That's me, on the left, when I was teaching 2-way for the Warsaw Center (this is Kettler) back in 2006.
Return to Graduate School
Going back to graduate school at age 54 was a
big event for me. I had been to grad school, J-School at Ball State, immediately
after I got out of the Army, but that didn’t work out so well. As a Vietnam-era
vet who had served in Europe for nearly three years, I was a little out of step
with the fifth-year seniors I was thrown in with. Soon I dropped out of the
program to fill a sudden opening on a small-town paper in northern Indiana. So
30 years later, after a career in Journalism that had left me proud but weary,
I was ready to pick up where I had left off. This time though, my goal was to
get a job as a college professor teaching writing. My immediate challenge, of
course, was to survive the transition.
I still remember the elation I felt driving
over from North Manchester to my first evening class at the IPFW campus. I had
been accepted to the summer program that would introduce me to college-level
teaching, and once fall started I would teach two sections of W131 while I took
English courses at the same time. Piece of cake, I thought.
The good news was that I immediately found
that IPFW was an ideal place for returning students. Profs were accepting of my
experience, and the other students seemed already to be adults, with many
responsibilities no matter their age, so I wasn’t entirely outside the
mainstream of their experiences. The less than good news was that I was
startled by the amount of reading and writing, and I was also a bit surprised
at the high caliber of my fellow classmates. I would not excel simply by
showing up, that much was clear the first night.
To compensate for my surprise, I immediately
adjusted my short term goals from simply studying hard and that kind of thing
to finding a special niche where I could fit in and rise above the maddening
crowd so to speak. Early on I got involved with the Writing Center, which
seemed to attract a specialized kind of
teaching, and not long after that I discovered technology. Always a computer
nerd – my wife and I owned a Commodore Vic 20 when they first came out and then
purchased the first 512K Macs – I scoured the course descriptions and took any
English or Comp class that mentioned technology. Soon I had a working knowledge
of discussion boards, listservs, and an early version of Blackboard. I also
bugged ITS until they gave me my own ipfw.edu/users web space.
It wasn’t long until this approach paid off
in my teaching, with my students seeming to respond very well to my class web
pages where I presented their assignments along with PowerPoint lectures and
the like. Even though my early teaching experiences were not over the Internet,
the technology worked well in face to face classrooms, and I was inspired to
push this approach as hard as possible, including writing my Master’s Thesis
about technology in the classroom.
Because I had set my goals high and focused
them well, three years after I entered grad school I was rewarded for my
efforts with a full time teaching position on the faculty of the English and
Linguistics Department at IPFW. Short-term goal accomplished.
College teaching of course is more than just
about the job: it is about you guys. It is about working on your behalf to
ensure that you succeed in meeting your own goals. So my long-term goal, to be
the best teacher possible, is still unfulfilled and hopefully never will be. As
they say, “There’s always room to grow.”
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