Ponderings on Teaching
This is part IV of my all the things(!!!) blog series where I attempt to make sense of all the things I've gotten myself into these past 5-10 years, and I figure out how to Marie Kondo my professional hobbies. Yes...yes... I know that Kondo is no longer Kondoing and has given up the practice, but I am aiming for the gives you joy part.
While I had taught bespoke hour-long workshops in the past, in my training jobs at the university library and in my job as a learning technologist in IT, my teaching side hustle really took off in 2012. I often joke that I got into college teaching as a kind of dare. Once I finished my instructional design degree I was really into curriculum planning and seeing the big picture. And my laboratory for this was the instructional design program from which I graduated. I spent some time in the university archives looking at past course catalogs and graduate program catalogs dating back to 1984. There I traced the development of the instructional design MEd program from 1984 to 2011. I also reached out to past directors to see if they had any program materials that they could send my way for analysis, and they didn't disappoint! I got a small treasure trove of syllabi!
Doing some academic forensics (I made up the term, don't ask me to define it right now), I tried to figure out why certain things became part of the curriculum, traced how the program evolved, and how individual courses evolved. As part of this process, I was convinced a research methods course would be nice for the MEd program because it would enable students to pursue capstone projects that were more research-oriented rather than the traditional ADDIE capstone that had been standard since 1984. The then-director of the program probably got tired of me and my suggestions (LOL😂) and she offered me the possibility of both developing and teaching that course. That's how I got my start in college teaching. Bonus brownie points: this was designed as a HyFlex class because the program, at the time, had both on-site and online modalities!
Anyway, one thing led to another, and since 2012 I've taught intro courses, capstone courses, and a few things in-between. Around the same time as I started teaching graduate courses, I also got an invite to teach a workshop for the Online Learning Consortium on MOOCs (remember MOOCs?). I guess my Twitter fame on the subject, my blog-ponderings on MOOCs, along with a couple of papers I co-authored, gave me the credibility needed to teach on the subject. When MOOCs became passé, I was invited to facilitate works on Social Media in Learning, and other emerging topics that I was an expert on. I think the pandemic really supercharged this aspect of my teaching (Professional Development courses for faculty and instructional designers) because many more faculty were suddenly thrust into virtual spaces in order to cope with the impacts of the pandemic. As lockdowns and ERT are basically behind us, I am wondering if I should be slowly taking on less teaching. On the one hand, I enjoy teaching, and I have met many fabulous individuals over the years, but free time is sparse, and I find that regular breaks and vacation time are no longer enough to make me feel re-energinzed. One of my workshop participants with whom I developed a good rapport wondered if I was a workaholic 😅. It's quite possible! Someone else has described me as easily bored, which may also be true 😬
On the other hand, I am feeling a bit of the Adjunct's Dilemma. It is true that the more teaching you do the less time you have for other things, which is especially true when your teaching is a side gig. However, if you turn down teaching offers once, those opportunities may never come back, or if they do, they may be in a diminished capacity. I had something like this happen when I took a "sabbatical" from teaching to work on my dissertation (and to recover from burnout, I think). This wasn't a real sabbatical, of course, because I get paid per course taught. When I was at a point where I was happy with my proposal and it was ready to go forward and be defended, I returned to the department I was teaching for before the sabbatical. Let me tell you, jumping back into graduate course teaching wasn't exactly the same afterward! I went from an expected number of courses to one course per year, maybe. It is to be expected, departments gotta run, even in your absence, and the diversity of new faculty is really cool to see, but it does point to the opportunities not rebounding to a previous level. The silver lining here is that less for one department may mean more time to seek new horizons elsewhere, so not a total "loss". Then again, it does bring back the question of overwork (dammit!) 😂
Doing the math, I've discovered that for the past few years, I've been teaching 47 out of 52 weeks of the year. This basically means that 47 weeks of the year, my workweeks are 7 days (10-12 hour weekdays, and 3-4 hour weekends). I'm trying to decide if keeping on keeping on (teaching) is a kind of FOMO; and if I can get comfortable with turning down opportunities due to a lack of time (as opposed to trying to find time), even if opportunities don't come back in the future... Don't get me wrong, the additional money that comes with teaching gigs is also good (it certainly has paid for some unexpected bills over the past few years), but I am wondering if I've reached the diminishing returns phase.
Any thoughts from teaching-gig workers out there? 🤔. How do you balance things?
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