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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: University of Maryland University College

What Bull Durham and I Have in Common

18 Wednesday May 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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American Univeristy, Betrayal, Bull Durham (1988), CMU, Crash Davis, Dubious Honor, Finding Meaning, Jealousy, Pitt, Self-Reflection, Teaching and Learning, University of Maryland Global Campus, University of Maryland University College


“Well, 247 home runs in the minor-leagues would be a…kind of dubious honor.”

Bull Durham, 1988.

Today marks two occasions, both of them a bit bittersweet. One, I marched and picked up my doctorate on this date, a quarter-century ago. A whole 25 years since my PhD ceremony, and my professional life has been a roller-coaster of betrayals, slights, and occasional triumphs since. I have written about all of them ad nauseum over the past 25 years, too. Learning people like my advisor and my mom were jealous of me was so discouraging that if it weren’t for writing, I might not be here at all to muse about anything.

But this May 18, in the year 2022, I have achieved a milestone I didn’t think possible, not even five years ago. Today, I begin teaching my second summer session course, US History from 1865 to the Present, at University of Maryland Global Campus. This is the 100th course I have taught or guest lectured as a regular since 1991. One hundred courses, enough to earn 2.5 bachelor’s degrees. “Yay, me!”, right?

This is a truly half-full, half-empty post, and so is how I feel about today. As Crash Davis would say, “Well, 100 undergraduate and graduate courses taught in academia’s minor-leagues is a kind of dubious honor.” It wouldn’t make news in The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed, forget about The Sporting News! 

I mean, a full 58 of my courses have been taught at a University of Maryland campus that mostly offers online courses. American University, my primary teaching place for the past four years, laughs every time our adjuncts’ union brings up our want for a new contract to correct our paltry salaries (their latest offer barely enough for Chipotle dinner for four per course). I haven’t taught a course affiliated with graduate-level work since my Teaching Black Studies class at Howard University in 2007, and that was marginally so. I made more money managing my former bosses at the defunct Academy for Educational Development for eight years ($620,000) than I ever have in my 20+ years as a TA, instructor, or professor ($360,000). So yes, hitting my 100th course feels dubious.

News flash: it’s still an achievement, too. That means I’ve taught between 2,450 and 2,600 students off and (since 2007, mostly) on over the past three decades. At least a dozen of my students have gone to earn doctorates, at least another 200 have their master’s and JDs. I’ve written dozens of letters and provide references for scores of former students. I’ve had some amazing revelations and epiphanies while teaching, including on many of the topics I write about for income and publication now. And, though almost exclusively in the lowly position of “ad-junk,” have taught at Pitt, CMU, Duquesne College of Education, GW School of Education and Human Development, University of the District of Columbia, Howard University, and my two current campuses. I’ve also taught for two summers at Princeton, worked with students in civic education, and designed curricula and materials for various education organizations over the years. 

I’ve hit home runs, and against quality pitching, too. I’ve also hit threes out of double-teams, caught touchdowns while splitting double-coverages, and made blinding saves off of slapshots. In teaching as much as I have, I’ve had to. One TA in 100 courses, (and the one I did have should have never been trusted with grading responsibilities), one office (American) and two cubicles (Pitt and CMU, and I was a grad student then) in all my years in the classroom. I’ve taught students as young as 12 and as old as 80, too. Short of a mass shooter, I have pretty much seen it all as a postsecondary educator (though I’ve had armed cops as students in the classroom, too).

Really, I hope to remain an educator for the rest of my days, even as I hope that I’m not teaching eight, nine, and 10 classes per year for the next 20 or 30 years, either. For all the joys of light bulbs going off and seeing stereotypes shattered, there’s also the student sitting with their arms folded, refusing to listen, to me or their classmates, blaming me for everything wrong in the world. Crash Davis retired after breaking his record and became a coach in the minor leagues. That’s not so much a retirement as it is a significant role change. Maybe I can achieve the same, and soon.

