10 ms·

Teach at a Community College

171 points by zandert 3y ago

23B1 3y ago
I taught at my local CC and it was a blast. I was relatively young at the time and more than a few of my students were older than me, so I probably learned a lot more than they did. I think HR (and frankly PR) departments would be very smart to connect themselves with schools in their area for tutoring or teaching at any level.
jason-phillips 3y ago
I always say that I learned more while teaching technology classes in my local community than any individual student. Like this person, it helped hone my skills communicating technical ideas to non-technical people. Most importantly, it helped me understand others' limitations and abilities of mine I had taken for granted. As a result, I learned patience and grace, that sometimes it's better to show someone while doing it yourself, rather than expecting them to master it. I scheduled an AI class in the library this summer, because I think it's important. We'll see.
ZunarJ5 3y ago
Thanks for this. I think I might look into it as I finish my degree.
CrampusDestrus 3y ago
My only gripe with this is that academic carreers and working in the field are not really interchangeable. I would have loved helping people learn by teaching a few classes after graduating, but would any company have hired me after seeing that's the only thing I did in those years? I love helping people and making the world better, and if I could I would switch between teaching at college and working in the industry every few years, but unfortunately it's not really possible
- msrenee 3y ago
  Some of the lecturers at my local community college have regular jobs and do a course or two a year on the side. It's not their full-time job.
ssttoo 3y ago
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.
- routerl 3y ago
  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.
  - prosaic-hacker 3y ago
    I teach at a Vocational college the teaches entry level system administration. I am one of those boomers (1959) but I have no degrees above a Bachelors. I could not get out of the teaching because of ageism and assumed if-you-cant-do-teachism. I took this job 15 years ago because prospective employers looked at my then 30 year career and repeatedly said you cannot adapt to new tech and are too expensive. So I took my sysadmin, programming, and management skills and taught them to younger people who did get the jobs I was rejected for. Hopefully some of my work ethic will have rubbed off on them and when they hire they will do it with less "ism". Now I get to play with the newest tech and teach it.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    You think they love the job so much that they are NOT currently retiring ?
- Spooky23 3y ago
  Professor yes, adjunct no. My dad started teaching English Comp at the local community college and got me pulled in as well doing some computer science and information science classes. I started at the CC and did a few at the local state university. Most schools are not hiring tenure track staff, and use adjuncts and contract assistant professors for the less profitable teaching roles. I would imagine that music has a different dynamic, as lots of emerging professional musicians may be seeking those roles to get benefits, etc.
gravypod 3y ago
This is a dream of mine. I'd love to do it and help teach people. How does someone with a normal BS + industry experience get into this?
- jackthetab 3y ago
  AFAICT, you don't. I reached out to the local CC years ago, with a resume of 20+ yoe in industry; a list of educational clients including NASA, IBM; local clients, industry certs; etc. The response was "Impressive resume! Come back when you have a Master's degree." So, screw them...
  - culopatin 3y ago
    Same experience. All I wanted to teach was intro to C. I took the class online. The professor’s whiteboard was MS paint. He didn’t have a Wacom or touch screen with a pen, he used the mouse. You could not tell what he was writing 80% of the time. Lectures were supposed to be 90min but they were 3h long because the guy would not stop rambling about random stuff. The classes were really bad. No one was getting anything. The assignments were very ambiguous yet strictly graded. I already knew C and all the content of the class, so students started reaching out to me for help, the ones that cared at least. The failure rate of the class was something like 70%… for an intro class. Madness. So I decided I wanted to help and maybe I could teach this a few hours a week. But no, they want someone with a PhD and it pays 38k (full time). No wonder they can only get people like that professor to teach that. You have to be either nuts or very passionate, in this case I got the first one. That’s not to say all of them are like that, my algebra professor was the best one I’ve ever had.
thathndude 3y ago
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.
- zandert 3y ago
  Definitely second that in my case. The students had troubles connecting to the school-provided Teams course and I had to deal with the justified complaints. Even though it was fully out of my controls
spicyusername 3y ago
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 to then take a 75-90% pay cut.
- Mezzie 3y ago
  I'm not in tech but I'm qualified to adjunct/teach some other subjects and this is it. I'm even a good teacher. But why would I do it when I'm making more and I'm treated better working retail? My local CC just posted a part-time librarian job I would jump on if it paid more than 21/hr. Fuck that - I could do better as a waitress or bartender. If they want to use my experience and education they can pay for it; God knows they're charging the kids enough.
  - porknubbins 3y ago
    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.
    - fn-mote 3y ago
      > rather than as an profit maximizer We're not talking about profit MAXIMIZING, this is planning your own exploitation. You would have to be supported by someone else or be independently wealthy to take typical CC jobs. In the US in my area, I'm pretty sure you'd be better teaching K-12 because the unions are bigger / stronger and hence the benefits and job security are greater.
