What I Did Over Winter Vacation

Topiary Mickey

Over the break my family and I went to Disney World for our vacation. Even though I live within sight of the airport (really), getting to Lambert has been a problem for us in the past. Taking a cab both ways is pricey for such a short trip, and there is no good way to walk to the airport. But at the last minute we arranged with a friend (who also was dog/ferret/fish/house sitting for us) to ferry us to the terminal. you might think that flying with a baby (my son Rex is 8 months old) would be a challenge, but not with this baby. He is so laid back, he just slept and/or  smiled the whole trip.
In Orlando Disney has all the machinery in place to get you (and your luggage) from the airport to your hotel. They even collected our bags for us, so all we had to do was get in-line for a bus. Finally my kids started to get excited. We we're in Florida on a Mickey Mouse bus watching a disney cartoon and Rhys (my 5 year old son) actually put it together and exclaimed, "We are going to the REAL Disney World!?!" Indeed we were.

Main Street USA was a bit crowded 

We started  in the Animal Kingdom (for future reference a half-day is not enough time here). We rode the animal safari, had dinner, and saw a live-action lion king show. All of it cool, but one of my favorite moments of child-like wonder happened during the Lion King show. Several large floats with animotronic animals crossed the stage and parked in the corners of the theater. These giant animals proceeded to sing-a-long with the show. After about fifteen minutes Rhys leans over to me and earnestly asks, "Daddy, are those animals real?" The same thing happened at the Tiki Room. And the Jungle Cruise. How awesome must it be to live in a world where the lines between imagination and reality are still so fuzzy!

The only good picture
of the whole family

Next up was the Magic Kingdom, and it was jam packed with people. The crowds were so rude too, I mean it is the happiest place on Earth, there is no need to shove. We had the baby in a stroller and people were quite cavalier about bumping it and cutting us off. Next time I'm going to install a cow-catcher on the front. Here we had breakfast with Winnie the Pooh, and the other characters from the 100-acre wood. When we went to the Monsters Inc. Laugh floor Alice (my 9 year old daughter) wanted me to submit a joke for Mike to tell during the show. Here is here joke:

Two scientists walk into a science bar.
The first says, "I'll have H two O."
The second says, "I'll have H two O too."
The second guy died.

I am not a good photographer.

My wife is a good photographer

Alice thinks that is so funny. Pretty sharp for a 4th grader. We also did everything in adventure land and explored the Swiss Family Robinson tree house. But that was about it, so we went back to the hotel and swam. Hollywood studios was a blast! Rhys rode Star Tours twice and was amazed! We took a backlot tour and I spotted some props from Narnia in the warehouse. We also saw a driving stunt show that really impressed Rhys. That night was New Years Eve and we went to a fireworks show. The crazy thing is that Rex slept through the ENTIRE thing! What a chill baby. In Epcot we had breakfast in Norway with the princesses, then rode a boat through troll country. Rhys got freaked out by a troll with one big red eye. Next we drove cars on a test track, toured the spaceship earth and saw illuminations that night. We went back to Hollywood and spent over two hours in line for the Toy Story ride, but Rhys claims it was his favorite thing ever. Then he and Alice wanted to ride the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. I was surprised, but they both had the courage to give it a try. Rhys was scared of the Twilight Zone floating eyeball, Alice was scared of the falling. The kids also loved Space Mountain when we went back to Magic Kingdom on the last day. I can't wait to take them on more thrill rides in the coming years, they are going to love it.
All in all it was a great trip for the kids. I got progressively more exhausted as the week went on, and by the time we got home I was glad to have another week off to recover from my vacation before heading back to work. If you want to see more photos from my vacation I put them all up on Facebook.

Trivia Night Victory!

JLA and Mandi posing with my team's trophy

That's right my trivia team won the ESP trivia night competition here at SCC. My teammates were:

1. Gabe Harber
2. Anna Leeper
3. Marvin Tobias
4. Marvin's Wife
5. Marvin's Son
6. Lisa Stoner
7. Kate Weber
8. and Me

We had a fantastic game, scoring 92 out of 100 (Of course we got an A). Categories included: State Quarters, Candy, Sports Mascots, TV Theme Songs, Musicals, and Flags of the World. We had a great time, and raised money for a great cause! If you think you can beat my team next year I invite you to be disappointed.

