It finally happened.
On Monday night, I taught my first college class!
I am teaching a hybrid course called Second Language Acquisition and Development for K-12 Educators as an adjunct. Hybrid means that we meet at PSU 5 times and then on alternate weeks I use the D2L digital format to post assignments and prompt discussions.
As an adjunct, I basically inherited the course content and it's my job to deliver it. Having all the content created for me has its advantages and disadvantages, but I think overall it was beneficial given that it is my first ever college course.
Since I have control over the format of the D2L course page, I tried to make that super organized so my students will have an easy time understanding what their assignments are and when/how they need to turn everything in. I took several online courses when I was living in Germany and working on my doctorate, so I am pretty familiar with how those types of courses operate.
So far my takeaways from being a professor are as follows:
- I really like having my own teaching space. It was weird to arrive in a random classroom prior to class only to find that a different class was in session. I showed up very early, but by the time I got access to the room, my students were already coming in. I had to figure out how to get technology running, arrange the small room to accommodate 30 students, and get all my papers organized with an audience. I had no idea what the table/seating arrange would be and since we were very crowded, the set up was not ideal for the group activities I planned.
- Adults ask a lot of questions. Even though I thought I made things VERY clear, there were still many clarifying questions.
- Adults actually did what I asked and I didn't need to redirect any behavior. It was great to just calmly circulate when they were discussing in groups. I listened and enjoyed what they had to say. I don't often feel that way in Kindergarten.
- The amount of work I have to grade just grew exponentially. I don't grade a whole lot in Kindergarten, but my college students have to write a 500 word reflection each week minimum. 500 words times 30 people is a lot of reading. Plus, I have to read the textbook chapters so that I can be familiar with the content and plan activities to go along with the content.
- I was a lot more self conscious teaching adults than I ever am teaching children. Hopefully that gets better.
The next course I am going to teach is entirely online, so that will be interesting as well.
Now, please share with me some of your favorite memories of college courses so I can be a rockstar professor!
What did professors do that you LOVED and also what did professors do that you HATED?