      - Mezzie 3y ago
        This, basically. I would happily teach at a CC for ~40-50k. I consider having my basic economic needs taken care of a necessity to being a good teacher - there is a correlation between poverty/economic stress and agitation, irritability, etc. Being in constant stress is not going to be conducive towards teaching well. If I have to work 2 jobs, I'm going to not spend my time grading thoroughly, I will choose the quick and easy route to curriculum development instead of tailoring the curriculum, etc. Oh and forget time for office hours or student emails; have to go deliver groceries or work at a car wash so I can make rent. I'm not going to take a job where I'm not given what I need to be good at the job - it's terrible for me and it's terrible for the students. The only 'winner' is the institution.
2b3a51 3y ago
Some things that occurred to me while reading OA. I thought the page covered most things carefully and I suspect the students had a good experience. In the UK sessionally paid teaching can be just one class a week as an extra thing. There will be the dbs check and if you want to do this as a long term thing you will need to take a basic teaching qualification. Planning a course: Write down a series of sentences saying what the student should be able to do after the course. In the UK we call these 'learning outcomes'[1]. For something like the OA's example Introduction to HTML, CSS and Javascript you will end up with quite a few! Those learning outcomes will help you to devise a series of activities, see below. The outcomes can also help you to devise an assessment if the college requires that. Finally you can write a few sentences explaining what skills students should have to benefit from the course. Estimating time in class: Devise some practical activities for your students to complete tied closely to the learning outcomes (does not have to be 1 to 1 mapping). Time yourself working through the activities - line by line. Multiply that by 6 or something like that. OA has worked out that instructions need to be fairly full. Then add time for the 'whole group' explanations (the bit where you stand up and explain stuff). IT classes: Your learning outcomes and activities will help you to list all the facilities you need. As OA found out Colleges can have quite locked down systems. Might be an idea to talk to technical support in the College through your contact there while planning. [1] http://www.bristol.ac.uk/academic-quality/approve/approvalguidance/intendedlearningoutcomes/ http://www.bristol.ac.uk/academic-quality/approve/approvalgu... Above is just one I found doing a quick search. Seems pretty standard if wordy.
- gbuk2013 3y ago
  Anecdotal experience: my mom used to teach some adult classes in a UK college and while she loved the work she ultimately left because for every hour of teaching she had to do 4+ hours unpaid work (lesson plans etc) and prepare for endless inspections by people who knew a lot less about teaching than she did (she has 20+ years teaching experience).
  - 2b3a51 3y ago
    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 amazing Web sites [2]. If you are the only teacher of a specialist subject, yes I admit the planning could be heavy the first time you run the course. Local management can be a factor sadly. Recent sad events in the UK news [3] I think will result in a change in approach from OFSTED. This will I think happen when the new OFSTED head is in post. [1] https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/5minplan/ https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/5minplan/ [ I don't think we paid anything! And the differentiation bit is different for adult education] [3] e.g. https://www.skillsworkshop.org/ https://www.skillsworkshop.org/ and https://corbettmaths.com/ https://corbettmaths.com/ [3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65207784 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65207784
black_13 3y ago
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fn-mote 3y ago
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 great for your students. You are being trained on the job. They are looking for training. You are learning from the mistakes you make teaching them. This isn't necessarily horrible. You teaching the class could still be better than the next best alternative. 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.
- yummypaint 3y ago
  For comparison, going to school at a large research university will mean many of your classes are taught by TAs who are themselves PhD students right out of undergrad who may not have taught before or have any interest in teaching. They may also grade most of your work and provide most of your feedback, at least until the highest level classes. Someone who at least has industry experience with mentoring and giving feedback might be preferable.
- pxc 3y ago
  > 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.)
ZachSaucier 3y ago
You can do this sort of thing on a smaller scale but with similar results by volunteering for mentoring organizations like Underdog Devs, Vets Who Code, Operation Code, or another organization that helps underprivileged people try to get programming jobs.
aaron695 3y ago
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k__ 3y ago
I worked as a lecturer at a private university for a semester. It was a nice experience, but payed really badly.
ignoramous 3y ago
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. 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.
- tester457 3y ago
  I've only read Deep Work out of those books you mentioned, but the others must be great too. I envy them for having such an incredible teacher.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  How did you pick which student got which book? Some fell asleep in class? Some were HR?
  - ignoramous 3y ago
    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.
ankaAr 3y ago
