Teach at a Community College
timozander.de
timozander.de
First, I had great instructors at Portland Community College.
Also, in addition to what I learned there, an area company (Tektronix spinoff) happened to put a job post there for a co-op student, and it turned out to be a great company, doing big things, which launched my career.
After later working and then going to fancy-pants schools, one day a professor dissed community colleges to me. I thought the professor was wrong and out of line, so I talked constructively with them about that. But I still felt bad, and didn't need the stigma in those particular circles, so I removed community college from my Web CV.
When I was finally making a LinkedIn, I found one of my instructors from community college on there, and wrote them a note, thanking them, and telling them how helpful and important their teaching had been to me.
Maybe the next day, I realized I'd left community college off my LinkedIn, and the instructor might've seen that. So I added it back on, and have kept it on.
Community college is for people who want to better themselves, and, for whatever reason (I suspect usually involving socioeconomic circumstances) they aren't (yet?) at a more expensive college or university.
When I'm hiring, I see a lot of MIT/Stanford/Ivy on resumes, but I also pay as much attention to resumes from people who went to other schools, or who took some other path through their circumstances.
Consider someone studying while also working to pay their way through school or support their family, vs. someone who has more free time.
(I say this as someone with open source, which I wouldn't have been able to do, if I had anyone to support when I started the bulk of it. The open source helped get me a few very nice jobs, but I still would've had much of the skill and potential without that. So I don't want to over-fit, and exclude people with skills and potential, just because they had different circumstances than I did.)
Anyway it looks like you are filtering for rich people with free time.
We aren't all entrepreneurs, social butterflies keyed into what others are doing, or undecided and thus open to any whims of life made available to us. Some of us had plans and ideas, but lacked the feedback or mentoring to pursue those plans and dropped out, became depressed, or whatever for large chunks of our young adulthood. That doesn't mean we aren't now great at what we do.
My dad put himself through community college then did 2 years at a university with some work in between. He was the first of his family / only one of his generation to go to college.
These days given cost & competition, most people going to a 4 year university come from a family that has already done the same and is following the prescribed path.
I started at a community college. This was a long time ago now but I remember having to dance a precarious line between explaining where I went to school and explaining what I know. To this day when people ask me where I went to school, I riddle off a long explanation on why that kind of thinking isn't helpful and instead should be asking yourself, "What don't I know?". I've been to a 4 year college. I've been to an Ivy League school. The humbleness and "Let's do this" attitude of community college is still the best education I got. Don't feel bad for having these things on your resume, show them with pride. If YOU see someone applying for your positions and they are proudly showing their community college, I'd definitely want to talk to them over someone spoon fed from Harvard. Show me the people who take initiative. Regardless of where they went to school. I'm hiring for aptitude and attitude, everything else can be taught.
FiveThirtyEight has a great article from 2016 that agrees with you. [0] It also debunks a lot of the myths of higher education, like the myth that students are mostly majoring in humanities:
>What few journalists seem to understand, Goldrick-Rab said, is how tenuous a grasp many students have on college. They are working while in school, often juggling multiple jobs that don’t readily align with class schedules. They are attending part time, which makes it take longer to graduate and reduces the chances of finishing at all. They are raising children, supporting parents and racking up debt trying to pay for it all.
>“One little thing goes awry and it just falls apart,” Goldrick-Rab said. “And the consequences of it falling apart when they’re taking on all this debt are just so severe.”
>Students keep taking that risk for a reason: A college degree remains the most likely path to a decent-paying job. They aren’t studying literary theory or philosophy; the most popular undergraduate majors in recent years have been business and health-related fields such as nursing.
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/
I wonder how much this is additional jobs, or how much it replaces jobs cut from traditional media companies.
Edit -- I did think of one person I kmnow personally who is probably making some money from YouTube, but he was a well-known author and public speaker before that. YouTube became an additional channel for things he had already invested many years in creating, it was not something he launched into as an alternative to or replacement for his day job.
That is very surprising to me, and I am a reasonably-successful YouTuber.
For nearly everyone, YouTube is not a viable career path. It’s not even a viable path to making money. Any money.
YouTube is the most saturated market that I know of. There are almost no barriers to entry, and your competition is everyone else on the planet who has a YouTube channel, plus, to some degree, the entire entertainment industry. Success on YouTube requires hard work, but hard work doesn’t guarantee even a bit of success. To succeed on YouTube, you don’t just have to create great content; you have to create content that people want to watch more than everything else that is available to them. That, obviously, is very hard. And even if you do it, a significant luck component remains.
Why did you “decide against the channel?”
Exactly. Now that I am older, having the option to return to school while working is so helpful. Too add to that, community colleges generally offer one off classes, or certificates in certain fields that are really useful.
Many colleges (often by law) have to accept local community college transfer credits. A freshman can save thousands by taking prerequisite/introductory math, science, and other courses at a community college and then transferring to a traditional college or university to complete an undergraduate degree.
I'd like to add that one of the ways community colleges provide educational value is by putting you in a classroom made up of more than just teenagers and 20-somethings who came to college directly from high school. For a lot of subjects, the quality of discussion is improved a lot by having parents, veterans, people who have had varied or multiple careers, people who have survived various hardships... people who have seen and contended with more of life.
