Teaching

Ok ok....so I haven't written on here...in awhile. Ok ok so I fell down on the job of telling people about what is going on over here. Sorry. However I have jumped back up onto the band wagon and am going to attempt to keep this going....this time.

As some of you know I have been teaching at the aeronautical college here. Mainly I am teaching Math but I have been teaching a couple IT classes for the past year and gradually going to all IT classes. In some ways this is good, it is easier to motivate a student with a computer than to tell them to do some problems on a piece of paper, but sometimes you still have to get creative even to get a student to follow along with what you want them to learn.

"TEACHER, what I do." in deep voice of a person obviously not a native English speaker.
"Follow the directions" I respond.
"TEACHER, what this." in deep resounding voice.
"Type that table into Excel." I respond.
"Easy Teacher." comes the reply.
"Ok, then do it." from yours truly.
"TEACHER, you know I do" deep voice that also has undertones of reaching for his cell phone.
"Your last exam you didn't!" I follow up.

Our terms here are short.....REAL SHORT. Every 4 weeks we are having a midterm or final, with one group of students in midterm and the other group in finals. As an instructor it can be good and bad. If you get lucky and have the same class for both cycles you only have to do one major prep and then just maintain your notes after. I however have only once had this luxury. I have taught every class here with the exception of the English ones....which is probably a good thing (could you imagine a bunch of southern speaking Arabs?)

We are actually wrapping up yet another finals today and my set of students that I have taught for the past six months will finish IT today. We have covered the basics of a computer and made sure that if we are to have a problem then we can atleast talk to the non-native speaking tech support on the other end of the phone. We can create many types of Word documents and know where EVERYTHING in word can be found. We understand what an Excel spreadsheet is used for and can create fairly basic but useful sheets. We can create a MEAN PowerPoint presentation with everything from transitions and effects to sounds and movies. And last but not least, we can use Outlook to manage our time and to communicate with our peers. I am proud of this class, for the most part they work hard and are eager to learn. I will truly miss them next week when we start the new term.

As a closing I thought I would share this interesting graphical representation how our attitudes as educators can be if we aren’t careful. The thing to remember is that here this cycle happens on an 8 week loop. Talk about mood swings! Hope to communicate again with ya’ll soon!