i was teaching robotics years ago for schools (elementary and intermediate). A big tech company gave to me the materials and the place to do that. Then schools choose a date to come and we have the classes. The schedule was completed almost a year in advance. For the schools was free. Was one of my best experiences, and yes, the payment was very low, but i was teaching.., maybe 10 hours a week.
neilv 3y ago
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 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.
- yummypaint 3y ago
  Totally agree. For me the most important metric is to what extent a person has made use of the opportunities available to them. I would hire a passionate and engaged community college grad who has hobbies before someone who went to a "top" school but only has grades to show for it.
  - neilv 3y ago
    Hobbies can be a complicated signal. Consider someone studying while also working to pay their way through school or support their family, vs. someone who has more free time. (I say this as someone with open source, which I wouldn't have been able to do, if I had anyone to support when I started the bulk of it. The open source helped get me a few very nice jobs, but I still would've had much of the skill and potential without that. So I don't want to over-fit, and exclude people with skills and potential, just because they had different circumstances than I did.)
6stringmerc 3y ago
Notably absent from the article are the main things that don't appeal to certain people: 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
ModernMech 3y ago
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.
- culopatin 3y ago
  Does your CC require a PhD to teach basic COP classes?
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    No, it's a Master's or Bachelor's + experience that's required.
- dopeboy 3y ago
  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.
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    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.
  - blandcoffee 3y ago
    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).
culopatin 3y ago
I tried. Programming classes in my CC were SO bad it made me want to help. They wanted someone with a PhD and it paid 38k… non starter. The kind of PhD that’s willing to take that in a field like computer science is a very unique kind of person that doesn’t have better opportunities for whatever reason.
- throwaway426079 3y ago
  Might also be someone who already had a career and wanted to do some teaching at the end of it
  - culopatin 3y ago
    Might be, but still limits your pool of candidates so much that you’ll have to go with the first person that shows up.
    - dazc 3y ago
      The right candidate for this kind of job is unlikely to be motivated solely by money, so the fist person that shows up may not be that bad?
  - pxc 3y ago
    At the CC system I went to, it was fairly common for underpaid associate professors at nearby community colleges to teach some of their usual university courses at the community colleges for extra income. It's still a lot of work for them, but I think when you teach a familiar course at an additional school, you can save a lot of prep work so it's a little bit more like teaching another section of the same course than taking on a whole new one.
tibbon 3y ago
I taught at a boot camp from 2013-2015 and it was one of the best moves of my career. I should find a community college to help at
photochemsyn 3y ago
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-community-college-system-slammed-with-budget-cuts https://www.communitycollegereview.com/blog/california-commu... A main issue, at least in the USA, is that college is extremely expensive so smart students who don't want massive debt or who can't tap parental wealth can do two years of work at a community college (with smaller classes) before transferring to a four-year school, saving tens of thousands of dollars along the way. Some community colleges have reoriented around this goal to attract students, but the tradeoff is that continuing education for adults and other vocational programs often get cut. 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. Note that teaching at a CC tends to require at least a Master's degreee in the field, and of course if you have large student loans the pay is to low to make any headway in paying them down. Incidentally, if you are planning to teach, LLMs have huge potential for new teachers to design a course with modern material. Of course grading students is going to be an issue and in-class testing is the only plausible alternative as LLMs can also write code and solve problems for students.
- pxc 3y ago
  > 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 2-year degrees from was literally 'no entry requirements', so offering remedial coursework was really important there. When I tutored (math and computer science) there, I liked working with the remedial students. They were just as motivated as anybody, and it was satisfying to see concepts fall into place for them as we went along. 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.
tristor 3y ago
The pay isn’t worth it, and you won’t enjoy the company of most students. Instead, use VTO and guest lecture at the local community college or university. By guest lecturing you’re time boxing your commitment, doing it for free, and the actually interested students will reach out. I’ve guest lectured twice and mentored 4 students met this way in their tech careers. Each class had 40-50 students in it but only one or two truly engaged with the material. Those engaged students will almost certainly have fantastic careers and are people you want in your network.
jgrowl 3y ago
I paid off my entire college debt with my first paycheck. I lived at home and got my associates from a community college in Appalachia. I did well enough to get a small transfer scholarship at a state college to finish up my BS. You get what you put into it no matter where you go.
westurner 3y ago
> Learning to teach To learn, teach.
- pxeger1 3y ago
  For contrast, there's also: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Not that I 100% agree with that.
  - westurner 3y ago
