Thursday, November 3, 2011

A Touch of Class

Well, I have made the commitment to teach the Writing, Publishing & Promoting Your Non-fiction Book class for the spring session. I did make a few changes. First of all the class will meet on Monday nights at Hixson Middle School. I wanted to get the class off of Wednesday nights since it conflicts with the St. Louis Publishers Association meetings. The students need to be able to attend the meetings, and since I will be the Membership Chair I have to be there to check people in. Second, I figured if I was teaching the class again I might as well hold it at the school closest to me. Besides, I didn't really like being in the basement of Clayton High School.

The other thing I did was change the class description. Since the time I had taken the course it had been modified to reflect two tracts being taught simultaneously. Even after teaching this semester I didn't quite get what that meant, so I modified the description to reflect what I believe people will take away from the class.

At the last class I had handed out evaluation forms for the students to complete since Meramec didn't provide me with any. Based on the feedback I received, which was overwhelmingly positive, I will also make some tweaks to my weekly classes. I was so happy that everyone thought the guest speakers were helpful. I think that they add a lot to the learning process as they are all experts in their fields. Plus they offer a different voice and perspective from mine, which is beneficial.

I put some feelers out with the continuing education coordinator as to the possibility of offering a two hour Saturday workshop on how to research the history of your home. I could offer my house history book as part of the class. The coordinator was very amenable to the idea, but I would have to get a class description and the suggested class fee to her by tomorrow morning as they are getting ready to go to press with the spring catalog. So I decided not to rush into this, but will look at teaching it in the fall instead. I will be attending a house history talk through the St. Louis Genealogical Society in a couple of weeks, so that will help me with the format and pricing of the workshop. The biggest issue is where the workshop will be placed in the community college catalog. Their categories are Professional Development (which this is not), Lifelong Learning (which covers classes such as history, languages, personal computing, science and math), and Personal Interest (which covers activities for kids and adults, crafts, dance, fine arts, genealogy, music, photography, writing). The coordinator suggested placing it under history, which I can see. But I could also make a case for putting it under genealogy, not that it is the best option but genealogists do research the houses of their ancestors. I'm concerned that neither of those options will get a glance from my target audience. Lots to consider here...

1 comment:

Mrs. Wryly said...

Definitely genealogy.