Bethany Sreedharan has already overcome the biggest challenge in teaching composition: The marking.
Assessing student work is always challenging, but in a class focused completely on their written work, its form, content, style, and adherence to the parameters of the assignment, the challenge can feel overwhelming.
“I create a spreadsheet for every rubric, and as I go through their work, I focus on making specific comments as I go through their papers, page by page,” Bethany said in a recent online interview. “While I make a comment at the end that is summative, I also try to leave at least two comments based on the rubric and how they approached it in their work. My class is now largely project-based, and it’s good to have structures in place to help my students work together.”
The Southern New Hampshire University instructor holds a Masters in English Literature in Language and is currently working on her MFA in creative writing. The mix of teaching and learning, Bethany believes, helps her encourage her students to stretch out and bring more of their own experiences into their work. It is certainly a formula that has worked for her, especially now that she’s at work on a novel for her MFA thesis.
“My husband is an adventurer,” Bethany explained, “so we have moved a lot and done completely different things in each place. At one point, we even owned a hair salon even though we had no experience in that area of business.”
That sense of adventure helped Bethany gain her first experience teaching online. The opportunity first arose in 2002 when Bethany was doing her first Master’s degree at Austin Peay State University.
“It’s easy to forget how much online instruction has grown over the last twenty years,” she remembered. “When I was starting, none of the tenured faculty wanted to teach these new online courses. They were considered less important than on-ground courses, so I just scooped them up and went to work. Things were so new then that I was writing my own code to support class activities, and my colleagues and I worked together, sending each other code, to build our courses collaboratively. Now, there are so many great tools available, and universities provide templates to keep all courses to a more uniform look and feel.”
Emphasizing her vast amount of experience and longevity in the field was a challenge for Bethany when it was time to write her CV. It’s hard for anyone to be respectful of their expertise while accepting that job hunting is itself a rather humbling activity.
To help Bethany fulfill her teaching ambitions while working on her thesis, she hired Professor Services at The Babb Group.
She purchased the Getting Started Package with LinkedIn. It includes CV writing, cover letter writing, a LinkedIn profile, and six months of job application services (up to 20 applications per month) with job leads.
“With my youngest in first grade, I feel like it is time to focus on my own career and building it for the future,” she said. “Teaching online while I finish my thesis gives me the flexibility I need to start putting everything in place.”
Success stories are inspired by clients of The Babb Group’s Professor Services who share their love of teaching, education, and working with students.
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