Students and the Joys and Travails of College Teaching

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Work

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Adult Learners, Ambition, Aspirations, Civic Education, College Students, Duquesne University College of Education, Enthusiasm, George Washington University, High School Students, Joy, JSA, Junior States of America, Motivation, Passion, Presidential Classroom, Teaching and Learning, Traditional College Students, Travails, UDC, UMUC, Undergraduate Students, University of Maryland University College, World Cup 2014 Final Pictures


Argentina's Pablo Zabaleta lies on the pitch as Lionel Messi stands beside him after losing to Germany in the final, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 13, 2014. (Francois Xavier Marit/AP via http://usatoday.com).

Argentina’s Pablo Zabaleta lies on the pitch as Lionel Messi stands beside him after losing to Germany in the final, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 13, 2014. (Francois Xavier Marit/AP via http://usatoday.com).

Maybe not to that extreme, but there are circumstances where teaching a college course can be a joy or torture or even sometimes both at the same time. Some of this has to do with the actual nature of the course, some of it with my disposition, some of this with the types of students that walk through the door. But, in teaching somewhere around sixty courses since ’91, working with a civic education nonprofit and consulting with another one, I’ve found two large categories of students who have made teaching more enjoyable over the years, though not always an actual joy. One group has been graduate students, the other high school students aspiring for college.

There are a number of reasons why, of course. Some are pretty easy to understand. High school students aspiring to go to college or taking college-level courses are often ambitious and motivated, students who are amenable to learning. Graduate students often aspire to be better at their specific profession of study, which in my experience, has this group of students essentially aspiring to be some version of me. Even the brown-nosers in both groups tend to have the motivation necessary to be better students, or at least, to look like they’re better students.

It also has helped over the years that the several hundred high school and graduate students who’ve been in my classrooms have actually wanted to be there. Doing a week in Washington to learn how Capitol Hill really works, or a summer course at Princeton on AP US History or taking one of my undergraduate course over the years at the University of Pittsburgh, UDC and UMUC, those students (and their parents) made the choice to take those steps. Those students wanted to get into a college of their choice, to be well prepared, to make themselves better students, and perhaps even, better people.

History graduate students have choices, for the most part, in terms of which graduate seminars they take and in their specific cultural, geographic area and time period focus. In my experience teaching school of education courses, though, at Duquesne and George Washington University (courses like History of American Education, Multicultural Education or History of American Education Reform), the students I’ve taught in those courses chose to be there. They chose to read as many as eight books in eight weeks, to write term papers and research papers and do original research. Those students wanted to become better as teachers, as researchers, and in a few cases, to become college professors themselves.

Ready and waiting: 500,000 Germany supporters await the arrival of the country's World Cup stars, Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, July 15, 2014. (AFP/Getty via http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/worldcup2014/).

Ready and waiting: 500,000 Germany supporters await the arrival of the country’s World Cup stars, Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, July 15, 2014. (AFP/Getty via http://www.dailymail.co.uk/).

So what’s different teaching undergraduate courses with undergraduate students? Well, they’ve tended to complain the most about general education requirements, ones that require them to take a course in US or World History (my African American History students are generally happier about taking the course). But that’s not all. A fair number have treated me as their enemy, not as their professor or a teacher invested in their learning. Of course these students were in school to complete a degree. But college was no longer an aspiration. It was now a reality, with all of the responsibilities and complications that come with the five-year march toward a four-year degree. For traditional college-aged students, there have always been competing interests, the need to organize a life that involves working 15-20 hours per week and some semblance of a social life, and attempting to figure out a major (often not history).

With my adult learners, those pressures come from at least three directions. The personal pressure to perform academically, the workplace, familial and parental pressures, and the pressure of learning how to be a college student on the fly. Add to this mix the general lack of academic preparation for college for those over twenty-five. All of this has frequently led to a combination of insufficient motivation to learn — even when I’ve explained the “what’s-in-it-for-them” piece — and a quiet hostility toward the process of college matriculation. For this group as a whole — traditional college students and adult learners — aspirations can frequently turn into Being and Nothingness, or rather, a state of being and meaninglessness.

This mindset has been the most difficult aspect of my job as a teaching professor over the years. It’s somewhere between extremely hard and absolutely impossible to teach students whose minds have been closed to learning or self-improvement, whose idea of an education is a piece of paper and a rubber stamp. That most of those students who’ve made my work most difficult are undergraduates isn’t surprising, though. That’s part of the job.

