I have had a practice with this blog of trying to keep personally identifying information disguised or to not include such in the first place. This applies to people, insitutions, departments, and programs. Needless to say, as a newly employed tenure track faculty member - with a link to this site on my official institution page - this creates some challenges. There is the obvious need to be cautious of expressing thoughts about one's employer or adjustment experiences in a new position; the usual difficulties that complicate writing about ongoing research that involves people (and, now, in my case, an organization that cannot be named); and the government-mandated requirement to refrain from discussing much of anything that involves students. That said, the purpose of this post is to talk a little about teaching - which I have done in three different institutions of higher learning. There are similarities and differences, but it seems like everywhere I go, I am confronted with what I have come to think of as the sink strainer issue. I have lived in a lot of rental dwellings during the past 10 years, and I have purchased a new sink strainer for each. The sinks never seem to be the same or standard sizes, so I buy a reasonable strainer and leave it behind - in good to above average condition. Without fail, when I move into a new place there is no sink strainer. This makes me wonder what happens to all of the purchased sink strainers. Am I the only one who buys them? How did the previous tenants drain their dishes? (Although increasingly people don't have or use dishes; just paper bags and foil wrapping material.) I would suspect the dwelling cleaners although I am relatively certain that: a) they already have a sink strainer; b) the one in the rental dwelling sink won't fit their home sink anyway. I have another related theory, too - the sinks in rentals were purchased as close outs because they don't fit any standard kitchen.
So what does this have to do with teaching? At each of three universities, I have come in as new faculty - whether employed or as a graduate assistant - to teach existing courses. And with just a couple of exceptions (and I have somewhere between 15 and 20 courses on my 'instructor of record list'), I was unable to find or procure any material. (I want to give a shout out here to the two people who did give me all of their teaching materials, thanks so much, Mr. X and Dr. Y.) As I mentioned above, I have not taught a newly developed course and I have - for the first semester of teaching a new course at least - used the existing text. I usually get what is described as a syllabus - two pages of general learning objectives and lots of boilerplate liability-prevention wording and, once in a while, an included weekly schedule that shows something like: Week 1: Chapter 1 of text; Week 2: Chapter 2; Week 3; Chapter 3 and Exam 1, etc. On the other hand, as with the sink strainers, I am always willing to share anything I have - syllabus, content schedule, assignment descriptions, exam questions, presentation materials, lesson plans, supplemental reading - with anyone who asks. Interestingly, only about three people ever have asked. This was a lot more shocking and disturbing to me when I was a graduate assistant - I really expected that I would receive a sort of course 'kit' when I started to teach - consisting of daily lesson plans (or slides) in electronic or paper format. I thought the work would be in making the material mine; not in making the material. Although most of the time no one offers any reason why they do not appear to have developed or kept anything that would allow an instructor to present a semester long class in a public university, I have heard a few excuses over the years: -Former instructor retired -All of our files are on WordPerfect (R) and we have no computer around that can open that software -I don't have/use a computer (yes, I heard this in 2012) -We just changed the text -Former instructor quit/was asked to leave and left nothing behind -I only use the material that comes with the text (this one at least provides a starting point although to date I have not thought much of ancillary materials) -We had all of our classes in the lab and worked with XYZ software program Needless to say, this semester has come together in much the same way so I work along in the unfortunate practice of being 1-2 weeks ahead in my planning and usually still doing some fine tuning the day or days before classes. And I am keeping everything, as usual - and I bought a brand new stainless steel sink strainer, too!
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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