    If none teach, few can do or teach. "This is where teachers are paid the most" (2021) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/teachers-pay-countries-salaries-education/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/teachers-pay-countrie... : > Globally, teachers’ salaries vary hugely, according to the OECD’s Education At A Glance 2021 report
- ipcress_file 3y ago
  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.
MontagFTB 3y ago
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.
jacooper 3y ago
> I stumbled upon this job posting for a teaching position at the local Community College. My biggest motivation was money. Having some extra money is always needed, especially as a student. They allow students to teach? Bachelor students?
jasoneckert 3y ago
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.
lowken 3y ago
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.
AlbertCory 3y ago
I made this movie for a film class at De Anza College in 1990. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re2Oh4rxN6w&list=PL3F463A67763681D8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re2Oh4rxN6w&list=PL3F463A677... This teacher knew his stuff. He read us the poem "The Eensy-Weensy Spider" and when everyone laughed, he said, more or less, "If any of you can write a script half this good, you'll be a success." It was on Super-8. "Editing" consisted of cutting the film and taping it together, and then punching sprocket holes in the tape.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aaabre2476 3y ago
In many cases it's literally the same instructors at the community college that teach the first two years of a CS program at the universities. Don't waste your money sitting in a room with 100 other students while the instructor is forced to move through a rigidly scheduled curriculum that is totally at odds with what students are actually struggling with. They all seem to prefer teaching at community colleges as well.
than3 3y ago
US-based community college is mostly just a bait and switch fraud. There inevitably are weed-out classes where you can be weeded out of programs or college entirely simply by having the unfortunate luck to attend them. Usually positioned in critical preparatory or transfer coursework needed for a degree program, its mostly not about knowing the material, but dealing with the disadvantaged structure, and having limited resources to attend college in the first place. I've personal experience in an engineering program, where this was common practice in the 3-class core physics courses. 3 question-20step/q test where each subsequent question is dependent on the answer to the previous question. This is the causality spiral of doom, where you either get it perfect, or you don't pass, but you have to get it perfect 6 times in a row to pass the class. By the time you take the first test, you can't get a refund, and if the answer doesn't match perfectly with Pearson or Canvas's material, good luck you just wasted $10-15,000 in living expenses during the time you tried. Try again. and again. and maybe by time 8 or 10 you decide its just not a program for you anymore, and you run into the same issue with the supposedly easier classes in the business program, or drop out completely. Some professors take it a step further by adjusting the rounding strategy between those questions instead of following the same significant digits. Its deceitful lying meant to sell you a pipe-dream which you'll never be able to complete unless you get lucky, and that's just one example. I've almost 15 years worth of examples, in a broad geographic area. Its one of the most egregious deceitful lies we are told as people entering college. Education is only an investment when you can get something back from that investment. If you just need that paper because anyone without it is not qualified, then it doesn't matter what you know (as many professionals I've met have demonstrated they lacked crucial skills and had no inclination to fix their shortfalls). Not even close to meritocracy, I've passed and completed up through DiffEQ and Linear Algebra math wise which require Calculus 3 as a pre-requisite. No issues with math, but I have yet to pass a Mechanics of Solid course because of structure. Its structured to fail people. Eventually people give up trying to be engineers and try business only to find the same thing in the economic's courses. Its such corrupt deceitful bad behavior, and impacts those who have to pay their own way through more than others. I had an online econ class this past semester which had all the same hallmarks, worse, the professor was collecting a paycheck, and instead of lecturing simply referred us to Khan Academy movie links and Pearson's Autograder (which routinely failed on correct answers, and no exceptions were being made regardless, i.e. its the student not the professor or pearson were in the wrong). Any other industry doing these same business practices would be sued or shut down for outright fraud and unfair and deceptive business practices. Because its state funded its somehow exempt from all those same rules. Also the only path to correct is escalating to the chair/dean/trustees rarely ever has any action taken. The people responsible for advocating are the same people that have let this continue for decades. They don't track metrics that would quickly show problems so they can fix them. My local colleges say they don't track how many students in each class have taken the same class or professor before and failed, and the graduation rates as we all know are abyssal.
gonzalonunez 3y ago
Love this
- zandert 3y ago
  Thanks!
juanitamaxapril 3y ago
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summerflowers 3y ago
You have discovered some of the basic facts about teaching! 1. it's not easy 2. if you're a subject expert then your language and communication skills are probably awful and full of jargon 3. planning is very important 4. proper teaching means actually checking that your students are learning 5. teaching a subject you are expert in actually teaches you things too Well done. If you do another blog on this later that would be interesting. PS I'm not a techie, I'm in teacher training.

