RIT’s winter quarter is almost over. I’m shooting to get my application packet in this Friday. After that it will be all about writing syllabi and rereading the course materials. Hopefully the indecision I’ve been suffering from will pass as well.
research and writings at the crossroads of journalism, cultural anthropology, technology, and reading.
Archives for category: praxis
Teaching statement has become synonymous in my mind with the term, or perhaps the feeling of, pulling teeth. I???m trying to finish this so I can submit my application. So far I???ve been burning cycles rewriting the initial paragraph. Its not that I don???t know what I want to say.
That I have.
It???s a question of how do I say it.
This is what I want to say: If I have learned anything in my thirty-and-a-bit years on the planet, it???s this: the world is made up of complex, interrelated systems, and all of them will change. If you want to have a successful life, let alone a successful career, you need to acknowledge this and be capable of adapting to the changes that occur around you. More so, you need to be able to find opportunities for success within the challenges of change. Confining your knowledge to what???s expected of you today isn???t going to help you tomorrow. Tactical knowledge can only get you so far. Learning ???X??? isn???t enough. One must learn how to learn.
Accepting all of this, I see my challenge as a teacher to push my students beyond surface facts and tools. Instead they must be able to recognize the structure and rules from which those facts and tools proceed. And I must do this is such a way that students are capable of internalizing these lessons.
Benjamin Franklin presented a framework for this methodology when he wrote:
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
Involvement, or rather engagement is key. Whether in the classroom, the field, or in the workplace, students must actively engage with (observing, interrogating, and analyzing) the information they receive through encounters with coworkers, media, software, and countless other interactions with their environment. And this is where the techniques of social analysis can used to assist someone in understanding and adapting to the world about them.
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That’s it. Or rather the start of it. Now, we’ll see where I can take it. And how I polish it.
This weekend I had really planned on updating the blog in general and more importantly switch everything over to the new address. Then came the plauge. I’ve been layed up sick since Friday. Well not exactly, I thought I was getting over it on Saturday and ended up spending most of the day with Mike Zucca, who was in the area. By Saturday night, I was green and a wreck. Sunday, I didn’t move from the couch. Today, while better, I just havn’t made much progress. I just can’t seem to string thoughts together right now.
For those who have checked the comments, you may have seen that Julia mentioned something about a networking article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, our local area newspaper. I knew the article was coming and that I was going be quoted, but this was a lot more than I expected! I’m reproducing it here just in case the archive goes away (and I want to save this!).
Job networking works, when you work it correctly
(February 5, 2006) ??? Matthew Bernius hit many low points on his way to snagging that coveted job. It began when Bernius returned to Rochester last summer after graduate school at the University of Chicago. He had just finished a yearlong educational leave from Eastman Kodak Co., and his one-time employer wasn’t taking him back.
So he applied for coffee shop jobs, hoping to make some money while he hunted for full-time work. “I was told I didn’t have the right skills to make coffee,” recalled Bernius, 31. “I didn’t quite know how to react to that, especially after spending the amount of time I did in graduate school.”
Still, he persevered, never forgetting the golden rule of job hunting: Network, and use every contact you have to secure that job. Bernius’ networking, for example, touched off a domino effect, as contacts referred him to other contacts. He eventually landed a six-month teaching gig at Rochester Institute of Technology ??? a job he didn’t think he had a chance to get.
It began with his blog. He talked about his job hunt and his hopes of combining the Internet skills he got at Kodak with his new cultural anthropology education.
A friend read the posting, suggesting RIT’s Lab for Social Computing. Bernius did research, spotting the name of a “friend of a friend” on the faculty, who later referred him to a professor.
The professor suggested meeting at RIT, prior to a lecture he was to attend there. Who was leading the lecture? Bernius’s former RIT instructor, whom he chatted with, which led to a lunch and eventually a job offer at RIT’s School of Print Media.
“I remember him asking me how I felt about teaching,” said Bernius, a Long Island native. “It was completely out of left field. Teaching was on my eventual trajectory, but I didn’t expect to do it so quickly.”
“That’s the funny thing about networking,” he added. “It tends to be complex.” Networking is a simple process. It’s the web of contacts that can be complex.
You just start with friends, family and others you see regularly. Who do they know at your target companies? Some of the most underappreciated networking sources? Doctors, clergy, haircutters and personal trainers, said Candy Muth, job market consultant at Lee Hecht Harrison’s Rochester office.
Such sources talk to lots of people, especially about their personal lives. Why not shoot them a call? Or at your next appointment, bring up your career transition.
Mention your target jobs, companies and the kinds of people who can help you. They might refer you to such a patient or client. “Once you tell people you’re unemployed, people will want to help you,” Muth said.
