With the peak of the hurricane season upon me, I am delighted online teaching allows me the mobility and cash to escape to safer places.
For example, this online teacher could do much worse than visiting
I just returned from a 10-day visit to Eugene, and I want to recommend the Emerald City’s downtown to anyone seeking pleasant summer weather and a spanking clean urban landscape. I stayed at a great hotel on
Several times during my stay, overcome by a craving for fish served in a bistro atmosphere, I ate freshly caught Pacific salmon with blueberries while grading essays on my laptop, which I parked on the corner of my spacious table. After I finished eating, I packed up my computer and strolled back to the hotel under the mildest summer sky imaginable.
The advantages offered by my online teaching, mobility and cash, afforded me this trip, and I have to say right here that it is wonderful feeling to be able to fly across the country and continue teaching and earning money.
On a technical note, I used my new Cingular broadband service for the first time on this trip. Admittedly, the EDGE network in
After a late lunch one afternoon on historic
I had two courses running at mid-Quarter during the first six days of my visit, and I added two new courses to those already in play on day seven. As I sat in the airport lobby waiting to board my flight back to the Big Easy, I was able to participate in the Discussion Forums and grade essays in all four classes.
Thus, the handmaidens of online teaching, mobility and cash, have served me very well so far this summer, and, if a hurricane arrives, they will serve me yet again.
2 comments:
This is amazing! I was just running the numbers in my head, trying to figure out how to make a go of it and here you are. I'm working as an adjunct in a junior college in the midwest. No respect, little pay, and more dust and heat than a man should have to put up with. How did you make the leap?
This is a fair question, Eustace, and it deserves a fair answer. To be brutally frank, I was pushed into online teaching by the flooding of New Orleans in August 2005. I had just returned from my tailor with a spanking new seersucker suit and was in the process of mixing myself up a stiff julep when I heard the weather woman on the television say I better make tracks for somewhere else. I’m not the sort of fellow who ignores that kind of advice, so I left the julep on the table, suited up, so to speak, settled my white straw hat firmly on my head, and swam in the general direction of the northern end of the plantation, I mean state, with my laptop clenched firmly between my teeth. Once I hit my sister-in-laws house I set myself up at her kitchen table and began teaching my online classes while some 6,000 teachers in the Big Easy lost their jobs.
Now, let me be clear, Eustace, I did have three online classes already going on that hot August day, but I never thought I would make distance education a full time endeavor, and I never imagined this online teaching would allow me to become a Tourist with Privileges. However, the universe often makes a way for the well-dressed gent, and I as I watched the sun sink on that fateful day, julep in hand, of course, I understood that online teaching had become my destiny.
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