Since my "I might throw up" post on the first day of class two weeks ago, people have been wondering how it's been going at school. It's been good--mostly.
In my experience (which, I’ll admit, is rather limited) it has taken about 2 weeks to “bond” with the class. For those first two weeks I’m nervous to the point of nausea before every class meeting. Well, after about 2 days, the sickness had already passed.
This is a credit entirely to the students. Compared to what I had at SCSU, they seem focused and motivated. Of course there are outliers--I can finger about 9 out of my 45 students that are going to have real trouble passing, and I've already had discipline problems with one student, but I think I'll be able to beat down my 65% failure rate to something reasonable here.
When I was at SCSU, I used to commiserate with another of the professors about "the students these days," and how they just don't have the motivation. He'd say, "They're not hungry. They've never been hungry." Well, the students here have been hungry--some of them quite literally.
Whereas a lot of students seemed to treat SCSU as a live-away high school--a way to prolong their adolescence before hitting the real world--most of my students are firmly entrenched in the real world. There are no on-campus residences, so except for a few students who still live with their parents, all the students are out there making it in the real world. Many are older, a lot have kids, they're all paying for school out of their own pocket. They really see a college education as an opportunity. It's refreshing.
It can also be immensely frustrating. A lot of students are tremendously underprepared. This was also true at SCSU, but there the students would just fail the course repeatedly, whereas here they actually seek help. Which is great--and exhausting.
Exacerbating this situation is the fact that here at BSC they let students take physics 2 out of sequence--that is, physics 1 is not a prerequisite for physics 2--and guess who is teaching physics 2.
I shouldn't talk like it's a total surprise. At the interview they asked me if I would be able to teach physics 2 out of sequence, because one of their majors (RADT) requires physics 2 but not physics 1. I ticked off in my head the topics from physics 1 absolutely necessary for physics 2, and then told them that if it had been done before, presumably I could do it. I figured that since the class would be mostly populated with engineers, who DO need to take both, most of them would have had it, and I could 1) match up those who hadn't had the course with partners who had and 2) give the have-nots extra help outside of class.
Well, it turns out that about 80% of the class has NOT passed physics 1. In fact, the electrical engineering department encourages their freshmen to take physics 2. A decent fraction of these kids never had physics in high school, have just moved away from home for the first time, and are being asked to take physics 2 as one of their first classes at the college level.
Additionally, there is no math prerequisite for physics 2 (!), so I'm teaching physics 2 students trig, which is not one of the topics I ticked of in my mind as necessary from physics 1, as students should have that knowledge going into physics 1 (I didn't count adding or long-division, either).
I guess I was too placated by precedence: they'd been doing this out-of-sequence thing for a while, so they must have good reason. And maybe they do, but it can't be good enough. It's simply unheard of. They wouldn’t let you take calculus 2 before calculus 1, but somehow they expect us to teach the more complicated topics of physics 2 to students who have not only not mastered, but never heard of, the concepts in physics 1.
Another thing that bothers me is duplication of courses. I’m teaching general physics 1 and 2, though physics 2 is called “technical physics 2” because it’s an engineering rather than a science course. It’s taught the same way, out of the same book though. So one of the things that I can’t understand is why they offer PHYS 201 and GNET 101, which are the exact same course under different schools and PHYS 202 and GNET 202, ibid. None of these classes fill up, yet they offer duplicates all the time. It's wasteful.
So I’ve got some battles ahead of me. And some behind me. I have already gotten them to install clocks in the lecture room and labs, and a white board in my office. How the last guy functioned without these, I’ll never know. I had one guy removed from my class when he called me a bitch (completely unwarranted--ask the rest of the class) and then left the lab (BSC gives professors the opportunity to remove students from their class if the student misses more than 3 lectures or one lab. At SCSU, the only way to get a student out of your class was to convince them to leave. I like this much better.)
The truth is, there are going to be good things and bad things about any job--I think here the good things will definitely outweigh the bad.
