The Little Dutch Boy

So I started teaching at a local college last week. I won't mention the name here, but it's a technical school and I'm teaching History of Fashion and Draping I (a method of pattern making for sewing). Because I'm fond of lists, here's my "Oh good Lord, you must be kidding me" list.

A. The History of Fashion class is a 4 hour lecture class from 6-10PM.

Four hours.

At night.

4 hours of me talking to sleepy students at night. Or just 4 hours of me talking and trying to think up ways to keep them engaged and awake.

B. The Draping class is a 5.5 hour class from 5-10:30PM. But at least we're moving around doing things.

C. The first day of my Draping class, I call one of the other teachers - who teaches Draping during the day - to ask her about something class related, and she says "Oh, I meant to call you and tell you that they changed the textbook for the Draping class." This is 2 hours before I have to go teach this class (for the first time) and I already have my syllabus all together using the old text. This other teacher found out by GOING TO CLASS and discovering that all the students had a different text from hers (which is also the way I would have found out, had I not called her...) Apparently the guy who orders textbooks ordered the wrong book and no one in administration bothered to tell the teachers.

Oh, but there's more.

C. I breeze into my Draping class, pass out the syllabus, tell them that I'll have to revise it once I've had a chance to look at the new text, spend 20 minutes or so going over the requirements for the class, lecture some about the dressform and then ask them to measure their dressforms to get a basic set of measurements to use throughout the class.

About halfway through this process, one of the girls says something about her tape measure that doesn't sound right and it occurs to me to ask " Does everyone know how to read a tape measure?"

I look around and see most of the girls shaking their heads "no."

So I say, "I thought they taught you that in basic sewing..." Blank looks on all faces.

And I say " You have all taken basic sewing, right?"

Uh, no. 75% of my class has never taken Basic Sewing (which is technically a prerequisite for this class).

They don't know how to read a tape measure.

They don't know what seam allowance is.

They don't know how to use a sewing machine.

I'm teaching people who have never used a pattern, how to make patterns.

Well, then.

So I give them a dinner break after this startling revelation and tracked down the Head of the Department, E., to ask her what was going on. She gave me an apologetic song-and-dance routine about how they have admissions at different times of the year, which means some of the students take classes out of order, yadda, yadda, yadda. Whatever. And they don't tell the teachers because...???

Added to all of this, I find out that one of my students - who is representative of about half of my students - gets up at 3:30AM to go to her full time job at a call center, goes home to feed dinner to her two kids and then come to my class until 10:30 at night. And she's in both of my classes. Half of my students are working moms, aged 19-22. And they are paying a lot of money for these classes so that they can look forward to a future where they don't have to work jobs at call centers and they can see their kids more often.

So I owe it to them to teach them something that will help them in their future careers, and somehow keep them awake at the end of their 18 hour days.

The good news is, if I can teach these classes, under these conditions and the kids come out knowing something, I can teach anything...