It has been a long time since I have actually sat inside of a formal classroom as a student. I spend most of my time on the other side of the fence. However this summer has helped me better understand some of the challenges that my students must experience. Challenges with class availability. Challenges with scheduling conflicts. Challenges with learning a great deal of material in a finite amount of time. All of the things that I generally don’t have to concern myself with as an instructor.
My summer has been filled with classes and workshops on CSS, AJAX/JQuery/Spry, Actionscript 2 and 3, PHP, Coldfusion, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Dreamweaver, and eCommerce. Basically every acronym under the sun. The majority of the classes were programming based and were not easy courses. I found myself looking forward to the Photoshop and Illustrator classes as a respite from the programming. Luckily I had some great instructors at the schools that I attended. A few of which I am trying to lure over to LaGuardia as adjuncts.
My recent redesign of the curriculum for the New Media Technology program at LaGuardia made it neccessary for me to do some retraining in order to effectively teach the all of the new courses. And while I wasn’t able to go on vacation with the family this year, I needed to do this in order to stay current. Plus I definitely needed the AS3 class since the language and programming style is radically different than AS2. I took the classes at Noble Desktop, SVA, and Pratt. And overall, I was very happy with the level of instruction at the schools.