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I love my job!
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Well, I've been teaching here at Palomar College for three weeks, now. I am happier in this job than I think I have been in any other save perhaps pizza delivery driving, and my circumstances then were very different.
I really like having a job which is intellectually stimulating, has fairly flexible work hours, decent to good pay, excellent benefits, a supportive work environment, and good co-workers. My department has gone to some lengths to make me feel welcome and valued, I feel like I'm at least reasonably good at doing what I do, and I have an inkling of how to improve.
Another nice thing is the facilities and support around here. palomar's academic technology crew is fantastic. They are doing things here which I never saw at UCLA, or which were made so difficult to do as to be impractical. For example, they encourage us to record our lectures and podcast them, so our students can download them for review. (They do still seem to come to class, which pleases me as well).
Even better, they are not enamored of tech for tech's sake; they are interested in how technology can improve teaching. In my department, for example, there is a fairly strong anti-PowerPoint sentiment. Not that it should never be used, but that it should only be used when one could not do the same thing with speaking and whiteboard work. Presenting diagrams, illustrations, animations, or interactive feedback quizzes via PowerPoint is encouraged. Doing the entire lecture in a darkened room, reading off bullet points from a series of slides as a lecture is not. I've been guilty of that in the past, and I am finding it refreshing to break away from that and have to write/draw most stuff out myself. It's gotten a better response from the students, in any case.
So I like my new job. I hope that, by the end of the semester, my students are as happy that I came here as I am.
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