171 points by zandert 3y ago

23B1 3y ago

I taught at my local CC and it was a blast. I was relatively young at the time and more than a few of my students were older than me, so I probably learned a lot more than they did. I think HR (and frankly PR) departments would be very smart to connect themselves with schools in their area for tutoring or teaching at any level.

jason-phillips 3y ago

I always say that I learned more while teaching technology classes in my local community than any individual student. Like this person, it helped hone my skills communicating technical ideas to non-technical people. Most importantly, it helped me understand others' limitations and abilities of mine I had taken for granted. As a result, I learned patience and grace, that sometimes it's better to show someone while doing it yourself, rather than expecting them to master it. I scheduled an AI class in the library this summer, because I think it's important. We'll see.

ZunarJ5 3y ago

Thanks for this. I think I might look into it as I finish my degree.

CrampusDestrus 3y ago

My only gripe with this is that academic carreers and working in the field are not really interchangeable. I would have loved helping people learn by teaching a few classes after graduating, but would any company have hired me after seeing that's the only thing I did in those years? I love helping people and making the world better, and if I could I would switch between teaching at college and working in the industry every few years, but unfortunately it's not really possible

msrenee 3y ago
Some of the lecturers at my local community college have regular jobs and do a course or two a year on the side. It's not their full-time job.

ssttoo 3y ago

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.

routerl 3y ago
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.
- prosaic-hacker 3y ago
  I teach at a Vocational college the teaches entry level system administration. I am one of those boomers (1959) but I have no degrees above a Bachelors. I could not get out of the teaching because of ageism and assumed if-you-cant-do-teachism. I took this job 15 years ago because prospective employers looked at my then 30 year career and repeatedly said you cannot adapt to new tech and are too expensive. So I took my sysadmin, programming, and management skills and taught them to younger people who did get the jobs I was rejected for. Hopefully some of my work ethic will have rubbed off on them and when they hire they will do it with less "ism". Now I get to play with the newest tech and teach it.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  You think they love the job so much that they are NOT currently retiring ?
Spooky23 3y ago
Professor yes, adjunct no. My dad started teaching English Comp at the local community college and got me pulled in as well doing some computer science and information science classes. I started at the CC and did a few at the local state university. Most schools are not hiring tenure track staff, and use adjuncts and contract assistant professors for the less profitable teaching roles. I would imagine that music has a different dynamic, as lots of emerging professional musicians may be seeking those roles to get benefits, etc.

gravypod 3y ago

This is a dream of mine. I'd love to do it and help teach people. How does someone with a normal BS + industry experience get into this?

jackthetab 3y ago
AFAICT, you don't. I reached out to the local CC years ago, with a resume of 20+ yoe in industry; a list of educational clients including NASA, IBM; local clients, industry certs; etc. The response was "Impressive resume! Come back when you have a Master's degree." So, screw them...
- culopatin 3y ago
  Same experience. All I wanted to teach was intro to C. I took the class online. The professor’s whiteboard was MS paint. He didn’t have a Wacom or touch screen with a pen, he used the mouse. You could not tell what he was writing 80% of the time. Lectures were supposed to be 90min but they were 3h long because the guy would not stop rambling about random stuff. The classes were really bad. No one was getting anything. The assignments were very ambiguous yet strictly graded. I already knew C and all the content of the class, so students started reaching out to me for help, the ones that cared at least. The failure rate of the class was something like 70%… for an intro class. Madness. So I decided I wanted to help and maybe I could teach this a few hours a week. But no, they want someone with a PhD and it pays 38k (full time). No wonder they can only get people like that professor to teach that. You have to be either nuts or very passionate, in this case I got the first one. That’s not to say all of them are like that, my algebra professor was the best one I’ve ever had.

thathndude 3y ago

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.

zandert 3y ago
Definitely second that in my case. The students had troubles connecting to the school-provided Teams course and I had to deal with the justified complaints. Even though it was fully out of my controls

spicyusername 3y ago

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 to then take a 75-90% pay cut.

