Lovely

Tuesday (Non)Teaching Question

Tuesday (Non)Teaching Question is an irregular feature that attempts to get a conversation going about (non)teaching.  Typically, the questions attempt to be very impractical and begin with an excessively short preamble.  T(n)TQ is brought to you by CAST.  If you have a question that you’re dying to have featured in an upcoming T(n)TQ, don’t e-mail me at hwc_cast@ccc.edu since this is a one shot deal.

So we survived the semester and final grades are (almost) in…

Those of you teaching summer have a few weeks off; the rest of us have a significantly longer amount of time.

What are you planning to read/watch/see during your time off?

It would be kind of fun if we had a faculty book club of sort (similar to the once existent Pedagogy reading group).  Maybe from these responses we could find a book we could all read and discuss in the fall.

Faculty Development Week 2011

Have you checked your e-mail in the past minute and a half?  If not, you missed this from hwc_CAST.

Hello all.  I have some very important news.

There is a very good chance that we will have 3 days of local Faculty Development here at HWC this summer and 2 days district-wide .  I received this information from a high authority, but I must warn you that it is not 100% set in stone.  Nonetheless, we need to be prepared.  CAST is charged with planning this event and did so up until last year’s little surprise.

Please follow the link below to fill out the brief survey about the programming for FDW.  Assuming that this does occur, we’ll need to move fast.  My goal is to have things in place, at least tentatively, before the end of the semester.  Yes, this is extremely ambitious, but I am confident that we can make it happen.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDdWclowWEwyMzJreW1OVVF2aS1NTUE6MQ

Thanks again.

Chris Sabino
CAST coordinator

Next Up!–Spring Break Open House

The Lounge is never closed, of course, but it is sometimes unsupervised, like over Spring Break.

There may be posts (especially if there’s news), but there may just be you and whoever happens to be here at the same time. Feel free to treat this as an open thread message board or use the week to catch up through the stuff you’ve missed or just take the week off to prepare yourself for the end of the semester rush that will be upon us when we return.

Stay safe, and rest up. Finals await! All of the regular features will return next week, starting with Next Up! on April 24th. See you then, if not before.

The last Tuesday Teaching Question(s) of 2010 (I think.)

OOPS, this should have gone up at 11:59 last night.  I had it scheduled for 11:59 tonight, giving people only one minute on Tuesday for the Tuesday teaching question.  Sorry for the delay.

The end is here.  The multicolored pen business is booming as we in the education business (ha, according to who?) do our business so we can enjoy a much earned vacation (if such a thing is truly possible).  I figured I’d keep it incredibly practical and low level this week in order to respect the cognitive demands of grading.  Here goes.  The even-numbered questions are slightly meatier than the odd-numbered ones.  In fact, the one that is divisible by 3 and even (i.e. divisible by 6) is likely the meatiest of them all (and my original TTQ idea).

1. Are you procrastinating from grading right now?

11. Do you have a red pen to lend me?

24. Since it’s likely that many students won’t come back to collect their final work from you (assuming it hasn’t happened already)…

a) What do you do with you students’ work?

b) Are you as careful “marking their work up” knowing that they will likely never see it?

40. Do you use a percent based grade weighting scale or points?  Why?

115. Would you be more likely to grade in room 1046 if there was music playing?

Let’s see if we can get more than 2 responses this week.  Thanks for reading.  Good luck in this final week.

Tuesday Teaching Question Thanksgiving Week Edition

One of the hats I wear when I’m not at HWC is as a support person for a volunteer teaching organization formerly called ICTC (Inner City Teaching Corps), now called the Alain Locke Initiative.  Anyway, one of my jobs as support person is to lead reflections to help them make sense of their experience as 1st and 2nd year teachers living simply in community.  Around this time of year, I always ask them to consider the following pair questions.  I figured that these would be apropos for us as the end of the semester draws near.  Also, though it’s not Monday, I’ve included a song that I think of around this time of year (of course not nearly as hip as PhiloDave’s Monday selection).

1.  What are you thankful for with respect to teaching?

2. What are you thankful for with respect to working at HWC (this may intersect with the 1st question)?

3. What are you thankful to your students for (and what do you think they’re thankful for with respect to your class(es))?

It’s alive!! The Harold lounge comes to life tomorrow (10/6) in Room 1046 @ 1:45

Why should you come to 1046 tomorrow at 1:45?  to check out the new keypad door (yes, we finally got it).  You can e-mail me at hwc_cast@ccc.edu for the code or just come at 1:45 or ask me in person.

Here’s a reminder for tomorrow per my e-mail from a few days ago.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, will be our first unofficial CAST meeting of the semester.  As many of you probably know, haroldlounge.com is a site designed for faculty to discuss various happenings at HWC, CCC and beyond.  There are often topics that come up on the lounge that perhaps you feel should get some more attention.  This is where CAST comes in.  We’re proposing having actual get-togethers in 1046 to discuss some of these “lost” or misplaced or forgotten issues in real time in a real physical space with each other.  This week, one of our topics comes from one of our Physical Science faculty.  Here’s an excerpt from our e-mail correspondence.  “(I)n the last two days I’ve had two separate conversations with colleagues about what constitutes “college-level” work and behavior. I think we need some institutional homogeneity on this topic.”

So the question is, what constitutes “college-level” work?

Here are the details.
•All are welcome to come at 1:45ish to room 1046.
•At the very least, I’ll make some coffee, but I’m looking for volunteers to bring some snacks, or if you’d like, bring your lunch with you.
•We’ll discuss the above question as well as anything else that comes up.  So if you’d like to grab some other topics from haroldlounge.com or if you have something else on your mind that you’d like to discuss, let me know and I’ll make sure to include it in the questions that we discuss.
•This is meant to be a time to kick back and discuss pertinent issues with each other outside of our offices.
•If anyone is interested in bringing some snacks, that’d be great.  Just let me know.

I think that’s it.  I’m excited to try this out.  I apologize if this time doesn’t work with your schedule, but feel free to give your 2 cents to the question above via e-mail (hwc_cast@ccc.edu) or reply to this post and I’ll make sure that your comments become part of the discussion.