Fulbright Teaching and Faculty: End of Semester!

December 16, 2010

I was SO happy to be done with teaching classes at the end of the semester. It’s pretty intense teaching a large 150 person class (see photo above), preparing new lectures every week, even with the help of bits of my old and another professor’s powerpoint slides. To keep their attention for a grueling 2.5 hours of class, it takes every bit of entertainment and activities in me.

Still, I find the process of preparing the lecture to be a near state of “flow,” meaning one in which I lose myself and ideas come to me through a creative process. I’d never really experienced this flow of creative ideas before I’d taught my NYU “Drugs and Kids” class this past spring. Then, the head of the program had encouraged me to let loose and do fun, creative activities to spark the love of learning (and increase enrollment and more $$ in NYU Child Study Center’s pocket). It actually unleashed me in my teaching and I really grew to love the process.

Now, teaching Research Methods here could kill anyone’s flow. Dry subject. A required course for all freshman. Not something the students are excited about, unlike “Drugs and Kids.” But, the topic actually gave a lot of room for creative experiments to be acted out in class, with lots of fun videos of research experiments too. I even found myself dramatically falling to the ground, throwing the quiz papers into the air, and pretending to break my leg for a good 30 seconds – all in the interest of demonstrating a study of social apathy, depending on how close you are to an injury, and to show an experiment using deception. We even then completed a few questions about their reaction to the deception, ran statistics, and got results fitting the hypothesis that those students who were annoyed by my deception were more likely to mistrust future experiments, but only for those students who’d felt seriously deceived in the past, fitting a moderation model technique I’d been teaching them the previous week.

The first photo above was taken by one of my freshman students who asked for a picture of her friends, her, and me on the last class. And, she asked me for a hug. Then, I watched about 15 other girl students from my class line up behind her, all asking for hugs. Some even bowed to me. After this kind of deference, it'll be a rude awakening to return to the cynical shells of NYU undergrads. I don't know if my ego will be able to handle it!

But, thank god the semester was over. I invited some of the other professors to join me for drinks and dinner right after my last class. And, we had such a blast. These ladies are HYPERarticulate! They can talk for 3 hours straight in lecture so sure can chat. And, they have a fun spirit. After a semester together, we all feel like good buddies now. They are Indian Malaysian and Chinese-Canadian professors. The Indian Malaysian professor named Bawany specializes in at-risk street children research for UNICEF, lived in Hong Kong for a while and her husband works for an oil company, with her kids in International Schools. The Chinese-Canadian professor named Hera is living here mostly because her husband is Malaysian, but she often dreams of being back at her former UK university where her colleagues actually wrote papers and did research, with research truly being supported by the institution, unlike at HELP University. She focuses on body image problem prevention. And, the third professor heads the Counseling Psychology program and does brave qualitative research on caning in Malaysian government schools.

We also went to dim sum for lunch during the grading week, with Hera showing me how to finally use a chopstick correctly. She learned the hard lesson that my second grade teacher, Mrs. Hall, learned when she hoped the proper pencil grip she taught me would stick – my hands only seem to hold sticks in certain, disabled ways, leading to horrible handwriting and my constantly dropping the dim sum chicken feet they convinced me to try using the chopsticks. Finally, Hera laughingly called the waiter in Mandarin, asking for forks. The waiter seemed to smile knowingly, like he’d had the fork in his back pocket, just in case.