Classes Taught

When I began at Tzu Chi University in 2001, it could be called a teachers college. Course loads for faculty were high (7-10 classes per year). As a ‘new’ teacher at age 44, I had to develop all of my classes, and in a few years I met the required load. With a Masters program, we were required to teach undergrad and graduate classes. I taught what I knew, which gradually became very diverse. Over the years, pressure to publish increased (the way of the world). Teaching loads, sadly, remained the same.

Still, I loved my classes. I put great effort into producing each of them, constantly revising and improving as I learned more. Many of our students struggled with English, especially English listening (they all read quite well). After trying many approaches, I settled on producing detailed PowerPoints with English text and images on almost every page. I put a lot of work in them, especially for the undergrads. This gave students the chance to look and listen while they read my short texts. Once they were ‘primed’ for the ideas, I could then elaborate. With 20 hours a week in class, our undergrad students had little time to struggle with an English textbook. My PowerPoints became their texts, and they studied them for the exams. The grad student ppts are maybe less elaborated (except for the theory class) because they were touchstones for full lectures. I made our grad students read papers. But that was gradually lightened over the years. I always had a great deal of sympathy (too much?) for students required to read papers in their second (or third) language.

My intention in sharing my ppts on this website is to give them a second life. After all the work in creating them, maybe they can help to educate cohorts of new students. I’ve seen other class ppts online at payed sites of slide sharing. The quality can be very mixed, and the work of one professor is typically dispersed. I wanted my content to stay together and to maintain the organization and intentions of my individual classes. In order to assure that my ppts would not be ‘scraped’ by web crawling aps, I have saved them as pdfs. Further, I choose the unusual format of two slides per page. This allows for easy viewing and reading, but does not permit direct use in presentations by others. My only intention is to make my class materials freely available for university students who might be searching for additional content.