[As I did a
couple years back, I wanted to start the fall semester by highlighting a
few of the things I’m working on and looking forward to this fall. I’d love to
hear about what you’ve got going on for the final few months of 2014 as well!]
On the class
that puts me in an unfamiliar and beneficial position.
Only one of the
four undergraduate courses I’m teaching this fall is entirely in my wheelhouse:
the
American Novel to 1950 (any class that includes Hawthorne, Chopin, Cather,
and Faulkner pretty much has this AmericanStudier written all over it). The
others are definitely more uncertain: the senior departmental
Capstone because it depends entirely on the specific group of students
within it; and our gateway course Approaches
to English Studies (which I’m teaching two sections of) because it includes
a good bit of literary theory, a topic with which I don’t think I’ll ever feel entirely
comfortable. But they’re still undergraduate English courses, and at the end of
the day, as I enter my tenth (!) year at FSU, I feel pretty comfortable moving
into all such courses.
On the other
hand, the new course I’ve had the opportunity to pick up as an overload
represents something entirely unfamiliar for me. Partly that’s the case because
of the program through which I’ll be teaching for the first time: the Massachusetts Assocation of Vocational Administrators
(MAVA), which brings together secondary educators and administrators from the
state’s public high schools pursuing advanced studies and graduate degrees. But
I’ve long taught fellow educators and adult learners in our Master’s
and Adult
Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) programs, respectively, so I know
such communities of learners pretty well (and respect them tremendously). So
the unfamiliarity really lies in the specific content I’ll likewise be teaching
for the first time in this course: Introduction to Speech Communication.
I try to include
at least one oral presentation in every class I teach, seeing such public communication
as an important part of both undergraduate education and critical thinking. But
those presentations have always been driven by the content of the particular
class (in literature courses) or assignment (in first-year writing ones), and
thus graded as such (ie, in terms of their inclusion and analysis of the course
or assignment content), and so I’ve never, as I see it, taught speech or communication. So I’m feeling the kind of
uncertainty and nervousness I haven’t felt since, probably, my first teaching
experiences, as a grad student at Temple University in 2001 and 2002. Which are,
I believe, very good things to feel—because they’ll force me to figure things
out (including by consulting colleagues who regularly teach Speech, most
especially our departmental expert Angela Nastasee-Carter); and because too
much comfort, in teaching as in life, is never ideal. As with all these fall
plans, I welcome any thoughts of yours, and I’ll keep you posted on how it
goes!
Crowd-sourced
fall plans this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more time: what's on your autumn agenda?
Thanks you for such profound ideas! Indeed, we need new vision of teaching where there is less teacher talk and more student talk, where teachers focus on how to help students take responsibility for their own learning. As a rule, when it comes to some college assignments or even phd thesis writing, students rely upon some services and writers online and not their educators. As they didn't inspire an interest to study, they just forced to do tasks for another grade. The old education system should be changed and modified in the best interests of children.
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