About Me: Preparing to Teach

During the interstitial time between semesters I always think back to my first semester teaching. Every semester we teachers prepare for our classes; we usually just call it prep. Prep can be a verb ("I'm going to prep my course sometime in the non-specific future when I will allegedly have more time to work on it.") or it can be a noun ("My prep for 101 hasn't changed in 30 years and if I don't notice any problems then it must be working fine."), but either way it refers to all the work we teachers do before the first day of class. It always feels as though there will be time to get this done, but it also always seems to devolve into laying tracks before an oncoming train. The first time I had to do prep was daunting; I had no idea what I should prepare. 

I did the same thing  a lot of new faculty do --  I read the text book, downloaded the powerpoints supplied by the publisher, and perused the Instructors Resource Manual (IRM). The IRM was a binder that had been given to me that had a HUGE amount of instructions about how to run lectures, what sort of activities one could do and a bunch of other junk delightful materials that teachers could use like worksheets and crossword puzzles. I thought I was well prepped for day one. I was wrong.

A PowerPoint Wall of Text

The publishers powerpoints, while detailed, are essentially the same information that is in the text. So, I found myself reading them and then saying, "Any Questions?" to a classroom of bored students. So by the second week I had cut most of the text out of the powerpoint, but then what should I do with my time in class? Activities. But, crosswords didn't work for me; my students sat quietly looking up answers in their books and trading them amongst themselves. Same thing with any "work sheets" but what did I expect? That is high school style. So I went to work transforming those work sheets into real interactive learning experiences. It wasn't too hard to reshape them into a discussion followed by a writing exercise where students generated answers that used material from the textbook instead of regurgitating vocabulary terms.


Then I went nuts. I made a disturbing amount of assignments, rubrics, and activities. I tweaked and re-tweaked my syllabus. Ultimately deciding to run an experimental classroom where I did things way differently than I had before. Each semester from then until now I've had experimental elements in my class trying to find out exactly what works for me, to achieve the classroom that I want. Never once though have I felt "prepared" by the time the semester starts. I always feel there is more I could do ahead of time if only I had more time.

Which brings us to now. After this summer I think I have it locked down. I'm not adding anything new this fall. This is the first time that everything I'm doing is something I've done before. This semester will be the semester of refinement. Without doing anything new I will be able to tweak, adjust, and weave my course into a fine afghan of teaching (or liberty blanket of learning I suppose).

For those of you that are interested here is my syllabus complete with a list of assignments my students will likely do this semester (Fall 2012). I, of course, reserve the right to alter this at my own capricious whimsy. Oh I guess that is one new thing I'm doing this semester; I put my syllabus on my Google Drive as a Google Doc.

About Me: Hired as an Adjunct

A Professor

In 2008 I obtained a Master's in Behavioral Neuroscience. It was a strange pick-a-path adventure getting to that point, but that's another story. After earning this degree I wanted to find a way to use it to make money. There are actually several options for example I could've worked in an animal behavior lab, or other animal research facility. But I thought teaching would be a better choice. So I looked on-line and found a job posting at St. Charles Community College for an adjunct professor.

If you didn't know an adjunct is a part-time professor. There are basically two types of adjunct faculty. First, there are the specialists. These adjuncts are experts in their field and would like to teach on the side. For example, a sports psychologist that works with a national sports team might teach a night class on sports psychology. The other type of adjunct has been hired to fill a need for classes while avoiding committing (by contract) resources (money, insurance, etc.) to a full-time position. Many of the adjuncts I know end up teaching at multiple colleges; just having a class or two at each campus. If you are a student at SCC the odds are you've had some classes taught by adjuncts.

So after my application had been reviewed I was called in for an interview. Here, to the best of my memory, is the conversation I had with Beth when she called me to set-up my interview:

Mitch: Hello?
Beth: This is Beth Finders from St. Charles Community College, you had applied for the psych adjunct position are you still interested?
M: The wha-- Oh yeah! Yes I'm definitely still interested.
B: Great. Well we are setting up interviews and teaching demos. Do you think you could prepare a teaching demo for us on Friday.
M: . o O ( thinking: teaching demo? Like a lecture? To whom? About what? ) Oh yeah sure, no problem I can have that ... teaching demo ... prepared for you.
B: *pause* Ok, well do it on Learning Theory.
M: . o O ( thinking: wait, what? learning which theories? ) Of course, that makes sense.
B: Will you need anything for the demo?
M: Like props?
B: We have a computer with powerpoint and projector for your use will you need anything else.
M: Oh. Uhm, ... no.
B: Great, we'll see you Friday.

