Catching Up
The sucking vortex of Facebook has been relentlessly drawing my attention lately. Not that I've ever posted a lot anyway, but much of the time I would have spent on LiveJournal has gone to Facebook instead.
John and I are more sure than ever that this move was the right decision. It's certainly not been perfect. He has been struggling with what to do with himself. We CAN live on my salary and publishing money alone, but the higher mortgage payment here makes that more difficult than it was in Rockford.
Along those lines, I just completed an online graduate education class - Teaching Through Learning Channels. My credit is from Rockford College, where I have completed a similar face-to-face class. The class was interesting, exploring research on how people learn and organize information and then creating lesson plans that take advantage of this research. The 3 credit hours should move me to the Masters +36 salary lane, with an accompanying raise for Fall 2010. I need to take 4 more classes in the next year so that I can get one more (and final) such raise for Fall 2011.
Teaching has been going well, although I have had more student drops this semester. That seems fairly typical for spring semesters in my experience. I covered conic sections in College Algebra last week, teaching about the parabola on Friday. We had already discussed parabolas earlier in the semester, but now we introduced the concept of the focus of a parabola. This is cool because you can talk about applications since as car headlight design, satellite dishes, and parabolic solar collectors. A couple of my students stayed after class to talk about a couple of things, and one commented how great he thought it was that I actually talked about real applications. He seemed to think I was an expert on all of them, which isn't really true, but it was nice to get some positive feedback.
I have another solutions manual to work on this summer, which is good. I'm not going to teach any summer classes, so I'll have time. I'm going to take another online class. This one is about developing interactive multimedia projects that can be used in or out of class for student learning.
We're planning to have our first pool party on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Come on over!
John and I are more sure than ever that this move was the right decision. It's certainly not been perfect. He has been struggling with what to do with himself. We CAN live on my salary and publishing money alone, but the higher mortgage payment here makes that more difficult than it was in Rockford.
Along those lines, I just completed an online graduate education class - Teaching Through Learning Channels. My credit is from Rockford College, where I have completed a similar face-to-face class. The class was interesting, exploring research on how people learn and organize information and then creating lesson plans that take advantage of this research. The 3 credit hours should move me to the Masters +36 salary lane, with an accompanying raise for Fall 2010. I need to take 4 more classes in the next year so that I can get one more (and final) such raise for Fall 2011.
Teaching has been going well, although I have had more student drops this semester. That seems fairly typical for spring semesters in my experience. I covered conic sections in College Algebra last week, teaching about the parabola on Friday. We had already discussed parabolas earlier in the semester, but now we introduced the concept of the focus of a parabola. This is cool because you can talk about applications since as car headlight design, satellite dishes, and parabolic solar collectors. A couple of my students stayed after class to talk about a couple of things, and one commented how great he thought it was that I actually talked about real applications. He seemed to think I was an expert on all of them, which isn't really true, but it was nice to get some positive feedback.
I have another solutions manual to work on this summer, which is good. I'm not going to teach any summer classes, so I'll have time. I'm going to take another online class. This one is about developing interactive multimedia projects that can be used in or out of class for student learning.
We're planning to have our first pool party on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Come on over!