10 Years of Teacher Life 🍏🍎
👩🏻🏫I gave my first lecture as a course instructor on January 20th, 2012
I have been a teacher for 10 years as of today, January 20th 2022 (see syllabus). My first class was the Advanced Social Psychology Lab course in Spring Semester 2012 at UT-Arlington. I taught Introduction to Psychology in Summer 2012. I taught Social Psychology, my favorite class & first class of ~100 students, in Autumn 2012. I continued to teach that regular rotation of courses each year through the completion of my doctoral training in May 2015.
👩🏻🎓 Before teaching a course myself, I was a TA at UT San Antonio in 2010 & 2011 during my Masters degree. I also taught high school students in the summers of 2013 & 2014.
#Caliversary (June 1st, 2015) 🍏
The first class I taught in CA was Interpersonal Relationships here at the University of California at San 💛 🔱 💙 Tritons (aka my 2nd home) in August 2015 (Summer Session 2). I then taught Intro Psych at Mesa Community College & Stats/Research Methods at the University of San Diego ✝️ that Fall.
#TeacherLife 🍎
It’s been an honor to teach at each institution I’ve had an opportunity to in CA, including California State San Marcos 💙(Fall 2016 — present) 🐅 , San Diego Miramar Community College, San Diego City City College, & Point Loma Nazarene University.
Most of all, it’s been a privilege to teach ~10,000+ students during this pedagogical decade of my life, and I look forward to the many more students to come 👩🏻🏫👩🏻💻
Random Teaching Pics
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How In-Person Autumn Felt
Most (68.2%) students indicated that Autumn 2021 was tougher than Autumn 2019, & more stressful than they anticipated, though 31.8% of students indicated that it took a moment, but they adjusted.
- Thanks to UCSD’s auto-lecture podcasting, I permitted students to take my courses virtually this Autumn & plan to do the same in Winter Quarter. As a result, my Health course generally had 25–50 people in attendance out of ~280.
- All of my assessments were via Canvas (Blackboard for USD). This enabled students to take their quizzes & exams from a safe location without having to worry about if the person filling out the scantron next to them was infected
- We had Zoom lectures the weeks after Halloween & Thanksgiving We’ll be having Zoom lectures for week 1 & potentially week 2 for Winter Quarter, as well as Valentines week (regardless of vaccination status and/or relationship status.)
Why? → Of all the days during a quarter/semester, people come to class coughing & sneezing the most on exam days… because stress. In 2019 & earlier, having the person next to you cough/sneeze during an exam may be annoying but not psychologically distressing.
In our current COVID-Life, a nearby cough/sneeze could generate enough psychological distress to reduce someone’s grade, even by simply motivating them to finish even faster so they can escape the room.
Zoom Lectures To Start Each Week
I’ll be having Zoom lectures on all Mondays so everyone has Mon/Tues to ascertain if they got infected over the weekend so that they can proceed to attend/watch the Wed-Friday lectures via Zoom or via the recordings.
Why? → The weekend provides more time & opportunities for a potential infection to occur than the other days of the week.
Learning vs. Intelligence
“Immune response vs strong immune system is like learning vs intelligence. I can memorize a poem, but it hasn’t made me any smarter. I can survive an infection, but it didn’t ‘strengthen my immune system”.
Christian Drosten (tweet) [@c_drosten]
(Stores are #COVID19 sponges.
The sponge is squeezed dry overnight while the store is closed.
☆ ☆ It’s safer to shop at 7am than 7pm ☆ ☆
Shopping at 7pm is like the video below)