I haven’t been feeling much like blogging of late. I guess I’ve felt sort of between chapters in my life, like a car in neutral.

I had a job interview on Saturday with ITT tech. I have two interviews to go, but it seems likely that I’ll be hired to teach in the summer session, which starts June 12th. My interviewer kept saying things like, “since you’re faculty you’ll be…” as though my employment were a foregone conclusion. They have to verify my education and employment history and then we will schedule the next interviews. My interviewer, a Dean at the school, was very frank with me about the position being a permanent one and being a gateway into online instruction, serving several institutions at once, which can apparently be quite lucrative. I have several friends who are motivated to get advanced degrees out of love for certain areas of knowledge, in order to research and publish. I am not primarily a researcher. I am primarily a teacher and a student. It will be interesting to try online teaching and see how viable a mode of instruction it is.

I start taking classes tomorrow towards my second Master’s degree. This is interesting in that online education is going through a change such that providers are attempting to hire instructors from the region that their students are in so that student and teacher can conference in person should the need for face time arise. I will actually be teaching some classes in person. The motivation on their part could also be a mixture of quality of instruction issues and student retention. It’s too early to be feeling this way, but it could certainly be possible that a degree in education combined with work experience in this area could lead directly to developing curricula and influencing how online English instruction evolves, at least locally. Anyway it feels like these two new opportunities for me could be linked in the future in interesting ways.

We look for patterns as part of human nature. In hindsight my time at the HAC in for profit education could be the perfect precursor to a future with ITT. I am not intrinsically opposed to the for profit model. Most more traditional universities have begun to refer to students as clients and make that semantic shift. If you can’t beat them…