“One common mistake?” she added. “People handing out their business cards impersonally. “You really have to treat it like a simple conversation in which you inquire about that person and get on a more personal level,” she added. “Then you can ask them to keep you in mind for future opportunities.”
Too often people just look for Internet job postings, “or they hit a button and send a resume,” added Richard Bayer, chief operating officer of the Five O’Clock Club, a national networking group with 10,000 members.
“But very few people get a job that way.” What if you don’t have a good network? Try to at least personally contact the overseeing manager, he added.
Bernius is perhaps the poster boy for using the personal touch to get jobs. Remember the professor who linked Bernius to the RIT job? He was the same person that networked Bernius into his first job at Kodak.
This weekend I had really planned on updating the blog in general and more importantly switch everything over to the new address. Then came the plauge. I’ve been layed up sick since Friday. Well not exactly, I thought I was getting over it on Saturday and ended up spending most of the day with Mike Zucca, who was in the area. By Saturday night, I was green and a wreck. Sunday, I didn’t move from the couch. Today, while better, I just havn’t made much progress. I just can’t seem to string thoughts together right now.
For those who have checked the comments, you may have seen that Julia mentioned something about a networking article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, our local area newspaper. I knew the article was coming and that I was going be quoted, but this was a lot more than I expected! I’m reproducing it here just in case the archive goes away (and I want to save this!).
Job networking works, when you work it correctly
(February 5, 2006) — Matthew Bernius hit many low points on his way to snagging that coveted job.
It began when Bernius returned to Rochester last summer after graduate school at the University of Chicago. He had just finished a yearlong educational leave from Eastman Kodak Co., and his one-time employer wasn’t taking him back.
So he applied for coffee shop jobs, hoping to make some money while he hunted for full-time work.
“I was told I didn’t have the right skills to make coffee,” recalled Bernius, 31. “I didn’t quite know how to react to that, especially after spending the amount of time I did in graduate school.”
Still, he persevered, never forgetting the golden rule of job hunting: Network, and use every contact you have to secure that job.
Bernius’ networking, for example, touched off a domino effect, as contacts referred him to other contacts. He eventually landed a six-month teaching gig at Rochester Institute of Technology — a job he didn’t think he had a chance to get.
It began with his blog. He talked about his job hunt and his hopes of combining the Internet skills he got at Kodak with his new cultural anthropology education.
A friend read the posting, suggesting RIT’s Lab for Social Computing. Bernius did research, spotting the name of a “friend of a friend” on the faculty, who later referred him to a professor.
The professor suggested meeting at RIT, prior to a lecture he was to attend there.
Who was leading the lecture? Bernius’s former RIT instructor, whom he chatted with, which led to a lunch and eventually a job offer at RIT’s School of Print Media.
“I remember him asking me how I felt about teaching,” said Bernius, a Long Island native. “It was completely out of left field. Teaching was on my eventual trajectory, but I didn’t expect to do it so quickly.”
“That’s the funny thing about networking,” he added. “It tends to be complex.”
Networking is a simple process. It’s the web of contacts that can be complex.
You just start with friends, family and others you see regularly. Who do they know at your target companies?
Some of the most underappreciated networking sources? Doctors, clergy, haircutters and personal trainers, said Candy Muth, job market consultant at Lee Hecht Harrison’s Rochester office.
Such sources talk to lots of people, especially about their personal lives.
Why not shoot them a call? Or at your next appointment, bring up your career transition.
Mention your target jobs, companies and the kinds of people who can help you. They might refer you to such a patient or client.
“Once you tell people you’re unemployed, people will want to help you,” Muth said.
“One common mistake?” she added. “People handing out their business cards impersonally.
“You really have to treat it like a simple conversation in which you inquire about that person and get on a more personal level,” she added. “Then you can ask them to keep you in mind for future opportunities.”
Too often people just look for Internet job postings, “or they hit a button and send a resume,” added Richard Bayer, chief operating officer of the Five O’Clock Club, a national networking group with 10,000 members.
“But very few people get a job that way.”
What if you don’t have a good network? Try to at least personally contact the overseeing manager, he added.
Bernius is perhaps the poster boy for using the personal touch to get jobs.
Remember the professor who linked Bernius to the RIT job? He was the same person that networked Bernius into his first job at Kodak.
Today, while attending a New Media Perspectives lecture, I discovered that the view from the last row of Webb Auditorium at RIT provides a sobering lesson for the budding teacher. From my vantage point I watched as student after student opted out of the lecture with the help of portable electronics. The student immediately in front of me spent most of his time watching anime episodes on his video iPod
I’m not sure how to react to this or take it into account in planning classes. The knee jerk extremes would be to either ban laptops (which is just plain dumb) or simply pretend that it shouldn’t happen (or even worse, won’t happen to me). I’m just not quite sure what the middle ground would be. Any thoughts about it?