve a problem or puzzle for them.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan