Of Mice and Marathons

Nice! What are you teaching?

It's a second year writing course, called "multimedia communication." It is somewhat different than what I usually teach, which is first-year writing.

In this course we focus on aspects of professional communication as well as the more traditional critical reading and writing.

Philadelphia University is an old textile school so it still features a good deal of majors that produce things (fashion is a fairly common major, as is architecture, and other kinds of built environment).

Walking around campus I was struck by how beautiful it is for a small campus. Lots of unique building and lots of trees. Has a much more New England rural campus feel than a city campus, but it also has a lot of old mansions converted to academic buildings.

My office is in Ravenhill Mansion, which is an old mansion converted to a girls' school where Grace Kelley went before the university bought it. It is straight out of Harry Potter.

that's great -- good luck with the semester ahead.

i had 9 students over the summer and i loved it (and i work for pennies and dust balls myself so no guilt here!). i think 7-10 is the ideal size. i've taught classes as small as 2 and it was awkward (and yes, there was some guilt there). :)

glad your calf is behaving.

7 is tiny for a writing class. A good cap is 18, which is what La Salle has and a cap at 20 is still decent. But the fact of teaching 3 classes with 43 students total instead of 56 sounds a lot better. I think 12-15 would be ideal for the top end of things but every student has to take this class.

2 would be very awkward, especially if one student missed a class :-)

That's a little bigger than your typical Utah high school class where we "stack 'em deep and teach 'em cheap".

37 in my smallest class.

rob -- that's crazy

High school teachers do have it rough. I couldn't teach the way I do with that many students.

I just did some math and a rough calculation of what your salary might be with what I assume your course load is and high school teachers are definitely under paid, which I already knew. My dad was a high school teacher and many of my family are teachers.

I am guessing you have something like 150+ students? As I recall my teachers had about 120, which is still a lot.

$3000 per class for a adjunct like me is "decent" money. The problem is that I can't teach more than two at La Salle and time wise I can't afford to teach more than 1 or 2 at Philadelphia University. For a starting professor in this area for the same field its an annual salary of about $50,000.

Teaching at a university is far preferable to teaching in the Philadelphia public school system.

I'm well aware of the challenges of breaking into a tenure track job at a university Jason and I feel for you.

I have 216 students plus my cross country coaching.

That is incredible, Rob. I had no idea. We need good teachers, despite what all those whose actions suggest otherwise (I don't need to name names, parties, organizations, politicians, etc).

Congrats on the job, Jason.

At least you guys sleep well at night knowing you are making the world a better place, shaping young minds, etc. right? I was just thinking the other day about how meaningless my job is now, in the big scheme of things. I'm a sellout, but strangely ok with it.