Category Archives: teaching

Dear TechIntersect…

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A student seeking advice writes:

Dear TechIntersect,

Have any of you ever hit a block in your schooling career and are no longer happy with the degree you were once striving to get? What did you all do in order to remedy that? Did you simply change degrees? Go to a different school? Drop out? How did you learn what was right for you that would make you happy in the world of academics?

- Looking For My Place

Dear Looking,

I know this place you are in well. I have changed career paths and college majors many times. It is a frustrating and often soul-crushing experience to have the feeling that you should be doing something else. Indeed, it is the condition that Henry David Thoreau describes:

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

The last thing I want for you dear Looking is for you to complete your college experience having your song still left inside of you begging to get out. God has placed within you certain talents and abilities in a unique combination that no other person in the past, present or future will ever have. You were put here for a purpose and it is up to you to explore and develop these gifts by becoming the best version of yourself.

Let’s keep something important in mind here. It’s college. Yes, it is your life right now so you should try to make the best of it while you are in it, but at some point in your life, college will become a distant memory. College is meant to be a formative experience in which you develop new attitudes and insights that will serve you well for the rest of your life.

Some people have the idea that college is where you will learn all of the things you will need to know in your future career. College is a place to learn and grow as a person, but it is only a beginning not an end. Surprisingly, to many employers it doesn’t matter what you major in if you have the right skills and attitudes. The subject matter content learned is less relevant than the foundational concepts you master and carry forward. This requires having an attitude of being a life-long learner. An attitude that no matter what comes my way, I am competent and capable of solving problems that I don’t necessarily know the answer to. That point is the key to your dilemma, Looking. Whatever your major is, if done right, it will expect you to solve problems that you don’t know the answer to when you start. To me, that is the very purpose of attending college, developing that attitude.

Many people wind up doing work outside of their college major. Often this is because they majored in something they love, only to find that the job market has few opportunities available in that particular area. According to a recent Forbes article, most of the college majors that are least likely to have jobs available are found squarely in the arts and humanities. This stands in stark contrast to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math degrees, which are booming.

So what are creative people to do? You are visiting with someone who has always loved the arts, particularly music, theater and the visual arts like drawing and painting. But according to the advisors of my youth, it is very difficult to make a living doing those things, so I chose to train for something more practical, computers. The amazing thing is that the practical thing I do – computers – in recent years has converged with the artistic things I love. Finally, I get to do both and I couldn’t be happier.

I have always advised my students to marry whatever it is they love with computer technology and you can’t go wrong. That technology expertise acts as an insurance policy that insures you will never go hungry. But when the conditions are favorable, you get to do what you love as well. That, in a nutshell, is why I helped to develop the Digital Media Technology degree at Kansas State University – Salina. Now I get to do what I love, and as the program grows I envision that I will be joined by other creative faculty members who will help us to expand in directions we could never imagine.

So back to your original questions about being happy with your major & your life. Happiness comes from attitudes inside of you. Take it from someone who has spent years trying to rearrange external things to be happy; if you depend upon external circumstances to be happy, you will be continually discouraged. There are four levels of happiness, and it is the lowest level that depends on things outside of yourself. The rest come from within. I wrote more about finding happiness a few months ago and I encourage you to take a look at that as well.

My best wishes to you, Looking. I know there is a song inside of you begging to get out. The question is whether or not you will find ways to let it out where you are, or if you will keep looking for better and better places to have that happen.

Superhero Proportions

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A couple of years ago, an amazing friend from my PLN, Malyn Mawby wrote about her fun Math assignment on the topic of ratios/percentages/fractions using DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. Her assignment reminded me of what I had learned in art class about drawing people 6 or 7 heads high. Back then, I also learned that comic book heroes are drawn with bodies 8 or even 9 heads high, to make their physique appear more massive.