Mezzie 3y ago
I'm not in tech but I'm qualified to adjunct/teach some other subjects and this is it. I'm even a good teacher. But why would I do it when I'm making more and I'm treated better working retail? My local CC just posted a part-time librarian job I would jump on if it paid more than 21/hr. Fuck that - I could do better as a waitress or bartender. If they want to use my experience and education they can pay for it; God knows they're charging the kids enough.
- porknubbins 3y ago
  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.
  - fn-mote 3y ago
    > rather than as an profit maximizer We're not talking about profit MAXIMIZING, this is planning your own exploitation. You would have to be supported by someone else or be independently wealthy to take typical CC jobs. In the US in my area, I'm pretty sure you'd be better teaching K-12 because the unions are bigger / stronger and hence the benefits and job security are greater.
    - Mezzie 3y ago
      This, basically. I would happily teach at a CC for ~40-50k. I consider having my basic economic needs taken care of a necessity to being a good teacher - there is a correlation between poverty/economic stress and agitation, irritability, etc. Being in constant stress is not going to be conducive towards teaching well. If I have to work 2 jobs, I'm going to not spend my time grading thoroughly, I will choose the quick and easy route to curriculum development instead of tailoring the curriculum, etc. Oh and forget time for office hours or student emails; have to go deliver groceries or work at a car wash so I can make rent. I'm not going to take a job where I'm not given what I need to be good at the job - it's terrible for me and it's terrible for the students. The only 'winner' is the institution.

2b3a51 3y ago

Some things that occurred to me while reading OA. I thought the page covered most things carefully and I suspect the students had a good experience. In the UK sessionally paid teaching can be just one class a week as an extra thing. There will be the dbs check and if you want to do this as a long term thing you will need to take a basic teaching qualification. Planning a course: Write down a series of sentences saying what the student should be able to do after the course. In the UK we call these 'learning outcomes'[1]. For something like the OA's example Introduction to HTML, CSS and Javascript you will end up with quite a few! Those learning outcomes will help you to devise a series of activities, see below. The outcomes can also help you to devise an assessment if the college requires that. Finally you can write a few sentences explaining what skills students should have to benefit from the course. Estimating time in class: Devise some practical activities for your students to complete tied closely to the learning outcomes (does not have to be 1 to 1 mapping). Time yourself working through the activities - line by line. Multiply that by 6 or something like that. OA has worked out that instructions need to be fairly full. Then add time for the 'whole group' explanations (the bit where you stand up and explain stuff). IT classes: Your learning outcomes and activities will help you to list all the facilities you need. As OA found out Colleges can have quite locked down systems. Might be an idea to talk to technical support in the College through your contact there while planning. [1] http://www.bristol.ac.uk/academic-quality/approve/approvalguidance/intendedlearningoutcomes/ http://www.bristol.ac.uk/academic-quality/approve/approvalgu... Above is just one I found doing a quick search. Seems pretty standard if wordy.

gbuk2013 3y ago
Anecdotal experience: my mom used to teach some adult classes in a UK college and while she loved the work she ultimately left because for every hour of teaching she had to do 4+ hours unpaid work (lesson plans etc) and prepare for endless inspections by people who knew a lot less about teaching than she did (she has 20+ years teaching experience).
- 2b3a51 3y ago
  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 amazing Web sites [2]. If you are the only teacher of a specialist subject, yes I admit the planning could be heavy the first time you run the course. Local management can be a factor sadly. Recent sad events in the UK news [3] I think will result in a change in approach from OFSTED. This will I think happen when the new OFSTED head is in post. [1] https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/5minplan/ https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/5minplan/ [ I don't think we paid anything! And the differentiation bit is different for adult education] [3] e.g. https://www.skillsworkshop.org/ https://www.skillsworkshop.org/ and https://corbettmaths.com/ https://corbettmaths.com/ [3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65207784 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65207784

black_13 3y ago

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fn-mote 3y ago

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 great for your students. You are being trained on the job. They are looking for training. You are learning from the mistakes you make teaching them. This isn't necessarily horrible. You teaching the class could still be better than the next best alternative. 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.

yummypaint 3y ago
For comparison, going to school at a large research university will mean many of your classes are taught by TAs who are themselves PhD students right out of undergrad who may not have taught before or have any interest in teaching. They may also grade most of your work and provide most of your feedback, at least until the highest level classes. Someone who at least has industry experience with mentoring and giving feedback might be preferable.
pxc 3y ago
> 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.)

