paulbailey.us

comfort zone

picture courtesy of david ocker

if i said its been a tough year it probably wouldn’t be quite exact. i guess its more accurate to say it feels like its been a tough year. the biggest problem with working in higher education and the economy going to crap is that you feel pretty good about having a job for about 4 months until you have to start worrying if you have any work the next semester. i actually worked (and made more) more money teaching college than i ever had, but unfortunately there is no guarantee that i’ll have any classes in the fall.

its not been a bad year, i really enjoyed teaching quite a few new classes; a music pedagogy class for general ed elementary teachers and music appreciation (through southwest college) for charter high school students. both classes exposed me to the non self-selecting music students for the first time in my teaching career and i loved it. in both classes besides focusing on the traditional lecture materials we sang songs, played games and learned a variety of instruments.

although the increased workload of teaching new classes kept me extremely busy i was really happy to do something outside of my comfort zone.  as bad as the economy is right now fall 09 is looking better. i still will probably have some work at csuf (although they are expecting to cut an additional $29 million), and my charter HS is exploring creative ways to get me back in the fall by setting up their arts electives through a different community college.

it all could still go to shit (like it did at the end of last summer) but right now i’d choosing to see the future with the glass half full.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 1:10 pm. It is filed under Uncategorized and tagged with economy, high education, music appreciation, teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.