It makes a big difference in a class on childhood development to have classmates who are parents of kids of various ages, or who have worked for a long time in childcare and education. It makes a big difference in a class on death, dying, and grieving to have classmates whose experiences with death, aging, and grief are not limited to the passing of one or two relatives two generations apart from them. It makes a big difference in various job-oriented classes to have classmates who already work in the field and are studying in order to specialize, pursue a certification, or round out their skillset.
The student bodies of community colleges are way, way more diverse than those of universities, and that makes them a lot more interesting in certain ways, especially for discussion-oriented classes and subjects that address human life and experience outside of narrow, academic contexts.
I agree wholeheartedly. As another datapoint, over the years I've worked with many people from "top" schools like MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Ivies, etc. Generally they have not been strong engineers. I don't really have a good understanding of why, but it's just something I've noticed.
The folks who've struggled through non-traditional routes have been stronger engineers. They may not be as strong on the theory side, but they have some intangible "street smarts" or something that makes them overall more effective. Some combination of focus, grit, scrappiness, etc.
There have been some engineers who are from top schools who do have those traits but IME they aren't as common.
Have they ever worked at the bottom? Working at the bottom of your discipline ensures you learn basics in a non-theoretical manner.
I was once interviewed by someone who asked me a question about restriction enzyme digestion. He didn't like my answer so rephrased whatever the question was along the lines of "what's the unit defition of a restriction enzyme?". Which I answered along the lines of "One unit is the amount of enzyme that digests the substrate DNA in one hour. But you always use more enzyme.". The unit definition is theoretically true, but it's irrelevant for most bench work. You (almost) always use more enzyme because: 1) your DNA is usually not the test substrate DNA, 2) the enzyme is not fresh at the supplier where it was tested (enzymes degrade in functionality over time, even when stored properly), 3) due to stochastic effects or other mechanisms (such as denaturing) some minimal amount of DNA may remain undigested, and an extended digest or digest with additional enzyme can help maximize digestion, and 4) enzyme is cheap compared to your salary and having to redo things. I unfortunately didn't get the job. Maybe I would have if I had said the unquoted part (but still probably not, he was just one interviewer out of many).
My guess is because those are the people who really had the persistence and ambition to overcome obstacles and adversity.
Those who didn't have that on a "non-traditional rout" would have been much more likely to drop out, whereas someone going to a top school is more likely to have family expectations as their prime driver, which doesn't translate as well to workplace performance.
Anecdotally, my interview/application rate went from something like 5% to more like 25% when I finished my B.S. I previously only had a C.S. associates degree and a year or so of credit at university in an unrelated program from just after high school. By the time I enrolled in the B.S. program I had ~3 years of industry experience and a promotion on my belt. None of that (including my contributions to major open source projects, and other code samples that to this day I still think are high quality) made as big of a difference for hiring managers as the scrap of paper from a university. I didn't learn a damn thing and had to pay ~$20,000 for the privilege, lost out on time with my young son, etc. It's worth it for the security of knowing you will always be able to find a job on short notice, but it's also massively frustrating. I wish there was a B.S. equivalency exam of some kind that was taken seriously.
Anyways, here are some of the advantages I see in hiring community college grads instead of or in addition to bootcamp grads, the other major way companies hire non-traditionally:
1. The students did have to put in at least a solid ~2 ish years and had to work on the fundamentals. A big one here is being able to step through code mentally, which is something we often forget has to be learned.
2. They are much more likely to actually like programming, given that they stuck with it for 2 years. I worry the shorter bootcamps sometimes aren't able to weed out highly intelligent people that nevertheless are going to end up hating the job, and that they are focused too much on front end web development that is flashier than a lot of the work many companies need done. So sometimes the candidate from a bootcamp may just like front end but hate more general programming.
3. You can't just copy code into a GitHub profile and have bootcamp instructors hold your hand through everything. If somebody with just an associates shows you code that isn't obviously some kind of brain teaser from a course exercise, you can bet they wrote it themselves without a lot of handholding. The code may suck compared to what you get from bootcamp grads, but it is significantly more representative of what the candidate will actually produce on the job.
4. I don't just hire web developers. There is no bootcamp I am aware of that teaches C programming or that goes through computer architecture and basic operating system stuff. All of that is covered by the local community colleges in their associates degree programs.
After a few years of this, I remember interviewing at a larger company for a position in their IT department. I didn't get the job, but the interviewer gave me life changing advice, "why don't you just go to the local CC?". I had no idea that was even an option, so I looked into it, the cost was cheap, it allowed for flexible part-time schedules, and I started my journey.
I ended up dual majoring, graduated from the CC, moved to a state Uni graduated with a BS, and later worked through an MS. It absolutely transformed my life. I'm the first person in my entire family to have been educated to this level.
I also grew up in an immigrant heavy area and met many wonderful people from around the world at the CC, who also all went on to get BSs and MSs and move through successfully better careers at major companies. CC was their entry point into the American dream.
