<p>poor shoe!! i hope you’re feeling a little better.
i looooove the cs teaching track faculty. every time i have to work for tenure track faculty, a little piece of me dies. haha. i am glad to be back under a teaching track faculty member next semester. even if they are overworking them.</p>
<p>and don’t even get me started on math SOLs, especially your comment about algebra (that’s what I’m going to be student teaching). I mean, at upward bound, these kids were supposedly taking algebra ii the next school year and you couldn’t tell they had passed their pre-algebra sol test. i am not lying. i asked them to find the equation of a line between two points (3 times… so 3 questions… that was the whole homework), standard algebra 1 sol question, and they all complained the next day the homework was too hard!!! yup. story of my life.</p>
<p>anyways, my brother and i were eating fruit snacks tonight. they were shaped like zoo animals. i told my brother if i ever have to teach food chains, i am buying those fruit snacks and my students can use them to make a food chain. then they can eat them because we are at the top of the food chain. yupppp. there are still lots of great ways to teach the sols. but it does mean you can’t just do chicks or butterflies or whatever depending on your mood anymore. do you know how many math videos on youtube there are?? some of my favorites are bad pimance, every math parody to tik tok and milkshake and crank that (math term), etc… so not all is lost. but the fact that kids who can’t do anything with fractions are in algebra ii is wrong. oops you got me started i guess!!</p>
<p>finally – how big are your classes at a community college? are they 500 person classes? 100 person? 50 person? the smallest math classes are typically 40-50 people (unless you are taking an elective such as number theory or something), these are upper level classes. and there is a difference between lecturer (most lecturers i know teach 3 classes), teaching track (teaching 2 full courses, in addition to undergrad advising) and tenure track, tenured or working towards it (teaching 1 class of 2 sections, or 2 classes with just 1 section and maybe a seminar, in addition to phd student advising, research, etc – this holds true for professors i can think of in cs, math, education, foreign language…). Think about the poor quality of research (hence, less grants, hence, less money) that would occur if those professors needed to teach more classes. In addition to not getting a raise. They will all leave or retire!!</p>