Reflections on a Teaching Career #4

Letting go of one college and advancing to university teaching

By the mid-2000s I was teaching an average of seven courses per term between College of Du Page (COD) and Moraine Valley Community College. While I loved the courses I had created at COD on Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen and other directors because they were special topic courses they took some work to fill after their initial offerings. By the fall of 2006, my friend Ron was the head of the Motion Picture/Television (MPTV) program at COD and offered to give me a few courses which were pretty much guaranteed to fill up. These included classes in the college’s applied arts option, such as Documentary Production. I’d not taught a production course before and while I felt a bit intimidated by the prospect, this one involved screening several key documentaries, a genre I’d always really liked. It turned out to be an enjoyable course to teach which boosted my confidence that I could pretty much teach anything offered to me.

At the same time, I was asked to run the college’s Global Flicks screening series that winter. This paid position involved choosing international films to screen, one week at a time, from different countries and selecting faculty members to lead discussions of each film. The film series, which had been very successful for several years, was run by a woman named Zinta who was head of the international studies program at the college. It was free for students and members of the community.

I put together what I thought was a great slate of films and the series went off quite well. I was also able to promote the films with reviews I’d do on the college’s jazz radio station, WDCB, once a week. Dealing with Zinta was a whole other matter. She was tough and very opinionated. I wasn’t used to working for someone who was so authoritarian in their management style. We’d have heated discussions in her office and, most memorably, via email. One exchange got so intense that we wrote back and forth to each other in ALL CAPS. I don’t remember what exactly the issue was, but I forwarded the email thread to one of my colleagues who got a good laugh knowing the kind of administrator Zinta was. One day she showed up at one of the screenings in her workout clothes insisting I get one of the speakers off the stage who was getting a little long winded on a controversial topic. In the end, I vowed never to work for the woman again.

During the same period a full-time position opened in the MPTV department. This seemed like the ideal teaching gig, one that I had wanted since I’d started teaching part-time almost a decade earlier. I’d previously applied for a full-time position teaching the humanities at COD and as well as I thought I did, one of the associate deans had some issue with me and I didn’t get the position. This was probably a good thing since it would take me away from teaching film and was mostly focused on general humanities which I’d already moved on from teaching at Moraine.

The position in the MPTV program was what I really wanted at the time. I worked hard to put together a solid teaching presentation for the hiring committee. I knew one member of the committee quite well who told me the presentation and interview went very well and that I was their first choice. As days turned into weeks, and I’d not gotten an offer, I decided to contact the associate dean who was responsible for making the final decision. She was the same person who didn’t offer me the humanities position. I was shocked and deeply saddened when I was told I’d not be offered the MPTV position. I felt I’d done all I could to prove myself the ideal candidate, but she wasn’t having it. She left the college not long after that term.

I continued teaching at COD for the rest of the academic career when suddenly another opportunity presented itself. My friend and colleague Ron was teaching part-time in the Digital Cinema program at DePaul University in Chicago while also running COD’s MPTV program. DePaul offered him a full-time position and he quickly suggested I teach part-time there. This felt like the chance of a lifetime. By 2007 I had either taken courses, worked in student development, or taught at most of the major colleges and universities in the Chicago area. DePaul though, had always elluded me. As one of the biggest universities in town with decades of respected programs and sports teams, DePaul would bring me to my most high-profile level of teaching yet.

I didn’t have to interview but I did have to do a twenty-minute teaching demonstrate to the other department faculty members, including the head of the program, Matt. Since the program included several production courses in addition to basic intro classes, I wanted to show that I knew something about the process. Because of the Hitchcock course I’d taught at COD, I’d taken a few trips to California to visit some of the sights where the director shot some of his most famous films: The Birds, Shadow of a Doubt, and Vertigo. While there, my natural love for being in front of a camera led Frank to film me as I introduced many of the settings. Later, I edited these together with shots from the actual movies. This included a shot of me running down the streets of Bodega Bay, California trying to escape the famous onslaught of attacking birds.

It worked! The faculty seemed to really like the presentation, and I was offered a course for the 2007 Spring quarter (DePaul operates on a quarter system versus the semester system offered by most other colleges and universities.) So, that Spring, in addition to the seven or so courses I was teaching between COD and Moraine, I began teaching an intro course called Foundations of Cinema. It was pretty much similar to the Film Appreciation course I was teaching at Moraine, so it didn’t take a lot of additional prep. Coincidently, one of my former Moraine students had transferred to DePaul and enrolled in the course even though he'd essentially already covered all the material. (Apparently the course didn’t transfer to fulfill this particular major requirement.)

By the end of that Spring quarter, DePaul had offered me three courses for the upcoming Fall term. Since they paid considerably more per course than either COD or Moraine, I decided to say goodbye to the former. After advising and teaching at COD for over a decade I was ready for the challenges of commuting to downtown Chicago to teach at DePaul – my first real encounter with university level teaching.

Up Next: The widened opportunities teaching at DePaul

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