Still, that stigma hung with me until I had an experience where I was able to move past it. I was invited to a be part of a business team to build a product to sell to an overseas customer. Everybody introduced themselves and their backgrounds, some were very impressive, and a couple of them even had graduated from the Ivys. It clicked then, even with all of this impressive education and experience, we were all working at the same place on the same effort and I deserved to be there.
Ever since then, whenever somebody tries to edu-shame me or another person, I always reply with "and yet we're all working in the same place" and that shuts it down immediately.
I hear this is less of a problem in Europe, but in the US, education is a farce. Wherever you are from, I'm glad it worked out for you.
I ended up dropping out and getting into IT, self learning system's theory along the way, and after a decade am back to trying to get a degree because a lot of employer's won't look at you if you don't have one. Or worse, they'll say you aren't qualified (despite having a decade of direct experience), and low-ball offer the already low salary (50% off). There are some truly despicable people out there.
I took a somewhat roundabout way of going to a 4-year (first 2 years), then a community college for a year, and back to a different 4-year (last 2 years). In my experience, most of my community college classmates seemed to actually want to be there. They were motivated to learn and not just "get a degree". It's not that the university students didn't want to learn, its just that they were the ones who "knowledge comes easy" to; But, even then, a lot appeared immature, took the education for granted, had everything paid for by parents, and were perhaps guilted into to being there by parents, society, etc. Even in the last 2 years I noticed this.
Community college students were typically more mature, paying their own way, some having families and full-time jobs. And to top it all off I actually knew my professors in community college. I never once met 70-80% of my professors in the university. Maybe things would've been different at a smaller 4-year university, but community college felt just like that -- a community.
The community colleges in my area require a surprising amount of prerequisites and pay _dismally_. Even with 15 years of industry experience, I'd need at least a year or two of additional schooling (while not being paid) to earn a paltry few hundred dollars per credit hour per semester while teaching.
Hard sell to not get paid for a few years to then take a 75-90% pay cut.
My local CC just posted a part-time librarian job I would jump on if it paid more than 21/hr. Fuck that - I could do better as a waitress or bartender. If they want to use my experience and education they can pay for it; God knows they're charging the kids enough.
We're not talking about profit MAXIMIZING, this is planning your own exploitation.
You would have to be supported by someone else or be independently wealthy to take typical CC jobs.
In the US in my area, I'm pretty sure you'd be better teaching K-12 because the unions are bigger / stronger and hence the benefits and job security are greater.
I would happily teach at a CC for ~40-50k. I consider having my basic economic needs taken care of a necessity to being a good teacher - there is a correlation between poverty/economic stress and agitation, irritability, etc. Being in constant stress is not going to be conducive towards teaching well. If I have to work 2 jobs, I'm going to not spend my time grading thoroughly, I will choose the quick and easy route to curriculum development instead of tailoring the curriculum, etc. Oh and forget time for office hours or student emails; have to go deliver groceries or work at a car wash so I can make rent.
I'm not going to take a job where I'm not given what I need to be good at the job - it's terrible for me and it's terrible for the students. The only 'winner' is the institution.
I will not work somewhere where I am expected to put in extra hours for no extra pay, allow people to physically and verbally abuse me, and doesn't pay enough for me to make rent and bills.
I don't expect a CC to pay amazingly, but if they want good people they should at least make sure that they offer a better deal than jobs who only want a GED and right now they aren't. Plus the salaries are skewed: I could get a good paying job at my local CC... in the development or 'business' side of things. But not to actually teach. If you can pay data analysts 70k there's no reason to stiff your educational staff. It says a lot about the values of that institution.
So you'll never teach K-12 without giving up that restriction.
People often joke about how teachers have summer off, 2 weeks at Christmas, fall break, spring break, etc. but don't talk so much about the hours of work they do at home every night grading or doing lesson prep, or the hours of time they put into advising or coaching extracurriculars, as well as required professional development that normally has to be done on their own time.
And just because the hours are flexible doesn't mean the pay isn't an issue: Employment perks are relative and flexible hours are way more common than they used to be. For most people who qualify to be adjuncts, they could also freelance (which I do do) and get both payment and flexibility.
This one in particular (I grew up in the region) has still seen its in-state tuition grow by 300%+ in the past 20 years. Where's the money going?
> States are giving four-year colleges $63 million less in fiscal 2021 than they did last year, a 0.1% decline. Meanwhile, they’re cutting funding to two-year institutions by $457 million, a 2% decline.
> Enrollment losses and pandemic-related expenses are buffeting community colleges’ budgets as these schools face cuts in state support.
This is another reason why they are often significantly cheaper than a 4-yr school in the same state.
If society heavily implies "teaching is stupid and has no value" then of course fewer people are going to be teachers. How many SWEs would keep doing the job if it paid 20k a year, required reporting to multiple people, asked for a Master's+, and involved verbal abuse? I'm guessing most people who like to code still wouldn't take that job; they'd do something else and code in their free time.
hmm I wonder if you also protest the high cost of education?
