TURNING POINTS—Thriving in Academe

It’s been a thrill and an honor to connect with other college faculty since the publication of Open Admissions: What Teaching at Community College Taught Me About Learning by Wild River Books.

Meeting one peer or several fellow teachers at a time who share my passion for learning and teaching has been deeply gratifying, but you can imagine how exciting it is to know that my article, “Learning from Turning Points in Our Teaching Lives” has gone out to over 150,000 college faculty members nationwide.

For a guy whose classes often included fewer than two dozen students at a time and whose teacher encounters typically involved even smaller numbers this is new territory. Kind of a turning point in my connection with fellow teachers.

I hope the article helps this considerably larger group of readers reconsider the whole idea of teacher burnout. Wherever you teach, you can keep growing as a teacher and avoid burnout.

The article, part of the “Thriving in Academe” series, appears in Higher Education Advocate, a publication that is a joint effort of the National Education Association (NEA) and the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD). I am honored and grateful to have been asked to write for the series. http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/1901eAdvocate_ThrivingFinal.pdf

Ned Bachus is the author of Open Admissions: What Teaching at Community College Taught Me About Learning (Wild River Books, 2017) and of the “Turning Points” weekly blog on nedbachus.com. City of Brotherly Love (Fleur-de-Lis Books), his book of stories, was awarded the 2013 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction. Bachus’s article, “Learning From Turning Points in Our Teaching Lives,” is featured in the May issue of NEA Higher Education Advocate, which reaches over 150,000 college faculty in the U.S