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Teach at a Community College

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Re: Teach at a Community College

#101

Post by dopeboy »

ModernMech wrote: post #41

I'm on an advisory board for the CS department at the local CC. They have a real problem hiring teachers, because their students end up making more than them at an entry level. And not just a little more, a lot more. So anyone they hire to teach the material is poached almost immediately, or quits due to despair at the situation. Not sure how to fix this, but it's a terrible situation for an educational institution.

Can you ask them why they pay their teachers so little? I would think a CS lecturer is more valuable than your run of the mill admin.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#103

Post by anonymouskimmer »

photochemsyn wrote: post #57

A lot depends on your local educational system. Community colleges in California, for example, have suffered large budget cuts and many teachers have been laid off over the past few years so it's not a very attractive career. A program with few offerings is not attractive to students, either, so budget cuts tend to lead to enrollment drops: https://www.communitycollegereview.com/blog/california-commu... A main issue,…

> if you have large student loans the pay is to low to make any headway in paying them down

The Public-service loan forgiveness program has been revamped to make it possible to get loan forgiveness now. Most people whose sole income is adjuncting at a CC aren't going to be making any payments. Of course the side effect of going the forgiveness route is that it can lock you into a low-paying public job for years.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#104

Post by ignoramous »

hgsgm wrote: post #76
ignoramous wrote: post #35

I taught Celullar Networks and Android Internals at my alma mater just this past semester and can relate with TFA. It took 4 to 6 hours of prep to deliver a one hour class. Preparing from existing course materials available online or from YouTube and Wikipedia was the fastest as opposed to going through the text books. I found it very hard to know when to go fast and when to go slow, what to skip and what to include.…

How did you pick which student got which book? Some fell asleep in class? Some were HR?

I gave a brief overview of these books and let students choose in the order they were seated. And if they didn't get the book they wanted, I suggested that they could borrow it from their classmates or buy one for themselves (everyone had a paid summer internship lined up already). Previously, I used to gift Thinking Fast and Slow but the replication crisis had me abandon it because at least two entire chapters (3 & 4) seem like pop-science now.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#105

Post by jasoneckert »

This past Thursday (April 20) was my 25th work anniversary teaching at a community college. And while I agree wholeheartedly with everything in this blog post, they were not the reasons I set out teaching in this space.

25 years ago, I knew I wanted to build great teaching skills and genuinely make a difference in people's lives. But after spending almost a decade in the university space (and teaching a few courses), I realized that my abilities would be better spent teaching job-focused IT and programming courses at community college for two main reasons:

1) University students often come from privileged homes and/or have more supports while attending school, which makes my role as teacher less valuable to their development, and

2) Most community college students are focused on landing a job at the end of their program, and I felt I would make a bigger impact working with this drive in the classroom, while keeping current with the industry.

I should also note that it's very important to work in the industry while teaching for personal and academic development. I've taken on 1-2 extracurricular projects each year since 1998 that were outside of my comfort zone, and I don't think I would have taught for as long as I did if I didn't do this.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#106

Post by anonymouskimmer »

pxc wrote: post #95
photochemsyn wrote: post #57

A lot depends on your local educational system. Community colleges in California, for example, have suffered large budget cuts and many teachers have been laid off over the past few years so it's not a very attractive career. A program with few offerings is not attractive to students, either, so budget cuts tend to lead to enrollment drops: https://www.communitycollegereview.com/blog/california-commu... A main issue,…

> Another problem is that public high schools do such an atrocious job at instruction that community colleges have to pick up the slack, so you have schools teaching basic algebra and simple reading/writing skills (i.e. 9th grade level etc.) to young adults whose primary education was a disaster. It's a pretty sad state of affairs, at least in the USA. One of the advertising slogans of the community college I got my…

> Those remedial courses can also be nice for advanced junior high students, or students at high schools that are crummy in specific STEM subjects, if their parents have the resources and time to get them there. Sometimes a dual-enrollment program also means that those students can get high school credit for those classes, and use them to skip certain classes at their high school or graduate early.