I left a comment on her original post about this, with a link on Scribd to a page from Christopher Hart’s How to Draw Comic Book Heroes and Villains that describes this concept. Unfortunately, the book was removed for copyright reasons, so I ordered myself an inexpensive used copy of the book, and scanned the pages in myself. (The copy I received appears to be brand-new, and the book itself is really awesome!)

human proportions
human proportions

For example, consider the Incredible Hulk (as opposed to the Credible Hulk, which is a topic of discussion for another day.)

Hulk stands six heads tall, but he is always hunched over. If he would just stand upright, he could easily add a seventh head to his height. But alas, it isn’t easy carting all of that bulk around, fighting against gravity all of the time.

Spiderman & Superman are both seven heads tall.
And this drawing of Batman shows him nearly 8 heads tall.
And look, even Wonder Woman is 8 heads tall. I guess the standard holds for female superheroes as well.

I think this would be a really fun assignment in a math class. Get pictures of superheroes. Measure the hero’s head, and find out what percentage of the whole body is the head. What is the ratio of head to entire body? Which heroes have the most exaggerated proportions? It might even be fun to send kids home to take pictures of the adults they live with to see how their head to body proportions measure up with the superheroes.

Networks Have Layers

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I redid the sound track on this scene from Shrek, to have Shrek explain the OSI model to Donkey. Networks are like onions – they have layers.

I enjoy doing voice work like this. I would like to do a whole series of scenes that could be used in a technology class, but I’ve never given this much thought. I should brainstorm about it.

Do you have any ideas of scenes I could do in computer and technology classes?

Too Cool For School: A Memoir

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I was really pleased to learn about the forthcoming release of Elizabeth Collins’ new book Too Cool For School: A Memoir. Living in the bookstore-deprived area that I do, I purchased her e-Book through Amazon, which means I can read it a few weeks before the print book will be released, and I downloaded it as soon as I learned it was availabile. Talk about instant gratification!

Book:Too Cool For School

I first learned about Collins in 2010 when a Philadelphia news story came out about her dismissal for blogging while teaching, which is evidently a fireable offense in some locales. Collins & I became acquainted through social media after I mentioned her story in another blog post about a separate blogging teacher incident. Collins rightly points out that the details of these two stories I discuss are miles apart, with the only similarities being that a teacher was dismissed for something written on a blog. (These stories were starting to appear on my radar some years ago, but they are becoming so frequent nowadays that when a new Google alert appears in my inbox, I don’t always bother to click on it.)

In the memoir, Collins asks, “Will any online presence ultimately damn a teacher?” It is a question that all teachers need to consider. I think mileage will vary, and that much depends on where and who you are teaching. For example, I have noticed that many college educators are actually advancing careers through blogs and other online media. But college students are adults, and this is a key factor. We still have a boogie man mentality when it comes to discussing or involving minor kids online. Apparently some people are afraid that kids will be kidnapped by Bulgarians if their likeness appears on a website, but the research does not bear this out. But we still have the mentality and look with deep suspicion upon any teacher of kids who shares “too much” in online spaces. I agree with Collins when she says, “I believe this is the pivotal moment when things can either get worse or get better for teachers who blog, tweet or even post on Facebook.”

Let’s show them why this is an important issue. Teachers who blog are actively working on improving their practice, and teachers who blog with their students are teaching them to be citizens in a digital world. There are a lot of amazing opportunities being missed because of the fear mentality associated with teaching, blogs, kids and the internet.

In my own case, a blog led to a collaboration with someone I have never met before, and having my thoughts being published in her book. I can only assume that, although it was only a small contribution, having my ideas in print would have some benefit to my career as a college educator. This couldn’t ever have happened without my blog.

One more recent, and fun example. Teacher Kathy Cassidy tweets that her 1st graders are doing a “snow clothes challenge” with a video showing how quickly they can don their winter gear for recess. They did it in around 1.5 minutes.

I saw the tweet a few minutes after the video was posted, and my schedule permitted me to make a video reply for them to watch, on the same day! Mrs. Cassidy reported that the kids really enjoyed it, so I showed my own students who also agreed to do the challenge.

