Blog Entry #1

Over the past week, I have been thinking about what I want to get out of this course. Next semester, I will be teaching my first college course (PSYC 214: Social Interaction). I believe there is much I can gain from COMM 702 between now and the time and I start teaching. This week’s readings (McKeachie pp. 1-28, and Curzan and Damour pp. 11-30) helped me to think about specific strategies for starting a good semester in this new role.

One of my concerns about teaching is that I will necessarily have less time for research. Research and teaching are both important to me and it will be a challenge to balance these competing demands. I appreciated McKeachie’s (p. 4) acknowledgement of this dilemma. He suggests that research and teaching may not necessarily be in conflict. One can be an excellent researcher and an excellent teacher. I agree with McKeachie, but also acknowledge that spending more time on either research or teaching leaves less time for the other.

I also appreciated McKeachie’s view that college teachers are individualists (p. 12). He suggests that there is more than one way to teach well. In line with this reasoning, I believe that one cannot become an excellent teacher simply by reading and following specific rules. Rather, teachers should be adaptive to their own situation and be selective in only applying teaching techniques that are appropriate in those situations.

Curzan and Damour provide excellent advice for approaching and managing the first day of classes. I agree with their view that learning student names is important (p. 26). When I was an undergraduate, I worked as a mental health tech at an inpatient psychiatric hospital. For the safety of the patients, I often was required to learn up to 30 names in a very short period of time. Not surprisingly then, I found it aggravating that some professors could not learn the names of their students over the course of an entire semester! Below are a couple links that provide techniques for learning student names.

http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/bib/names.htm

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/remnames.htm

On a related note, I agree that information cards are a useful way to learn about your students (Curzan and Damour, p. 26). As an alternative for smaller classes, instructors might consider sending students an email with a brief introduction before the semester begins, and asking the students to reply with their own brief introduction. Similar to the recommendations of Curzan and Damour for information cards (p. 26), email introductions could include reasons why they are taking the course, interests in the area, and other courses they are taking that semester. An advantage of starting the semester with introductory emails is that it allows the instructor to learn about his or her students before the semester begins.

In general, I found this week's readings to be informative and useful as an introduction to college teaching. I look forward to our next class discussion and further readings.