>> God knows they're charging the kids enough.
looky there you do... how ironic. Community Collages do not charge high rates, they are purposely designed not to, and in many states are statutory limited on what they can charge
Many of the Adjuncts I know do it not as primary income, but as secondary income, and they do not do it for financial gain they fine other value in it like the original story./
> Many of the Adjuncts I know do it not as primary income, but as secondary income, and they do not do it for financial gain they fine other value in it like the original story.
Where do they adjunct? You see more of this at grad level or higher-level undergrad course adjuncting.
I also have major problems with the exploitation of vocational awe that happens in higher ed. If they don't need the money why accept pay at all? Why not make it a volunteer position? Surely there are enough retirees that adjuncts could be replaced with volunteers if the money is not a concern?
If you need another fancy job on your resume or a big paycheck then it isn't for you. It certainly does a good job filtering out instructors that only care about their own advancement and don't give a shit about teaching the courses, which is unfortunately a significant percentage of the people that teach university courses.
I'd go as far as to say academia in general isn't for you if you want to get paid the big bucks. If you aren't professor emeritus or department chair for a large CS department, then it is never going to be competitive with industry. That should be obvious, but I guess for some people it isn't.
Will never do that again. 10% of the class picked it up quickly. 80% of the class picked it up. 10% of the class would never understand the material and dragged the rest of the class down asking incessant questions.
The money was a joke and I hated it.
Some people were "learning new skills", and attended as a requirement. They just sat on their phones the whole time. Zero intention of learning or being employed in this capacity.
Then there were the people with zero computer skills that shouldn't have been in the class, and took up the entire two first days with how to sign into their student account, use and RDP session...
Hopefully after the first couple weeks all of those have dropped out.
The worst were the folks who were literally of the opinion that they just sat through this bullshit like a mushroom and they'd check the boxes to move up one grade at the union. One of these was a dude who constantly complained out loud about the math. Machining feeds and speeds is based on the surface feet / minute or your metric equivalent of the speed of the outer diameter of your cutter. So pi is used a lot. The equation is on every wall. 5 minutes in while everyone was signing paperwork I had reversed the formular for every variable. Page 3 of the book does that for you and makes pi 3 for ease and safety. This was the math the guy complained about. We had to do it 5 times total. 7 classes in this dude still had not brought in a calculator and the laziest kid in the class mocked him for it. This same guy who couldn't / wouldn't do the math spent an hour at lunch explaining his intricate scheme to basically work 14 days each year for the next 2 years before exiting out to part time and then retirement with his full benes. So he could do it, but he just wanted to sit at home playing guitar and drinking and subjected the rest of is this complaints. Also he hogged the professors time a lot.
There were some others who did not have the math skills to do offsets/ zero setting on depth of drill holes. But when the professors could give them the time they could usually come up with a way to explain it. That guy wanted to learn but also felt that once he was certified his job was to read a book until the machine went into fault mode, so the training got him an easier job. He didn't actually need to understand any of the training to hit a button when a light went red.
But it does sound like a good choice to not do it if you don't like teaching.
1. Accept only a for-credit class.
2. Demand a "weed-out" midterm, to be held before the last-drop date.
I went to take an EMT class. I was required to show I passed high school algebra. I couldn't get my hs transcript. The cc wouldn't accept my college transcript because the lowest math I took in college was calc two. Same for English comp. I tested out of that in college so much lowest comp class was 350 - tech writing.
I had to take 2 hours of online tests to show the competency. For a class that didn't even require either.
Exactly. They want quality education provided by people who see it as a social giveback. The pay is almost an honorarium.
Many CC professors are seniors in industry or professors at other local universities who do it really to give people a chance or to help with career mobility within their industry.
The part time teachers make barely anything though.
I had a friend who taught at our local comm college for a few semesters and worked out the pay to be less than $7/hr. For an advanced almost graduate-level IT topic. It's a joke. His advice - if you want to teach, do it as a volunteer. Don't hold any illusions about getting compensated.
It took 4 to 6 hours of prep to deliver a one hour class. Preparing from existing course materials available online or from YouTube and Wikipedia was the fastest as opposed to going through the text books.
I found it very hard to know when to go fast and when to go slow, what to skip and what to include. The feedback coming through wasn't real-time. I kept surprise open-notes tests to gauge where the class was lacking.
Students have a very short attention span. It is hard to keep them engaged throughout the period. I always start by summarising topics from the previous class. I also spoke to them multiple times and at length about concentration, but I guess the length was also a problem.
I believe some students are vehemently visual learners and prefer PPTs and videos. I shared links I thought were high quality with them via a Google doc and updated them every week.
Everyone used ChatGPT for assignments and some used it for preparing for exams.
It was jarring to see some students be in a perennial state of distraction (and be slave to their smartphones).
After the semester ended, with the money I earned taking the class (it wasn't much at all), I bought every student one among Pragmatic Programmer, Algorithms to Live By, Deep Work, Outliers, How Google Works, Why We Sleep. In the hope that it inculcates in them the habit reading books to progress in their careers.
I envy them for having such an incredible teacher.
Teaching is a skill. Over time you would be able to gauge these things easier.