Both groups of students benefited from this interaction. The children reached out beyond their classroom and felt important that people were replying to their message. The college students took a few moments of their time to create what amounts to an act of generosity. Both learned something about digital citizenship that day. This is not possible in a climate that views blogging and internet interactions with suspicion. It is past time to wake up and see the enormous potential benefits that are possible when teachers go online to interact with other educators and with other classrooms.

Thank you Kathy Cassidy for including my students and me in your lives and in your learning. Thank you also to Elizabeth Collins for thinking that what I wrote about was relevant enough to repeat in your book. I am humbled to know such people.

Somewhere along the way…

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I became a professor. I’m not really sure how it happened, but it did.

When I started my current appointment at Kansas State University, the whole culture of the tenure-track college professor was pretty foreign to me. I had little understanding about how coveted such positions can be, and even less knowledge of what would actually be required.

I sort of fell into a great thing at K-State. I had been teaching computer technology at a nearby community college. In fact, I taught there for three years and would have, I presume, been awarded tenure there the next year. As long as you do a decent job and don’t make anyone angry, tenure was usually granted after three years. There weren’t to my knowledge any clearly defined requirements other than to teach well and get along well with others.

I was just getting used to the whole idea of teaching when I saw the advertisement seeking an associate professor at the Salina campus of Kansas State University. I seemed to have all of the qualifications listed: higher education teaching experience, industrial experience in my field, masters degree… well I was ABT (all but thesis) at the time, but I’ve long ago learned not to limit myself based upon qualifications mentioned in a job advertisement, so I applied.

Once I did arrive for my interview, I could tell that things would be different here. The expectations for my job were clearly defined for me early on. I must perform in three distinct areas: teaching, scholarship and service. This was new, but not entirely unfamiliar to me. It was new in that the requirements were clearly spelled out in a departmental tenure and promotion document. The part that was unfamiliar was the explicit requirement for scholarship that was not a required part of my community college experience.

In the community college environment my primary function was teaching and occasionally I might be asked to serve on a committee. If I remember correctly, the contract spelled out the teaching requirement, and included a catch-all clause that said, “and other duties as assigned” which covered the chief academic officer’s bases for the service requirements of the position.

I recall thinking that this new scholarship requirement was a fascinating challenge, and that my old community college would benefit from such a requirement of its faculty. By requiring a bit of scholarship, and it wouldn’t necessarily need to be anything akin to the 20% of your time requirement that my current department has, I thought the culture among the community college faculty would be significantly improved by that challenge.

In the first several years of my new job, I was very uncomfortable with the title “Associate Professor.” I don’t think I ever fully embraced my associate professor-ness. What does it mean, exactly anyhow? What does it mean to be associate? Am I a professor? When I wrote to my best friend from high school about my new job, he wrote back to me jokingly that I was now in the company of the most famous of all professors, Roy Hinkley, who for all of his extensive knowledge was never quite able to get the castaways back to civilization.

At my old job, the only possible rank for a faculty member was “Instructor,” irregardless of experience or educational background. I don’t think it helped my understanding having attended a small liberal-arts college for my undergraduate degree. My graduate coursework was primarily done through online and brief summer sessions at Fort Hays State University so I didn’t have any experience of the culture of a research one institution.

I always have had a feeling that somehow I had slid under the door of entry into this new world of professorship, particularly because I did not arrive with my master’s degree in hand. Come to think of it, I even began teaching college courses at the community college as I was finishing up my bachelor’s degree. I continue to be amazed at the amount of faith that the people who hired me have had in me and my potential.

There is a principle at work in my approach; in how these amazing things have happened to me. I must have read it somewhere along the way many years ago, probably from Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. Behave as if you are already the person you wish to become.

Yep, I just googled it. (Isn’t the internet awesome?)