Still, there are times where I miss those days when I taught or worked with high school students fully motivated to get into college, who already had a sense of where they wanted their lives to go. There are times when I miss a grad student angling for a higher grade or with a real interest in my writing and research. For better and sometimes for worse, at least they’re interested in the learning enterprise.

Know Food, Know The World

04 Saturday Jun 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, race, Religion

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Carnegie Mellon University, Commodities, Conflict, Cooperation, Exploitation, Food, Ingredients, Jared Diamond, Peter Stearns, Recipes, Resources, Teaching, Teaching and Learning, University of Maryland University College, World History


Chocolate Cake, Vanilla Icing, 2011. Source: http://www.tastebook.com

I don’t really dedicate much of my blogging to what I do these days, my college teaching work. I guess that I kick up enough dust talking about my Mount Vernon years, my Humanities years, my Carnegie Mellon years, and my former jobs and bosses as it is.

But this is a fairly positive post (mostly, anyway). It about something that I learned recently while teaching one of my World History courses. Something so simple that it’s amazing sometimes how stupid I can be.

I realized one day in discussing the age of exploitation, um, well, exploration that one of the best ways to think about this period — heck, any period in world history, really — begins and ends with one word: food. I’d taught this course a couple of times for University of Maryland University College already. Not to mention having served as a teaching assistant under the great Peter Stearns while a grad student at Carnegie Mellon a decade and a half before (see my “Ego Inflation” post from last month).

German Chocolate Cake, 2011. Source:http://blogs.courier-journal.com. Meet a cake that was never German, but named by an English guy. And, since when do coconuts grow in Europe or the US?

But on that fall evening in ’09, looking at exploration patterns, commerce patterns and the state of the world circa 1600 CE, it hit me how I could just about reorganize every aspect of the way I’d been teaching World History by just looking at how much food has influenced it. Every bite we take, everything we imbibe, has some history attached to it, and with it, stories of bloody conflict, imperial conquest or rare attempts at true humanity and cooperation.

This is about much more than Jared Diamond’s books on the rise and fall of civilizations because of resources and the lack thereof. Commodities like salt, sugar, black pepper and olive oil have all been written about over the past fifteen years. It’s fairly obvious that these spices and other foodstuffs were fundamental in the histories of the Middle East, ancient Greece and Rome, India, Timbuktu and Western Europe over the past 5,000 years.

Still, I’m not really talking about that kind of history, either. It’s more about something as simple as taking a modern dish and using its ingredients to tell a story. Take something like a chocolate cake with vanilla icing. If the ingredients are natural and not ones cooked up at a chemical plant in northern New Jersey, then they’ve come from all over the world. Cocoa, the main ingredient to mix with the flour, is from the cacao plant, which originally from South America, but is primarily produced in sub-Saharan Africa. Sugar’s needed to sweeten it, and though originally from India, has been grown in Florida, Louisiana and in the Caribbean for centuries. One of the main economic drivers for the enslavement of Africans was the European need to rot out their teeth with the stuff.

Vanilla extract or vanilla beans are originally from Mexico and other parts of Central America. But the largest producers of it are Indonesia and especially Madagascar. There’s history in every gram of devil’s food cake with vanilla icing that we eat.

You could do the same thing with a “traditional” Chinese stir-fry. Especially if ingredients like baby corn or

Sweet-and-sour-chicken, 2011. Source: http://www.foodnetwork.com

sweet and sour sauce are added to the mix. That’s because baby corn and tomatoes (the latter the main ingredient in sweet and sour sauce) are both from the Americas, not Asia or Europe. Both arrived in Ming China nearly 500 years ago.

Every dish, whether invented in 2011 CE or 2011 BCE, has a rich story attached to it. From that story, we can all find important patterns in world history, cultural development, domination and destruction within. It may not be the most profound thing I’ve ever stumbled upon. Still, I didn’t get this from Peter Stearns or Jared Diamond. If anything, I might’ve gotten this from Forrest Gump.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

scr2555-proj697-a-kindle-logo-rgb-lg

Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

iBookstore-logo-300x100

Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

Boy @ The Window

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