Our department at the school has consultants visiting.

We’ve been struggling a bit, our numbers are down, and we’ve all been scrambling to find the answer to drawing more students into the program. I’ve been doing recruiting trips to Adventist academies in this region, as have others in the department. In the meantime, administration thought it would be a good idea to get an outside perspective.

I should be confident in my teaching abilities. I have 25 plus years experience as a writer and editor, and 12 more years experience as a teacher in the college classroom. And I am pretty confident in my strength areas. It’s when I teach 12 different classes over a two year rotation and some of them aren’t in my strength area that I get nervous. When you go into the classroom as a college professor, they don’t teach you how to teach. The common idea is if you know your content, and the rest of it would come naturally. Well, graduate school taught me that there are people who know their stuff and still can’t teach. Our tutorial on Dreamweaver that we are suffering through right now is a good example of that. And that’s a little bit of embarrassment.

So since my first calling was doing it in the industry rather than teaching it, I am always a little apprehensive when it comes under scrutiny. Today they came in and sat through my Visual Communication class with the Dreamweaver tutorial featuring the woman who knows Dreamweaver but lacks in communication skills. And we struggled through as we always do. When it comes to learning new things, I often learn it right beside my students. Not ideal, I know, but what can I say?

Tonight they will announce their verdict to us right after they meet with administration. I doubt that there will be any earth-shaking surprises. Actually, I am hoping they surprise us with some ideas we haven’t thought of. In the meantime, I will continue to do things as I think they should be done.

I’ll let you know tomorrow if any news comes out of the meeting.