If you want a quality, act as if you already have it. If you want to be courageous, act as if you were – and as you act and persevere in acting, so you tend to become.
― Norman Vincent Peale

Instead of a somewhat mysterious three year tenure process that hinges a great deal on whether or not your students, your superiors and your colleagues like you at the community college, earning tenure in my department at Kansas State was a six-year process in which I always had a strong sense of what was required. I simply had to demonstrate achievement in the three areas with the following time allotments: 70% teaching, 20% scholarship and 10% service.

As long as I could show that I had performed well in each of these areas, even if my students hated me, even if I had not one single friend on campus, according to the official tenure and promotion document I would not be denied tenure. Of course it is possible to achieve in the three areas without having everyone hate you (which incidentally is the path I tried to follow) after six years I was fully accepted into the tribe, earned tenure and became an associate professor.

Each year around this time, I have to turn in an annual report of professional accomplishments. Because I am not as organized as I could be, it is usually a hassle and usually a last-minute rush to get it done. It is getting better, and I do some things smarter, but it took me half of a day yesterday to put mine together. I have a spot in my office where I keep relevant documents in a pile (I’m a piler, not a filer) as the year progresses, and all I have to do is sort them into the three categories at the end of the year and put them into a tabbed binder. Knowing that this activity is coming each year, you might think that I would simply have a tabbed binder ready and place each item in the proper location as it comes up, but you would think wrongly. Hmm, maybe I should re-think my approach.

Anyhow, while looking through this tabbed binder of my activities throughout the last year, I noticed something peculiar and amazing. Somewhere along the way, I have become a professor. I do real professor work. I’m working towards a professor’s Ph.D. but in my particular department, that degree is a personal goal not a requirement. I talk with and work with other professors. Most importantly, I am on a path of ongoing self-improvement. This is definitely not a static situation where I feel I’ve arrived. There are always areas for growth and achievement, but as I wrote in my last post, achievement is only level 2 of a four-level continuum of happiness. Of course I will continue to achieve and strive for accomplishing great things, but I am mostly concerned with my growth happening in levels 3 & 4, where I am helping others and moving towards Truth, Love, Goodness, Beauty and Being. Isn’t that after all what being a professor is really all about?

 

Voice of Authority in Teaching

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When I was in the Navy, I was contemplating whether or not to stay with my ship in Japan, or if I should try to find a ship stateside. I was very far from home for two years. In some ways I was happy. I had a lot of freedom for person my young age, with plenty of new places and experiences to explore. In other ways, I was unhappy. I was so far from home, I never got to see my family and life was one culture shock after another. I was never truly comfortable.

Discussing this with a “Marlboro Man” type of fellow from western Nebraska, Dan Hall (he even looked like the Marlboro Man) –  I mentioned that I should ask my parents to tell me what to do. Dan told me, “what an awful thing to put on your parents. Make your own decision. I was looking for an authority figure to tell me what to do. I wonder if ultimately I was planning to hold them accountable if things didn’t work out well for me. In any case, Dan was right. I needed to make my own decision. I never did discuss it with my parents.

In a way, I still found an answer with an external authority figure by having Dan tell me it was up to me. Intellectually, I was in a place that respected authority in all matters, and my opinion counted for little. The Navy is a great place for people who enjoy having others tell them what to do.

After a couple of years, again I wrestled with a big decision when I decided whether or not to re-enlist or to be discharged and return home to Kansas. Again, I thought about discussing it with my parents, but ultimately after weighing the benefits (and experiencing combat action in the Persian Gulf War) I decided I’d had enough and I left the service.

Fast forward to today. I am still amazed to find myself a teacher. Not only a teacher, but a college professor. It took me several years to identify with that role and refer to myself as such. Many times I still simply tell people that I teach.

I have never much identified with the role of teacher as authoritative expert, but simply as a person in the role of a guide to learning. I suppose part of it is that I came into this game late enough that the internet was already an established part of our lives, and access to information was no longer the obstacle it once was. With abundant information available, and my years of experience in computing, together my students and I could be partners in learning where I could help them figure out for themselves how to get where they wanted to go.