Or you could do what some of my HS teaches and college professors used to do, and basically teach it how you see fit, and put the onus on the students to seek out help if they need it.
Kudos to you for going back to your alma mater and teaching. That's something I want to do, too.
Android is vast and changes rapidly. Do you have a specific sub-system (like the runtime, graphics, audio, camera, telephony, system-services, ipc etc) in mind?
You are doing something new, learning to communicate, potentially even learning some new material or a new perspective on something you know. At the very least, you get inspiration to create new materials (for teaching).
This experience is not great for your students. You are being trained on the job. They are looking for training. You are learning from the mistakes you make teaching them.
This isn't necessarily horrible. You teaching the class could still be better than the next best alternative. But the fact that CC (in the US, in STEM, IME) are not paying enough for this to be a viable career means that you will never stay long enough to be an experienced teacher who has figured out a solid approach to teaching the classes and students that you teach.
This wasn't my experience in community college in the US at all. I had a lot of instructors, including STEM instructors, who were very experienced and were in it because they loved to teach. Maybe part of what made that viable is that a state university also had a satellite campus in the same town, so for many of them, teaching at the community college was not their only job. Some of them also taught at that university, and many of those instructors also taught some identical classes at the two institutions.
My differential equations instructor, for example, even had a 'hard mode' section of that class at the community college every semester, which he taught in an identical fashion to the 300-level (third year) version of the course that he taught at the university. He told everyone in it that they could switch to one of the 'easy' ones if they preferred, because after all, it was at the community college and could only be offered for 200-level credit there. But that section of the course was really popular among the STEM-oriented students at the community college, who wanted to challenge themselves, get a deeper understanding, work more with proofs, better prepare for further education, etc.
Practical computing topics, like Unix systems administration and networking, were usually taught by people who still worked in industry and only taught 1 or 2 classes at a time. But sometimes those instructors had been doing that 1 class of theirs for a few years at least, and then their classes were really good.
I'm not sure what made each instructor like that choose to stick around and teach at the community college for years and years, but there were quite a few of them.
There were also some instructors at the same school who didn't know what they were doing or didn't give a fuck, basically high school redux. But I dropped all the classes I had with teachers like that.
There were a few gen eds that were taught by PhD students there, just like at a big university. But in those cases, they usually had already finished a master's degree, and the class was 12-20 people instead of 40-200. I found those classes to be pretty good, too.
Overall I would say that in my experience, the quality of education for intro-level courses and general education requirements is higher at the community colleges I went to than it was at the four-year university. (The in-major, senior-level courses at the university were phenomenal, though. Only a few of the community college courses rivaled those in quality, imo.)
It isn't a "bootcamp" for aspiring professors. Think of it more as a public service for professors nearing retirement who actually like to teach and interact with the students.
I thought the page covered most things carefully and I suspect the students had a good experience.
In the UK sessionally paid teaching can be just one class a week as an extra thing. There will be the dbs check and if you want to do this as a long term thing you will need to take a basic teaching qualification.
Planning a course:
Write down a series of sentences saying what the student should be able to do after the course. In the UK we call these 'learning outcomes'[1]. For something like the OA's example Introduction to HTML, CSS and Javascript you will end up with quite a few!
Those learning outcomes will help you to devise a series of activities, see below. The outcomes can also help you to devise an assessment if the college requires that. Finally you can write a few sentences explaining what skills students should have to benefit from the course.
Estimating time in class:
Devise some practical activities for your students to complete tied closely to the learning outcomes (does not have to be 1 to 1 mapping). Time yourself working through the activities - line by line. Multiply that by 6 or something like that. OA has worked out that instructions need to be fairly full.
Then add time for the 'whole group' explanations (the bit where you stand up and explain stuff).
IT classes:
Your learning outcomes and activities will help you to list all the facilities you need. As OA found out Colleges can have quite locked down systems. Might be an idea to talk to technical support in the College through your contact there while planning.
[1] http://www.bristol.ac.uk/academic-quality/approve/approvalgu...
Above is just one I found doing a quick search. Seems pretty standard if wordy.
I taught maths (basic level) and we had a team of something like 20 tutors so materials got produced and a common scheme of work got adapted as needed. All that cuts the work down, along with some amazing Web sites [2]. If you are the only teacher of a specialist subject, yes I admit the planning could be heavy the first time you run the course. Local management can be a factor sadly.
Recent sad events in the UK news [3] I think will result in a change in approach from OFSTED. This will I think happen when the new OFSTED head is in post.
[1] https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/5minplan/ [ I don't think we paid anything! And the differentiation bit is different for adult education]
[3] e.g. https://www.skillsworkshop.org/ and https://corbettmaths.com/
Good to hear that things have improved - it’s been about 10 years since she moved on to teaching privately.
Management can be abysmal. I've been lucky.
Hope Mrs gbuk Senior is doing OK now.
Apart from that she just made her lesson plans in Word based on a basic template that the college provided.
Seems like besides iPads in the classroom, little has changed.
https://www.communitycollegereview.com/blog/california-commu...