ZachSaucier 3y ago

You can do this sort of thing on a smaller scale but with similar results by volunteering for mentoring organizations like Underdog Devs, Vets Who Code, Operation Code, or another organization that helps underprivileged people try to get programming jobs.

aaron695 3y ago

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k__ 3y ago

I worked as a lecturer at a private university for a semester. It was a nice experience, but payed really badly.

ignoramous 3y ago

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. 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.

tester457 3y ago
I've only read Deep Work out of those books you mentioned, but the others must be great too. I envy them for having such an incredible teacher.
hgsgm 3y ago
How did you pick which student got which book? Some fell asleep in class? Some were HR?
- ignoramous 3y ago
  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.

ankaAr 3y ago

i was teaching robotics years ago for schools (elementary and intermediate). A big tech company gave to me the materials and the place to do that. Then schools choose a date to come and we have the classes. The schedule was completed almost a year in advance. For the schools was free. Was one of my best experiences, and yes, the payment was very low, but i was teaching.., maybe 10 hours a week.

neilv 3y ago

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 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.

yummypaint 3y ago
Totally agree. For me the most important metric is to what extent a person has made use of the opportunities available to them. I would hire a passionate and engaged community college grad who has hobbies before someone who went to a "top" school but only has grades to show for it.
- neilv 3y ago
  Hobbies can be a complicated signal. Consider someone studying while also working to pay their way through school or support their family, vs. someone who has more free time. (I say this as someone with open source, which I wouldn't have been able to do, if I had anyone to support when I started the bulk of it. The open source helped get me a few very nice jobs, but I still would've had much of the skill and potential without that. So I don't want to over-fit, and exclude people with skills and potential, just because they had different circumstances than I did.)

6stringmerc 3y ago

Notably absent from the article are the main things that don't appeal to certain people: 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

ModernMech 3y ago

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.

culopatin 3y ago
Does your CC require a PhD to teach basic COP classes?
- ModernMech 3y ago
  No, it's a Master's or Bachelor's + experience that's required.
dopeboy 3y ago
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.
- ModernMech 3y ago
  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.
- blandcoffee 3y ago
  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).

culopatin 3y ago

I tried. Programming classes in my CC were SO bad it made me want to help. They wanted someone with a PhD and it paid 38k… non starter. The kind of PhD that’s willing to take that in a field like computer science is a very unique kind of person that doesn’t have better opportunities for whatever reason.

throwaway426079 3y ago
Might also be someone who already had a career and wanted to do some teaching at the end of it
- culopatin 3y ago
  Might be, but still limits your pool of candidates so much that you’ll have to go with the first person that shows up.
  - dazc 3y ago
    The right candidate for this kind of job is unlikely to be motivated solely by money, so the fist person that shows up may not be that bad?
- pxc 3y ago
  At the CC system I went to, it was fairly common for underpaid associate professors at nearby community colleges to teach some of their usual university courses at the community colleges for extra income. It's still a lot of work for them, but I think when you teach a familiar course at an additional school, you can save a lot of prep work so it's a little bit more like teaching another section of the same course than taking on a whole new one.

tibbon 3y ago

I taught at a boot camp from 2013-2015 and it was one of the best moves of my career. I should find a community college to help at

photochemsyn 3y ago

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-community-college-system-slammed-with-budget-cuts https://www.communitycollegereview.com/blog/california-commu... A main issue, at least in the USA, is that college is extremely expensive so smart students who don't want massive debt or who can't tap parental wealth can do two years of work at a community college (with smaller classes) before transferring to a four-year school, saving tens of thousands of dollars along the way. Some community colleges have reoriented around this goal to attract students, but the tradeoff is that continuing education for adults and other vocational programs often get cut. 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. Note that teaching at a CC tends to require at least a Master's degreee in the field, and of course if you have large student loans the pay is to low to make any headway in paying them down. Incidentally, if you are planning to teach, LLMs have huge potential for new teachers to design a course with modern material. Of course grading students is going to be an issue and in-class testing is the only plausible alternative as LLMs can also write code and solve problems for students.

pxc 3y ago
> 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 2-year degrees from was literally 'no entry requirements', so offering remedial coursework was really important there. When I tutored (math and computer science) there, I liked working with the remedial students. They were just as motivated as anybody, and it was satisfying to see concepts fall into place for them as we went along. 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.

tristor 3y ago

The pay isn’t worth it, and you won’t enjoy the company of most students. Instead, use VTO and guest lecture at the local community college or university. By guest lecturing you’re time boxing your commitment, doing it for free, and the actually interested students will reach out. I’ve guest lectured twice and mentored 4 students met this way in their tech careers. Each class had 40-50 students in it but only one or two truly engaged with the material. Those engaged students will almost certainly have fantastic careers and are people you want in your network.

jgrowl 3y ago

I paid off my entire college debt with my first paycheck. I lived at home and got my associates from a community college in Appalachia. I did well enough to get a small transfer scholarship at a state college to finish up my BS. You get what you put into it no matter where you go.

westurner 3y ago

> Learning to teach To learn, teach.

pxeger1 3y ago
For contrast, there's also: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Not that I 100% agree with that.
- westurner 3y ago
  If none teach, few can do or teach. "This is where teachers are paid the most" (2021) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/teachers-pay-countries-salaries-education/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/teachers-pay-countrie... : > Globally, teachers’ salaries vary hugely, according to the OECD’s Education At A Glance 2021 report
ipcress_file 3y ago
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.