But this grand vision only works out well some of the time. Most of the time my students look at me incredulously, wondering when I will step up and become the authority that they have been conditioned to rely upon. My attempts at inquiry style learning to be driven by student interests often fall flat. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is due to my insensitivity to their personal level of intellectual development. “You can do this,” I say. “No I can’t,” they reply (or at least think.)

I have to find a way to start paying more attention to where they are, if this is going to work out. My attention to levels of intellectual development began when a few years ago I first learned about William Perry’s model in this area. It has been in the back of my mind, but has not come to the forefront of my thinking about my teaching until only recently.

In an article written earlier this year, Marcia Baxter Magolda (2012) discusses creating learning partnerships for transformative learning. Learning partnerships encourage positions of self-authorship. Her key aspects of building learning partnerships include:

  • Respecting learners’ thoughts and feelings, thus affirming the value of their voices
  • Helping them view those experiences as opportunities for learning and growth
  • Collaborating with them to analyze their own problems, thereby engaging in mutual learning with them
  • Drawing attention to the complexity of their work and life decisions and discouraging simplistic solutions
  • Encouraging them to develop personal authority by listening to their own voices in determining how to live their lives
  • Encouraging them to share authority and expertise while working with others to solve mutual problems.

When I reflect on these attributes, I notice that I may currently fall short on several. I am not certain that I ever draw attention to life’s complexity and the need for complex solutions. And I’m not sure when, or even if I am a “Dan Hall” figure who helps them to develop their own voice and authority. I typically begin with the assumption that they already have this, and find myself frustrated when they fail, even to begin.

But how do I accomplish these? Again, Baxter Magolda offers some suggestions. First, share authority in the classroom. This has not really been a problem for me. If anything, perhaps I assign too much authority to students leaving it up to them to figure out everything, rather than assisting and being a co-learner with them.

Also, faculty need to have experienced the personal transformation themselves into self-authorship and be willing to serve as a model for students. This includes being put in the vulnerable position of discussing the process and the struggles we have experienced, instead of always presenting to them the knowledgeable and polished person that we may be today.

Finally, I believe it also will require developing a structure from which to operate, that takes into account the needs of each student. According to Baxter Magolda example, faculty “spent hours structuring class sessions and assignments to link to learners’ capacities, evaluating students’ work, and addressing tensions that arose among students.” This is probably an area where I need to spend much more time exploring and learning how to better connect my assignments to existing learner capacities.

The more I learn about intellectual development, the more I see my own struggles and tendencies. From time to time, I still am seeking external authority, I still want someone to tell me what and how to do things. As a doctoral student, it has been especially challenging to find my own voice of authority as related to research, because it is still new and I am still learning. However, the more I explore this, the more I learn and the more confidence I gain. Maybe someday I will find a place that really works well both for me and for my students.

References:

Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2012). Building learning partnerships. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. 44(1), 32–38.

Fragile Kindles

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I’m 18 months into my experiment with using Kindle 3 eBook readers. Emily and I each got one for Christmas. We both broke the screens within a few months. Amazon gives a one year warranty, so both were replaced for free. About six months later, Emily broke hers again, and she didn’t use hers heavily so I just let it go. Then mine broke this summer. I use mine every day, so I had it replaced, even though I had to pay for a refurb. Since I complained about how fragile the things are when I called, they sent a free replacement for Emily’s as well. So we’ve broken four kindles in less than two years. We have covers for them. After the first one broke, I’ve been extra careful with mine. I honestly have no idea how it broke. But here’s what a broken kindle looks like:

 

I love the e-ink. I really enjoy reading my Kindle. I just wish it were a little more durable. I wouldn’t recommend this device for young kids, or ham-fisted adults.