A main issue, at least in the USA, is that college is extremely expensive so smart students who don't want massive debt or who can't tap parental wealth can do two years of work at a community college (with smaller classes) before transferring to a four-year school, saving tens of thousands of dollars along the way. Some community colleges have reoriented around this goal to attract students, but the tradeoff is that continuing education for adults and other vocational programs often get cut.
Another problem is that public high schools do such an atrocious job at instruction that community colleges have to pick up the slack, so you have schools teaching basic algebra and simple reading/writing skills (i.e. 9th grade level etc.) to young adults whose primary education was a disaster. It's a pretty sad state of affairs, at least in the USA.
Note that teaching at a CC tends to require at least a Master's degreee in the field, and of course if you have large student loans the pay is to low to make any headway in paying them down. Incidentally, if you are planning to teach, LLMs have huge potential for new teachers to design a course with modern material. Of course grading students is going to be an issue and in-class testing is the only plausible alternative as LLMs can also write code and solve problems for students.
One of the advertising slogans of the community college I got my 2-year degrees from was literally 'no entry requirements', so offering remedial coursework was really important there.
When I tutored (math and computer science) there, I liked working with the remedial students. They were just as motivated as anybody, and it was satisfying to see concepts fall into place for them as we went along.
Those remedial courses can also be nice for advanced junior high students, or students at high schools that are crummy in specific STEM subjects, if their parents have the resources and time to get them there. Sometimes a dual-enrollment program also means that those students can get high school credit for those classes, and use them to skip certain classes at their high school or graduate early.
My state's dual-enrollment program allowed dual enrollment for the final two high school years. Drawbacks of the program were that, if you used some of your electives in the first two high school years, you can't both graduate high school and take a STEM degree at the same time. In order to graduate high school you have to take an English/liberal arts heavy course load at the community college to fulfill the high school credit requirements. So at best you could get a high school diploma and a A.A. degree, but not an A.S. degree. Even then, in order to take only a single year of dual enrollment, I had to skip taking any physics course (HS or CC). Taking two years was a non-starter - I would have had to have skipped math and advanced Chemistry to do that.
I would rectify the situation by either allowing dual-enrolled students to waive high school course requirements, and allow them to get a high school diploma just based on credits (or at least get a high school diploma as long as they also receive a 2-year degree). Or blatantly tell them that a high school diploma is irrelevant, for them, as long as they have an associate's degree, and to go for the associate's degree instead of the diploma, and just let them walk with their high school cohort at high school graduation and hand them a dummy diploma.
Also much better individualized guidance counseling on dual enrollment.
The Public-service loan forgiveness program has been revamped to make it possible to get loan forgiveness now. Most people whose sole income is adjuncting at a CC aren't going to be making any payments. Of course the side effect of going the forgiveness route is that it can lock you into a low-paying public job for years.
Like this person, it helped hone my skills communicating technical ideas to non-technical people. Most importantly, it helped me understand others' limitations and abilities of mine I had taken for granted. As a result, I learned patience and grace, that sometimes it's better to show someone while doing it yourself, rather than expecting them to master it.
I scheduled an AI class in the library this summer, because I think it's important. We'll see.
25 years ago, I knew I wanted to build great teaching skills and genuinely make a difference in people's lives. But after spending almost a decade in the university space (and teaching a few courses), I realized that my abilities would be better spent teaching job-focused IT and programming courses at community college for two main reasons:
1) University students often come from privileged homes and/or have more supports while attending school, which makes my role as teacher less valuable to their development, and
2) Most community college students are focused on landing a job at the end of their program, and I felt I would make a bigger impact working with this drive in the classroom, while keeping current with the industry.
I should also note that it's very important to work in the industry while teaching for personal and academic development. I've taken on 1-2 extracurricular projects each year since 1998 that were outside of my comfort zone, and I don't think I would have taught for as long as I did if I didn't do this.
They wanted someone with a PhD and it paid 38k… non starter. The kind of PhD that’s willing to take that in a field like computer science is a very unique kind of person that doesn’t have better opportunities for whatever reason.
I’ve guest lectured twice and mentored 4 students met this way in their tech careers. Each class had 40-50 students in it but only one or two truly engaged with the material. Those engaged students will almost certainly have fantastic careers and are people you want in your network.
May be just my CC experience of study field (music) combined with locale (talent-attracting city of Los Angeles) but I hear one needs to be a PhD these days to compete for a CC professor spot.
The glut of PhD's is at such a level that the last teaching jobs available to industry professionals have all gone to boomers who will stay at those jobs until they die.
I took this job 15 years ago because prospective employers looked at my then 30 year career and repeatedly said you cannot adapt to new tech and are too expensive. So I took my sysadmin, programming, and management skills and taught them to younger people who did get the jobs I was rejected for. Hopefully some of my work ethic will have rubbed off on them and when they hire they will do it with less "ism".
Now I get to play with the newest tech and teach it.
Most schools are not hiring tenure track staff, and use adjuncts and contract assistant professors for the less profitable teaching roles.
I would imagine that music has a different dynamic, as lots of emerging professional musicians may be seeking those roles to get benefits, etc.
