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Teach at a Community College

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Re: Teach at a Community College

#121

Post by SoftTalker »

Mezzie wrote: post #28
porknubbins wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought community colleges were just a fraction of the cost of 4 year colleges? In my state at least CC are free to local HS grads. I think in a lot of cases you would have to do it out of a desire to teach rather than as an profit maximizer.

I genuinely would like to teach - K-12 or higher ed. I will not work somewhere where I am expected to put in extra hours for no extra pay, allow people to physically and verbally abuse me, and doesn't pay enough for me to make rent and bills. I don't expect a CC to pay amazingly, but if they want good people they should at least make sure that they offer a better deal than jobs who only want a GED and right now they…

> I will not work somewhere where I am expected to put in extra hours for no extra pay

So you'll never teach K-12 without giving up that restriction.

People often joke about how teachers have summer off, 2 weeks at Christmas, fall break, spring break, etc. but don't talk so much about the hours of work they do at home every night grading or doing lesson prep, or the hours of time they put into advising or coaching extracurriculars, as well as required professional development that normally has to be done on their own time.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#122

Post by grogenaut »

bluedino wrote: post #38
300bps wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I taught a non-credit course on Novell Networking at a local college back when I was a Certified Netware Engineer. Will never do that again. 10% of the class picked it up quickly. 80% of the class picked it up. 10% of the class would never understand the material and dragged the rest of the class down asking incessant questions. The money was a joke and I hated it.

Being on the student side of this, it seems like half of the class was there because of their employer. Some people were "learning new skills", and attended as a requirement. They just sat on their phones the whole time. Zero intention of learning or being employed in this capacity. Then there were the people with zero computer skills that shouldn't have been in the class, and took up the entire two first days with h…

I saw some of these during a machining class near Boeing. Most were actually trying to learn but it felt like high school with them fucking around on the machines. Some were real serious which is who I talked to.

The worst were the folks who were literally of the opinion that they just sat through this bullshit like a mushroom and they'd check the boxes to move up one grade at the union. One of these was a dude who constantly complained out loud about the math. Machining feeds and speeds is based on the surface feet / minute or your metric equivalent of the speed of the outer diameter of your cutter. So pi is used a lot. The equation is on every wall. 5 minutes in while everyone was signing paperwork I had reversed the formular for every variable. Page 3 of the book does that for you and makes pi 3 for ease and safety. This was the math the guy complained about. We had to do it 5 times total. 7 classes in this dude still had not brought in a calculator and the laziest kid in the class mocked him for it. This same guy who couldn't / wouldn't do the math spent an hour at lunch explaining his intricate scheme to basically work 14 days each year for the next 2 years before exiting out to part time and then retirement with his full benes. So he could do it, but he just wanted to sit at home playing guitar and drinking and subjected the rest of is this complaints. Also he hogged the professors time a lot.

There were some others who did not have the math skills to do offsets/ zero setting on depth of drill holes. But when the professors could give them the time they could usually come up with a way to explain it. That guy wanted to learn but also felt that once he was certified his job was to read a book until the machine went into fault mode, so the training got him an easier job. He didn't actually need to understand any of the training to hit a button when a light went red.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#123

Post by blandcoffee »

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.

I don't dispute your claim (and am personally swayed of the argument of technical > admin in most situations) - do you have data that shows this disparity?

Purely conjecture (which means absolutely nothing), I've always assumed that admin:faculty rates are similar, but the volume is where it matters (ie. 2x more admin:faculty in headcount).

Re: Teach at a Community College

#124

Post by Mezzie »

SoftTalker wrote: post #121
Mezzie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely would like to teach - K-12 or higher ed. I will not work somewhere where I am expected to put in extra hours for no extra pay, allow people to physically and verbally abuse me, and doesn't pay enough for me to make rent and bills. I don't expect a CC to pay amazingly, but if they want good people they should at least make sure that they offer a better deal than jobs who only want a GED and right now they…

> I will not work somewhere where I am expected to put in extra hours for no extra pay So you'll never teach K-12 without giving up that restriction. People often joke about how teachers have summer off, 2 weeks at Christmas, fall break, spring break, etc. but don't talk so much about the hours of work they do at home every night grading or doing lesson prep, or the hours of time they put into advising or coaching ex…