Seth Godin & Horace Mann

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I was reading Seth Godin’s free e-book, Stop Stealing Dreams yesterday. If you’ve read any of Seth Godin’s stuff, you know he’s an astute observer of the changes that are going on around us. In this e-book, he discusses the changes that he feels must take place to bring the institution of school in line with the changes happening in the world. When I read his stuff, I see echoes of what people have been writing in the success literature for years, including authors like Napoleon Hill who wrote Think and Grow Rich. Here’s just one example of how Godin puts it:

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, he will find someone cheaper than you to do it.

Napoleon Hill once wrote

The problem with most people is they quit looking for work once they find a job.

Doesn’t that sound about the same to you?

Most importantly, Seth encourages us to know and follow our passions. He says, and I tend to agree, that school does a poor job of helping people to discover their passions, but instead employs a standardized system that helps students to fit (read be compliant, follow the rules) into an industrialized form that is no longer needed.

Godin writes about the industrial revolution, and the rise of the common (public) school, citing Horace Mann as the father of the common school movement.

Horace Mann is generally regarded as the father of the institution, but he didn’t have to fight nearly as hard as you would imagine-because industrialists were on his side. The two biggest challenges of a newly industrial economy were finding enough compliant workers and finding enough eager customers. The common school solved both.

I found this interesting. I’ve considered before the role of school as a supplier of compliant factory workers, but haven’t thought more than superficially of the role of school in conditioning eager consumers. More on that idea in a future post. Noticing messages of consumerism is a big part of media literacy education efforts.

Back to Godin & Horace Mann… Anyone who studies the History of American Education will sooner or later encounter Horace Mann, who was so instrumental in bringing the common schools to America. In fact, I have taken a course like that myself, so I dug out my old textbook to compare it with what Godin is saying. Seth Godin includes a section called “Three Legacies of Horace Mann.” These are:

1) raise the standards of the culture by making school available to common people. He quotes Mann

Building a person’s character was just as impoortant as reading, writing and arithmetic. By instilling values such as obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment.

2) the “Normal School” – what we would call teacher education today. Godin notes that these schools were attended usually by high school aged women and taught the community norms to pass along as teachers in the common schools.

3) Banning corporal punishment. Again he quotes Mann

… be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

Godin seems to characterize Horace Mann as a person who instituted a structured form of learning conducive to teaching the future factory workers needed at the time, but at the same time acknowledges the intent of improving society and humanity. He develops this notion by saying that 150 years later, school is still largely unchanged and fit into this factory model of education, even being itself mass industrialized and standardized in nature. Godin calls for an individualized education attentive to the needs and interests of individual students. I tend to agree, but it is difficult to overcome the inertia of 150 years of doing it another way, as well as the efficiencies of teaching everyone the same thing in the same way at the same time.

What Godin doesn’t mention about Horace Mann that I found in my Ed History textbook is that Horace Mann was interested in implementing the pedagogical theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi is, unfortunately, a name I don’t recall at all, but am interested in reading more about as I investigate the roots of inquiry based learning. My textbook (American Education: A History by Urban & Wagoner, by the way) says that Pestalozzi was a Swiss educator who advocated a theory of education that started with the interests of the child rather than with the demands of the subject matter.

… popularly known as object teaching. In this theory, the teacher starts instruction with a concrete object in order to gain the child’s attention. The object, which is related to the child’s world, can then be used as a means of bringing the child to the world of the educator. (Urban & Wagoner)

And I thought that inquiry based learning was largely a 20th century invention. This debate between direct and inquiry-based instruction has been going on for much longer. I suppose if I was really an astute student of education history, I would realize it has probably been going on for as long as humans have had the profession of “teacher,” or at least since the invention of classrooms and lectures. I suspect that the direct (lecture) method of instruction is a much more recent development than is the method of following the interests of and relevance to the learner. I’m just going from memory & hunches now, but I’m guessing that the direct lecture style of education would have it’s roots in medieval universities.

Anyhow, I thought it was interesting that Seth Godin seems to say that Horace Mann gave us factory-optimized eduction, but it’s more complicated than that because Mann seems to have embraced the sort of teaching (considering the interests of the student) that might also work well for us in the digital age.