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
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.
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
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
A Paramedic's Notebook 