Taking your own advice

It always amuses me when faculty behave just like the students we complain about.  Chitchatting or texting while in meetings, putting things off until the last minute, and especially staying in a comfort zone.  We've all probably had this student.  The student that is pretty good, but is stuck doing the same thing because they are ultimately scared of failing by trying something new.  But sometimes, faculty are just as guilty of this.

At my institution, I teach an introductory level course on digital media that fills on a regular basis.  I have taught this course every semester and some summers since I began teaching there.   This is a pretty taxing course to teach over and over again - the basics of the Mac OS, photoshop, image resolution,etc - can become somewhat redundant.

So what a lot of faculty do is simply trade out the course and hand it over to someone else, usually an adjunct, for a semester or two.  Besides the fact that this is somewhat impossible with the current budget situation, I also disagree with this in general.  While teaching introductory-level courses isn't "glamourous" or "exciting," it is (pun intended) the foundation of the rest of the student's education.  Too often I hear faculty complain that students in their intermediate and advanced courses are lacking in the basic skills they should have received at the entry level and yet, they themselves can't be bothered to teach these skills.

So believing this, and considering the budget crunch, I had to find a way to break out of the assignment rut in which I found myself.  Being an introductory level course, there were some very specific goals that the class needed to cover:

• Introduction and utilization of the Mac OS environment
  
• Understanding of pixels, resolution and dpi
  
• Basic Adobe Photoshop skills
  
• Combining image and text effectively
  
• Basic web design principles
  
• Basic video editing

Having taught this class many times, I had developed assignments that I felt best fulfilled these requirements.  But I decided to give myself an assignment.  I would push myself to create new assignments that fulfilled the same goals as the old assignments.  I pushed myself out of my comfort zone.   In creating new assignments, I actually discovered two things.  That my new assignments were not only just as good, but in some cases, better.  And that the class was fun and interesting again.  Isn't this the same thing we promise that student who is afraid to try something new?   That trying to push ourselves beyond our imposed boundaries can lead to new ways of thinking and doing things?  I think it is important for faculty to remember to take their own advice sometimes.  We just might be surprised with what we find.