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Teach at a Community College

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Re: Teach at a Community College

#81

Post by gabereiser »

SantalBlush wrote: post #68
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…

>Community College is for people who are busy getting things done. FiveThirtyEight has a great article from 2016 that agrees with you. [0] It also debunks a lot of the myths of higher education, like the myth that students are mostly majoring in humanities: >What few journalists seem to understand, Goldrick-Rab said, is how tenuous a grasp many students have on college. They are working while in school, often jugglin…

I'd love to see an update. 2016 doesn't seem like long ago but in the labor markets and advent of TikTok I'm curious to see what the industry (higher ed) looks like compared to trade schools w/ TikTok channel on the side or something. I've met a ton of folks who, like me, decided to sail off into the sunset and started a youtube channel and now that's all they do and are thriving. I decided against the channel and instead continue to work via starlink. For younger generations, what's the outlook on higher ed vs doing your own thing?

Re: Teach at a Community College

#82

Post by pxc »

fn-mote wrote: post #26

Paraphrase: teaching a few classes at a community college can be great for you , in the begining , but probably not long term, and it is probably not great for your students. You are doing something new, learning to communicate, potentially even learning some new material or a new perspective on something you know. At the very least, you get inspiration to create new materials (for teaching). This experience is not g…

> But the fact that CC (in the US, in STEM, IME) are not paying enough for this to be a viable career means that you will never stay long enough to be an experienced teacher who has figured out a solid approach to teaching the classes and students that you teach.

This wasn't my experience in community college in the US at all. I had a lot of instructors, including STEM instructors, who were very experienced and were in it because they loved to teach. Maybe part of what made that viable is that a state university also had a satellite campus in the same town, so for many of them, teaching at the community college was not their only job. Some of them also taught at that university, and many of those instructors also taught some identical classes at the two institutions.

My differential equations instructor, for example, even had a 'hard mode' section of that class at the community college every semester, which he taught in an identical fashion to the 300-level (third year) version of the course that he taught at the university. He told everyone in it that they could switch to one of the 'easy' ones if they preferred, because after all, it was at the community college and could only be offered for 200-level credit there. But that section of the course was really popular among the STEM-oriented students at the community college, who wanted to challenge themselves, get a deeper understanding, work more with proofs, better prepare for further education, etc.

Practical computing topics, like Unix systems administration and networking, were usually taught by people who still worked in industry and only taught 1 or 2 classes at a time. But sometimes those instructors had been doing that 1 class of theirs for a few years at least, and then their classes were really good.

I'm not sure what made each instructor like that choose to stick around and teach at the community college for years and years, but there were quite a few of them.

There were also some instructors at the same school who didn't know what they were doing or didn't give a fuck, basically high school redux. But I dropped all the classes I had with teachers like that.

There were a few gen eds that were taught by PhD students there, just like at a big university. But in those cases, they usually had already finished a master's degree, and the class was 12-20 people instead of 40-200. I found those classes to be pretty good, too.

Overall I would say that in my experience, the quality of education for intro-level courses and general education requirements is higher at the community colleges I went to than it was at the four-year university. (The in-major, senior-level courses at the university were phenomenal, though. Only a few of the community college courses rivaled those in quality, imo.)

Re: Teach at a Community College

#83

Post by nortonham »

gabereiser wrote: post #54
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…

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…

>Community College is for people who are busy getting things done.

Exactly. Now that I am older, having the option to return to school while working is so helpful. Too add to that, community colleges generally offer one off classes, or certificates in certain fields that are really useful.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#85

Post by MontagFTB »

While attending UCLA, hands down one of my favorite professors was an adjunct from Cal State Northridge. The content he taught was delivered clearly and came with a sense of how we would end up using the material in jobs after graduation. He was authoritative in a way that was different from the school’s pure professors.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#86

Post by anonymouskimmer »

tcbawo wrote: post #69
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…

I read somewhere recently that the purpose of prestige/Ivy League schools is to provide the very wealthy and the very talented/ambitious the opportunity to mix, where you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Then there are schools like Rose Hulman or Curtis Institute of Music that specialize hard. They're very prestigious, but you also have to know about them to even think about going to them.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#87

Post by nortonham »

SantalBlush wrote: post #68
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…

>Community College is for people who are busy getting things done. FiveThirtyEight has a great article from 2016 that agrees with you. [0] It also debunks a lot of the myths of higher education, like the myth that students are mostly majoring in humanities: >What few journalists seem to understand, Goldrick-Rab said, is how tenuous a grasp many students have on college. They are working while in school, often jugglin…

I'm not surprised that many students in CC's are in fields related to health care. When I considered a career change into health care community college offered the easiest path to that.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#88

Post by anonymouskimmer »

gabereiser wrote: post #81
SantalBlush wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Community College is for people who are busy getting things done. FiveThirtyEight has a great article from 2016 that agrees with you. [0] It also debunks a lot of the myths of higher education, like the myth that students are mostly majoring in humanities: >What few journalists seem to understand, Goldrick-Rab said, is how tenuous a grasp many students have on college. They are working while in school, often jugglin…

I'd love to see an update. 2016 doesn't seem like long ago but in the labor markets and advent of TikTok I'm curious to see what the industry (higher ed) looks like compared to trade schools w/ TikTok channel on the side or something. I've met a ton of folks who, like me, decided to sail off into the sunset and started a youtube channel and now that's all they do and are thriving. I decided against the channel and in…

> I've met a ton of folks who, like me, decided to sail off into the sunset and started a youtube channel and now that's all they do and are thriving.

I wonder how much this is additional jobs, or how much it replaces jobs cut from traditional media companies.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#89

Post by nortonham »

300bps wrote: post #14
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…

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.

I feel like that would be the case no matter the school and no matter the subject.. In any class there are some students who just don't care, or are out of their depth.

Re: Teach at a Community College

#90

Post by nortonham »

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.…

>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.

Teaching is a skill. Over time you would be able to gauge these things easier.

Or you could do what some of my HS teaches and college professors used to do, and basically teach it how you see fit, and put the onus on the students to seek out help if they need it.

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