MontagFTB 3y ago

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.

jacooper 3y ago

> I stumbled upon this job posting for a teaching position at the local Community College. My biggest motivation was money. Having some extra money is always needed, especially as a student. They allow students to teach? Bachelor students?

jasoneckert 3y ago

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.

lowken 3y ago

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.

AlbertCory 3y ago

I made this movie for a film class at De Anza College in 1990. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re2Oh4rxN6w&list=PL3F463A67763681D8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re2Oh4rxN6w&list=PL3F463A677... This teacher knew his stuff. He read us the poem "The Eensy-Weensy Spider" and when everyone laughed, he said, more or less, "If any of you can write a script half this good, you'll be a success." It was on Super-8. "Editing" consisted of cutting the film and taping it together, and then punching sprocket holes in the tape.

deleted 3y ago

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aaabre2476 3y ago

In many cases it's literally the same instructors at the community college that teach the first two years of a CS program at the universities. Don't waste your money sitting in a room with 100 other students while the instructor is forced to move through a rigidly scheduled curriculum that is totally at odds with what students are actually struggling with. They all seem to prefer teaching at community colleges as well.

than3 3y ago

US-based community college is mostly just a bait and switch fraud. There inevitably are weed-out classes where you can be weeded out of programs or college entirely simply by having the unfortunate luck to attend them. Usually positioned in critical preparatory or transfer coursework needed for a degree program, its mostly not about knowing the material, but dealing with the disadvantaged structure, and having limited resources to attend college in the first place. I've personal experience in an engineering program, where this was common practice in the 3-class core physics courses. 3 question-20step/q test where each subsequent question is dependent on the answer to the previous question. This is the causality spiral of doom, where you either get it perfect, or you don't pass, but you have to get it perfect 6 times in a row to pass the class. By the time you take the first test, you can't get a refund, and if the answer doesn't match perfectly with Pearson or Canvas's material, good luck you just wasted $10-15,000 in living expenses during the time you tried. Try again. and again. and maybe by time 8 or 10 you decide its just not a program for you anymore, and you run into the same issue with the supposedly easier classes in the business program, or drop out completely. Some professors take it a step further by adjusting the rounding strategy between those questions instead of following the same significant digits. Its deceitful lying meant to sell you a pipe-dream which you'll never be able to complete unless you get lucky, and that's just one example. I've almost 15 years worth of examples, in a broad geographic area. Its one of the most egregious deceitful lies we are told as people entering college. Education is only an investment when you can get something back from that investment. If you just need that paper because anyone without it is not qualified, then it doesn't matter what you know (as many professionals I've met have demonstrated they lacked crucial skills and had no inclination to fix their shortfalls). Not even close to meritocracy, I've passed and completed up through DiffEQ and Linear Algebra math wise which require Calculus 3 as a pre-requisite. No issues with math, but I have yet to pass a Mechanics of Solid course because of structure. Its structured to fail people. Eventually people give up trying to be engineers and try business only to find the same thing in the economic's courses. Its such corrupt deceitful bad behavior, and impacts those who have to pay their own way through more than others. I had an online econ class this past semester which had all the same hallmarks, worse, the professor was collecting a paycheck, and instead of lecturing simply referred us to Khan Academy movie links and Pearson's Autograder (which routinely failed on correct answers, and no exceptions were being made regardless, i.e. its the student not the professor or pearson were in the wrong). Any other industry doing these same business practices would be sued or shut down for outright fraud and unfair and deceptive business practices. Because its state funded its somehow exempt from all those same rules. Also the only path to correct is escalating to the chair/dean/trustees rarely ever has any action taken. The people responsible for advocating are the same people that have let this continue for decades. They don't track metrics that would quickly show problems so they can fix them. My local colleges say they don't track how many students in each class have taken the same class or professor before and failed, and the graduation rates as we all know are abyssal.

gonzalonunez 3y ago

Love this

zandert 3y ago
Thanks!

juanitamaxapril 3y ago

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summerflowers 3y ago

You have discovered some of the basic facts about teaching! 1. it's not easy 2. if you're a subject expert then your language and communication skills are probably awful and full of jargon 3. planning is very important 4. proper teaching means actually checking that your students are learning 5. teaching a subject you are expert in actually teaches you things too Well done. If you do another blog on this later that would be interesting. PS I'm not a techie, I'm in teacher training.