I would have loved helping people learn by teaching a few classes after graduating, but would any company have hired me after seeing that's the only thing I did in those years?
I love helping people and making the world better, and if I could I would switch between teaching at college and working in the industry every few years, but unfortunately it's not really possible
The students were great. But the administration of the school left a lot to be desired.
You enjoy poverty wages and difficult co-workers. Also getting sick from students a lot. Also debates about in-person or online platforms.
Source: Ex-wife is a tenured community college professor involved in governance as well
I think HR (and frankly PR) departments would be very smart to connect themselves with schools in their area for tutoring or teaching at any level.
You get what you put into it no matter where you go.
1. it's not easy 2. if you're a subject expert then your language and communication skills are probably awful and full of jargon 3. planning is very important 4. proper teaching means actually checking that your students are learning 5. teaching a subject you are expert in actually teaches you things too
Well done.
If you do another blog on this later that would be interesting.
PS I'm not a techie, I'm in teacher training.
Anyway, as far as the school is concerned, they can survive without a robust or effective CS department, but they can't survive without the admin, which is true. It takes a lot of work to run a college, and CS profs aren't the ones who do that.
Paying more to better CS profs doesn't make financial sense, because they're not going to yield more students as a result. So they'd be dumping more money on a teacher to teach the same number of students. And no matter what they could pay them, it wouldn't be enough to offset what they could make in industry.
Purely conjecture (which means absolutely nothing), I've always assumed that admin:faculty rates are similar, but the volume is where it matters (ie. 2x more admin:faculty in headcount).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re2Oh4rxN6w&list=PL3F463A677...
This teacher knew his stuff. He read us the poem "The Eensy-Weensy Spider" and when everyone laughed, he said, more or less, "If any of you can write a script half this good, you'll be a success."
It was on Super-8. "Editing" consisted of cutting the film and taping it together, and then punching sprocket holes in the tape.
I reached out to the local CC years ago, with a resume of 20+ yoe in industry; a list of educational clients including NASA, IBM; local clients, industry certs; etc.
The response was "Impressive resume! Come back when you have a Master's degree."
So, screw them...
I already knew C and all the content of the class, so students started reaching out to me for help, the ones that cared at least.
The failure rate of the class was something like 70%… for an intro class. Madness. So I decided I wanted to help and maybe I could teach this a few hours a week. But no, they want someone with a PhD and it pays 38k (full time). No wonder they can only get people like that professor to teach that. You have to be either nuts or very passionate, in this case I got the first one.
That’s not to say all of them are like that, my algebra professor was the best one I’ve ever had.
I don’t put Palm Beach Community College on my resume but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the community college path to a young person.
It was a nice experience, but payed really badly.
They allow students to teach? Bachelor students?
Was one of my best experiences, and yes, the payment was very low, but i was teaching.., maybe 10 hours a week.
To learn, teach.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
Not that I 100% agree with that.
"This is where teachers are paid the most" (2021) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/teachers-pay-countrie... :
> Globally, teachers’ salaries vary hugely, according to the OECD’s Education At A Glance 2021 report
Also, you have to learn a lot more than you actually teach in order to be ready for a range of possible questions.
I've personal experience in an engineering program, where this was common practice in the 3-class core physics courses. 3 question-20step/q test where each subsequent question is dependent on the answer to the previous question. This is the causality spiral of doom, where you either get it perfect, or you don't pass, but you have to get it perfect 6 times in a row to pass the class. By the time you take the first test, you can't get a refund, and if the answer doesn't match perfectly with Pearson or Canvas's material, good luck you just wasted $10-15,000 in living expenses during the time you tried. Try again. and again. and maybe by time 8 or 10 you decide its just not a program for you anymore, and you run into the same issue with the supposedly easier classes in the business program, or drop out completely.
Some professors take it a step further by adjusting the rounding strategy between those questions instead of following the same significant digits. Its deceitful lying meant to sell you a pipe-dream which you'll never be able to complete unless you get lucky, and that's just one example. I've almost 15 years worth of examples, in a broad geographic area.
Its one of the most egregious deceitful lies we are told as people entering college. Education is only an investment when you can get something back from that investment. If you just need that paper because anyone without it is not qualified, then it doesn't matter what you know (as many professionals I've met have demonstrated they lacked crucial skills and had no inclination to fix their shortfalls).
Not even close to meritocracy, I've passed and completed up through DiffEQ and Linear Algebra math wise which require Calculus 3 as a pre-requisite. No issues with math, but I have yet to pass a Mechanics of Solid course because of structure. Its structured to fail people. Eventually people give up trying to be engineers and try business only to find the same thing in the economic's courses. Its such corrupt deceitful bad behavior, and impacts those who have to pay their own way through more than others.
I had an online econ class this past semester which had all the same hallmarks, worse, the professor was collecting a paycheck, and instead of lecturing simply referred us to Khan Academy movie links and Pearson's Autograder (which routinely failed on correct answers, and no exceptions were being made regardless, i.e. its the student not the professor or pearson were in the wrong).
