Teaching at BRCC
Reading: Mistral’s Kiss, by Laurell K. Hamilton (A guilty pleasure)
Listening: Stadium Arcadium, RHCP
I’ve been doing some thinking about what it means to teach at BRCC, which is hard to do without any experience there yet. I can make some predictions about what teaching should be like since I know what the populations/demographics are.
In surfing the web, I found very little, at least on a surface search. This gem made me think, though:
Feminist Pedagogy in Community Colleges
Because of the pressures and external commitments of students at the two-year college, unless these same students are able to apprehend the course material and see its relevance early in the semester, they may become discouraged and either withdraw from the course or from school altogether.
This makes me think I really need to get on the ball and make sure that the first two weeks of class go smoothly. I don’t even know what I’m teaching or what books I’m using, so I can’t really prepare. One thing I learned this summer from Teach Baton Rouge and their infatuation with Harry Wong, is that the first day of school is the most important. I’m anxious to get started.
On the flip side, this will be the first Christmas break where I don’t have anything (like papers) looming over me. It should be a relief.
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Hey Laura! Congrats and Good luck at BRCC. I hear the Chair is pretty cool:) I think that you will settle in fast with the teaching, the real culture shock may happen in other ways…
Mindy