My state's dual-enrollment program allowed dual enrollment for the final two high school years. Drawbacks of the program were that, if you used some of your electives in the first two high school years, you can't both graduate high school and take a STEM degree at the same time. In order to graduate high school you have to take an English/liberal arts heavy course load at the community college to fulfill the high school credit requirements. So at best you could get a high school diploma and a A.A. degree, but not an A.S. degree. Even then, in order to take only a single year of dual enrollment, I had to skip taking any physics course (HS or CC). Taking two years was a non-starter - I would have had to have skipped math and advanced Chemistry to do that.

I would rectify the situation by either allowing dual-enrolled students to waive high school course requirements, and allow them to get a high school diploma just based on credits (or at least get a high school diploma as long as they also receive a 2-year degree). Or blatantly tell them that a high school diploma is irrelevant, for them, as long as they have an associate's degree, and to go for the associate's degree instead of the diploma, and just let them walk with their high school cohort at high school graduation and hand them a dummy diploma.

Also much better individualized guidance counseling on dual enrollment.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#107

Post by brazzy »

cle wrote: post #64
neilv wrote: post #37

There's sometimes a stigma, which we should get rid of. First, I had great instructors at Portland Community College. Also, in addition to what I learned there, an area company (Tektronix spinoff) happened to put a job post there for a co-op student, and it turned out to be a great company, doing big things, which launched my career. After later working and then going to fancy-pants schools, one day a professor disse…

> When I'm hiring, I see a lot of MIT/Stanford/Ivy on resumes, but I also pay as much attention to resumes from people who went to other schools, or who took some other path through their circumstances. I agree wholeheartedly. As another datapoint, over the years I've worked with many people from "top" schools like MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Ivies, etc. Generally they have not been strong engineers. I don't real…

> The folks who've struggled through non-traditional routes have been stronger engineers.

My guess is because those are the people who really had the persistence and ambition to overcome obstacles and adversity.

Those who didn't have that on a "non-traditional rout" would have been much more likely to drop out, whereas someone going to a top school is more likely to have family expectations as their prime driver, which doesn't translate as well to workplace performance.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#108

Post by BlueTemplar »

routerl wrote: post #8
ssttoo wrote: post #6

While I wholeheartedly agree with “learning by teaching”, one question I have is whether one could teach in community college. May be just my CC experience of study field (music) combined with locale (talent-attracting city of Los Angeles) but I hear one needs to be a PhD these days to compete for a CC professor spot.

Yeah, you got it. This is the real answer. The glut of PhD's is at such a level that the last teaching jobs available to industry professionals have all gone to boomers who will stay at those jobs until they die.

You think they love the job so much that they are NOT currently retiring ?

Re: Teach at a Community College

#109

Post by ModernMech »

dopeboy wrote: post #101
ModernMech wrote: post #41

I'm on an advisory board for the CS department at the local CC. They have a real problem hiring teachers, because their students end up making more than them at an entry level. And not just a little more, a lot more. So anyone they hire to teach the material is poached almost immediately, or quits due to despair at the situation. Not sure how to fix this, but it's a terrible situation for an educational institution.

Can you ask them why they pay their teachers so little? I would think a CS lecturer is more valuable than your run of the mill admin.

What makes you assume run-of-the-mill admin at a CC are paid well, or better?

Anyway, as far as the school is concerned, they can survive without a robust or effective CS department, but they can't survive without the admin, which is true. It takes a lot of work to run a college, and CS profs aren't the ones who do that.

Paying more to better CS profs doesn't make financial sense, because they're not going to yield more students as a result. So they'd be dumping more money on a teacher to teach the same number of students. And no matter what they could pay them, it wouldn't be enough to offset what they could make in industry.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#110

Post by lowken »

I want to community college for two years. Then I transferred to the University of Florida. Many of my community college professors were worlds better than their University of Florida counterparts.

I don’t put Palm Beach Community College on my resume but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the community college path to a young person.

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