Yeah, that's why the 'and' is emphasized. I can see why that's the case (grading takes a variable amount of time, so does advising, and required PD to keep teachers up to date is very reasonable). I wouldn't mind doing that if I were paid enough to be secure, but you want me to do that and probably have to work a second job? No.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#125

Post by pxc »

SoftTalker wrote: post #112
gabereiser wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community College is for people who are busy getting things done. The stigma around community college is that "You weren't good enough for 4-year, let alone Ivy League" when simply that's not true and a stereotype. I started at a community college. This was a long time ago now but I remember having to dance a precarious line between explaining where I went to school and explaining what I know. To this day when people…

Also for people looking to get the best value for their tuition dollars. Many colleges (often by law) have to accept local community college transfer credits. A freshman can save thousands by taking prerequisite/introductory math, science, and other courses at a community college and then transferring to a traditional college or university to complete an undergraduate degree.

> Also for people looking to get the best value for their tuition dollars.

I'd like to add that one of the ways community colleges provide educational value is by putting you in a classroom made up of more than just teenagers and 20-somethings who came to college directly from high school. For a lot of subjects, the quality of discussion is improved a lot by having parents, veterans, people who have had varied or multiple careers, people who have survived various hardships... people who have seen and contended with more of life.

It makes a big difference in a class on childhood development to have classmates who are parents of kids of various ages, or who have worked for a long time in childcare and education. It makes a big difference in a class on death, dying, and grieving to have classmates whose experiences with death, aging, and grief are not limited to the passing of one or two relatives two generations apart from them. It makes a big difference in various job-oriented classes to have classmates who already work in the field and are studying in order to specialize, pursue a certification, or round out their skillset.

The student bodies of community colleges are way, way more diverse than those of universities, and that makes them a lot more interesting in certain ways, especially for discussion-oriented classes and subjects that address human life and experience outside of narrow, academic contexts.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#126

Post by prismatix »

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…

I agree with you.

I took a somewhat roundabout way of going to a 4-year (first 2 years), then a community college for a year, and back to a different 4-year (last 2 years). In my experience, most of my community college classmates seemed to actually want to be there. They were motivated to learn and not just "get a degree". It's not that the university students didn't want to learn, its just that they were the ones who "knowledge comes easy" to; But, even then, a lot appeared immature, took the education for granted, had everything paid for by parents, and were perhaps guilted into to being there by parents, society, etc. Even in the last 2 years I noticed this.

Community college students were typically more mature, paying their own way, some having families and full-time jobs. And to top it all off I actually knew my professors in community college. I never once met 70-80% of my professors in the university. Maybe things would've been different at a smaller 4-year university, but community college felt just like that -- a community.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#127

Post by james-revisoai »

gbuk2013 wrote: post #58
james-revisoai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I speak to your mom? Apologies for the directness but I work with tech for UK colleges and would love to hear her view (and see if there has been change since).

She left the college about 10 years ago. At the time all she used was a smart whiteboard - the 2 different colleges she worked at had different brands with different software interfaces on her PC and this was a real pain she said - just as she got used to one she had to change to another one. Apart from that she just made her lesson plans in Word based on a basic template that the college provided.

Thanks for the info!

Seems like besides iPads in the classroom, little has changed.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#128

Post by spicyusername »

hgsgm wrote: post #73
spicyusername wrote: post #9

I looked into this, as I'm starting to burn out of working in the industry. The community colleges in my area require a surprising amount of prerequisites and pay _dismally_. Even with 15 years of industry experience, I'd need at least a year or two of additional schooling (while not being paid) to earn a paltry few hundred dollars per credit hour per semester while teaching. Hard sell to not get paid for a few years…

Teaching at community college is community service, not a career.

Many forms of community service don't ask that you bankrupt yourself to contribute.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#129

Post by ipcress_file »

westurner wrote: post #84

> Learning to teach To learn, teach.

This is so true. You never understand a subject as thoroughly as you do after you've taught it. The act of distilling what you know and determining how to explain it clearly to others is as good for you as it is for them.

Also, you have to learn a lot more than you actually teach in order to be ready for a range of possible questions.

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