31–40 of 155 posts
Maybe this is IT-specific advice, but I did this (in another field). It did not end well. The students were great. But the administration of the school left a lot to be desired.
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…
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.
It was a nice experience, but payed really badly.
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. The feedback coming through wasn't real-time. I kept surprise open-notes tests to gauge where the class was lacking.
Students have a very short attention span. It is hard to keep them engaged throughout the period. I always start by summarising topics from the previous class. I also spoke to them multiple times and at length about concentration, but I guess the length was also a problem.
I believe some students are vehemently visual learners and prefer PPTs and videos. I shared links I thought were high quality with them via a Google doc and updated them every week.
Everyone used ChatGPT for assignments and some used it for preparing for exams.
It was jarring to see some students be in a perennial state of distraction (and be slave to their smartphones).
After the semester ended, with the money I earned taking the class (it wasn't much at all), I bought every student one among Pragmatic Programmer, Algorithms to Live By, Deep Work, Outliers, How Google Works, Why We Sleep. In the hope that it inculcates in them the habit reading books to progress in their careers.
Was one of my best experiences, and yes, the payment was very low, but i was teaching.., maybe 10 hours a week.
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 dissed community colleges to me. I thought the professor was wrong and out of line, so I talked constructively with them about that. But I still felt bad, and didn't need the stigma in those particular circles, so I removed community college from my Web CV.
When I was finally making a LinkedIn, I found one of my instructors from community college on there, and wrote them a note, thanking them, and telling them how helpful and important their teaching had been to me.
Maybe the next day, I realized I'd left community college off my LinkedIn, and the instructor might've seen that. So I added it back on, and have kept it on.
Community college is for people who want to better themselves, and, for whatever reason (I suspect usually involving socioeconomic circumstances) they aren't (yet?) at a more expensive college or university.
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 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…
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.
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 how to sign into their student account, use and RDP session...
Hopefully after the first couple weeks all of those have dropped out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The formal lesson planning has been cut back a bit these days (last 3 years or so). One of my employers went over to the 'five minute lesson plan' [1]. With a solid scheme of work (plan of the whole course) that works OK. I taught maths (basic level) and we had a team of something like 20 tutors so materials got produced and a common scheme of work got adapted as needed. All that cuts the work down, along with some a…
She used to teach a foreign language, so there was only one other teacher and yes management really was a problem. :( Good to hear that things have improved - it’s been about 10 years since she moved on to teaching privately.
Management can be abysmal. I've been lucky.
Hope Mrs gbuk Senior is doing OK now.
You enjoy poverty wages and difficult co-workers. Also getting sick from students a lot. Also debates about in-person or online platforms.
Source: Ex-wife is a tenured community college professor involved in governance as well