Any other industry doing these same business practices would be sued or shut down for outright fraud and unfair and deceptive business practices. Because its state funded its somehow exempt from all those same rules. Also the only path to correct is escalating to the chair/dean/trustees rarely ever has any action taken. The people responsible for advocating are the same people that have let this continue for decades.
They don't track metrics that would quickly show problems so they can fix them. My local colleges say they don't track how many students in each class have taken the same class or professor before and failed, and the graduation rates as we all know are abyssal.
The schools in the US are much easier than many. Try going to a public school in Argentina. 4h long lectures, theory of limit in the third class of calc. Proving theorems. Here? Sign in to Pearson and do some exercises.
Sure there are some classes where I had to withdraw because I'm paying for it myself, working a full time job alongside all my classes, with no family support, largely because my parent decided to rob my college fund. Scholarships and grants not an option because my parent makes too much and that's calculated even though they aren't providing any support.
Is it my fault that the units for the classes were misrepresented so a 3 unit course requires 22 hours a week to complete instead of the 9 its supposed to? (Can you do 16 weeks straight of 62 hour work weeks perfectly?)
Or the fact that questions on tests may have 3/5 correct answers, but only 1 real answer and they don't communicate the necessary context to find the real answer. (i.e. they don't teach what you are tested on).
Or the autograder attached to the class marking correct answers wrong, and because each student has randomized questions for the same assignment the teacher doesn't do their job.
Or the test material not being covered at all in preparation, and repeat students selling exams inside the class with the tacit approval of the instructor because she doesn't change it year to year, and the chair and dean do nothing about the academic dishonesty because the dean or chair is new in the job and the professor has seniority?
Or the class has a general 12% pass rate, and those 12% are people who have made many attempts, with one on those on their 6th attempt?
Surely these are all issues with the student having personal issues? /s Mind you, each one of these happened at a different local community college so its not even just one college.
Its not the whole coursework ecosystem, its critical coursework that's needed to transfer and complete that degree. Specific bottlenecks that everyone has to go through because its required. In engineering it was physics, the Mechanics, Electricity and Magnetism, and Light trifecta coursework. In business it was economics.
There is nothing personal about structure.
What's galling is I can derive Maxwells equations, and yet can't pass the physics courses, and Pearson sucks, they also intentionally embed dark patterns, and 30-40% of their testing material doesn't track with their practice, and they introduce new tools in the tests which are also broken. Worse, Pearson shifts their auditing to the student. I had questions where the test question changed after submission where I recorded it. Not enough evidence for the teacher to do anything. Yeah video evidence isn't enough, what will be?.
Its a systemic problem, and it has nothing to do with the student. They have optimized to snowball fail you. It was not just me either, there were hundreds maybe thousands, and there was a group trying to change this but the trustees never listened.
Classwork for degrees are supposed to be determinable so long as you know the material and are taught that material. In each of these cases, either it wasn't determinable (which btw is a system's property thing, it has a very specific definition), or they didn't teach the material. Either way you cut it, its fraud. They receive money for something (instruction and testing), and don't provide what they said, and due process doesn't exist because the people you report issues to are not obligated to act on them. They also happen to often be teachers who will receive social retribution if they do act (a common bureacratic issue).
I had no problems with Calculus, differentiation, double integration, series, multivariate, ordinary differential equations, no problem. I can prove theorems, systems of equations. I just can't pass the physics they have structured because of how its structured.
The point is the vast majority for the failures have nothing to do with me personally. Its simply the person who set up a course structure so once a single unexpected misstep occurs, you fail the class. They are optimizing for repeat customers and least work, and its fraud when a reasonable person knowing the material can't pass the course, and instruction and testing lack crucial integrity. If you cannot provide perfection, you don't pass; and I hope I don't have to tell you how asinine that is.
There has never been any accountability in the education system and the student is left with no effective means of controlling basic academic outcomes. That's what it comes down to.
Mind you many professional certifications have the exact same issues. Incidentally who do you think handles that? (Pearson).
So you are told, you will have no work opportunities if you don't hold a degree, or you don't have a professional certification, and they make it nigh impossible to get either. What's the problem here?
This shouldn't be happening, and yet its been allowed to continue for a generation (20 years). I know a few American's who travelled overseas (EU) to get their degrees because its less corrupt and dishonest than what's available locally.
When tallying my expenses so far (without a degree), I've spent roughly $280,000* on trying to get a degree and while I'm 2/3 there to a business degree, I still don't have it. If you factor in the value of money if I had invested that over the same time period, that's easily over a million dollars. An investment in a nonexistent future sold as a lie because it took decades instead of the 4 that were advertised. All that additional income that's needed for critical life things like buying your first home, getting married, having kids, all not possible if you don't have the income to support it.
Most people just drop out and cut their losses, I just wanted to build things... and I never had the chance because it was stolen through fraud with no accountability. There are many people out there just like me, but there's no visibility on the problem because they don't collect metrics that would show there is a problem. Instead they blame the student and claim they don't have enough resources at the taxpayers expense. Its the same shill argument that we fail because we don't have enough, when they'll never have enough, because its a systemic issue.
* Includes living expenses during that time.