The decision has been made

The powers-that-be decided to keep me on for another year :-) I had good student evaluations for the first semester of teaching and I was commended for my level of involvement and encouraged to continue to work on improving my teaching.

They also liked my syllabi which made me happy. I decided to try something entirely different for my syllabi and I like creating it and looking at it better than the normal/usual kind.

After I found out about a year ago that I would be interviewing for the position, I emailed a former UWP student at the suggestion of my former advisor, Geoff. Geoff is in Florida and he has a Master's student, Jake, who went here to UWP and did an undergraduate research project with Dr. Mee, the head of the search committee (currently my mentor). I may have told some of this story already. Anyway, I asked Jake what he thought were some of the things that I should do or be aware of with regard to the interview. One of the things he said was to have a syllabus prepared for the interview. I was like "really?" and he said that the last person hired made an impression because of that. I seriously never would have considered it.

So thanks to Jake I came up with a syllabus for a course that they don't have here but that could be a really useful course. I was searching for syllabus ideas on the web when I came across an English professor that used a newsletter style. Bingo! Something completely different. When I was in the interview and they asked "If you could create your own course here, what would you do?" I whipped out my five color copies of my syllabus newsletter and they were floored, not only by the content but by the syllabus itself.

That style is apparently still winning me points. Ah, it's the little things :-)

So, one more year to corrupt young minds other than my children. The power!