Then I got out one of the Introduction to Psychology textbooks that I had gathering dust on my shelf and looked up learning theory. I was happy to see it was about conditioning (like Pavlov's dogs) which was a topic I liked a lot, and I set about crafting a powerpoint. Really I just had a picture of Pavlov, a chart of the dogs being classically conditioned and an outline to guide my talk.

First I sat down with Beth and Barb and chatted about teaching and my experiences as a student and teaching assistant and how I hope to do better than my teachers. This seemed to sit well with Beth and she asked me to start teaching. I was so nervous when I stood up to talk, but I think I had spoken for a total of 30 seconds when she cut me off. I took this as a bad sign. In retrospect I think she had already made up her mind from the conversation part of the interview and was ready to get on with it.

For the next couple of weeks Beth worked with me to make sure I was ready to be personable with my students and not just lecture of theory. This was awesome since we are on the same page as far as technique goes. She made a ton of resources available to me including syllabi, powerpoints, and sample assignments. In fact, the whole program (Lisa, Vi, Barb, and Marvin), division (is that what the faculty in the SSB are called, I'm still not sure), and other adjuncts (Sylvia and the rest) made me feel welcome and offered a TON of support. While I was still nervous, I at least felt prepared for my first day of class. Two weeks later I was standing in front of my students as a freshly minted adjunct instructor.

About Me

I’m an Adjunct Professor at SCC in the Psychology program and advisor for the Secular Student Association and Games Club. Teaching might be my third career and the least expected. I had spent five years in IT at a hospital and worked towards becoming an animal researcher before discovering that I love teaching. I grew up in Vincennes, IN which used to be the capital of the both the Northwest Territory and the Louisiana Purchase (briefly).

The first thing I was asked to write for this blog was an about me blurb to go on the side of the template, and I wrote the above. Ok, to be fair I looked at what Andrea wrote and changed the details to be about me. But does that really tell you what you want to know about me and why do you even want to know about me? I suppose the answer is "No, and I want to know about you because I'm your co-worker or student and I think it'll be funny, and that blurb wasn't funny." See? I know my audience. Fine, I'll elaborate.

I did in fact grow up in Vincennes, IN. It is a weird town. It used to be very important 200 years ago, but now... not so much. Still there is all kinds of history there, like the oldest house in Indiana, president William Henry Harrison's house (Grouseland), the George Rogers Clark Memorial, and the annual Spirit of Vincennes Rendezvous (a Revolutionary War Re-enactment). Vincennes University (actually a mainly 2-year community college but it is so old it gets to call itself a University) is also where I took my first college class. I was a sophomore in high school at the time, but I got bored over the summer and thought to take a class. I took Introduction to Psychology, the class that I mainly teach now.

Side Note: I was sure I was going to be a psychotherapist as a career. I had taken a career assessment test and it gave me four possibilities: Journalist, Clergy, Hotel Management, and Psychology. I thought psychology was the career with the least amount of responsibility. Journalists ideally have to get facts right, clergy have to have faith, hotel managers have to make people happy. All I would have to do is listen to divorced women talk about their self-esteem issues and not sleep with them. Easy. Also of note, I changed my major 7 times as an undergraduate, took a 5 year break from college to fix computers, and ultimately decided to avoid clinical psychology all together as I wasn't really interested in helping individuals (probably for the best).

Anyway, the only thing I really remember about the class was how boring the actual class was. I had read the book in the weeks before class and so lecture was a dull repeat of the things I had already learned about from reading. Turns out most of my college classes worked this way. The best classes were those where the professor used class time to take us beyond the scope of the book, but they were few and far between. So in graduate school when I got to be a Teaching Assistant and had students of my own I just did what all of my teachers had done: make power point slides from the information in the textbook and basically read them to my students.

My students didn't seem to mind, but I didn't like it. So I read some books about teaching. Did you know there are lots of books about teaching and becoming a better teacher? Why didn't someone give me these before I taught students? Ever since I've tried to become a better teacher by trying new things every semester. Some stuff works great (going paperless, blog assignments, or twitter), some stuff hasn't gone as well (Wikipedia). Overall, though I think I've improved some since that first class and many students seem to dig my style.


I suppose that only tells you about my teaching, and not even very much about that. I imagine I can get several more posts out of exploring "About me" topics so I'll try to drag that out. Fortunately I don't have to pick a theme or explain to you about what else I'll be writing here until I do an "about this blog" post.