Month: August 2019

My day job is teaching at the local community college. I teach databases and software development in a Career and Technical Education (vo-tech) program. Normally, this should mean that I have the summer off to get some writing done. Things don’t always work as intended.

A CTE program is intended to teach the students for two years and then send them into the workforce. Our particular does an excellent job of this. We can’t meet employer demand for employees and all of my students find good work. This is a good thing. The software development we teach is business oriented and very much “applied” rather than “theoretical”.

Unfortunately, the information technology (I. T.) world changes quickly. The course for which I am responsible underwent significant changes in the past year. That means new books, updated software, and rewriting the curriculum to match the changes. While my liberal arts colleagues were lounging and reading the few new developments in their academic areas, I had to work my backside off.

Every course has Student Learning Outcomes, also called Course Objectives. These are the things the student is supposed to be able to do upon successful completion of the course. Sometimes, these will be broken further into sub-objectives in order to provide greater detail. To make sure that the course is doing its job, there must be assessments. You assess student success in the course through assignments and tests. When done properly set up, there is a direct map from every assignment or test to a specific course objective.

That’s for a normal course. When teaching software development, you must write every program that is part of an assignment. If you are going to make the students do it, you have to do it first to make sure the latest version of the development environment works. I wrote a lot of software and designed a lot of databases this summer.

Another issue with teaching CTE is finding books. Many college books are written for students in a Computer Science program. These texts tend to be a little more theoretical, are math and science heavy, and cost a fortune. The other books available are for absolute beginners or for experienced programmers who are just trying to pick up a new skill. The best books for my students are often missing topics or the topics are presented in a less than useful way. I wrote a lot of supplemental materials this summer.

The result of all of this is that I did very little writing of novels, short stories, poems, or anything else. There have been large gaps between my “weekly” posts to this site. It has gotten very annoying. Will it continue to be annoying?

In a week, the new semester starts. I’ll teach five sections and help adjunct (temporary, part-time) instructors with a couple more. I have two night classes of four hours each. Those classes end at nine forty-five at night, after which I can drive home, try to sleep, and start morning classes at ten o’clock the next day. Then there is the grading.

I’m guessing that I will still be too exhausted and busy to do a lot of writing. My psychological health will suffer for it. My writing skills will suffer for it. I just have to make sure my students don’t suffer for it.

There’s always next summer. It’s only about nine months away.

I decided my book could use more exposure, so I did some research. A press release seemed like a good option. Only time will tell the final value of the release, but the experience was definitely educational.

The Internet has plenty of articles about writing for press releases. Most are about press releases in general, but there are plenty focused on book launches. Reading these gave me more confidence that I would be able to do this. The articles also pointed me in the direction of my next steps.

There are services available that will distribute your press release to a wide audience. Naturally there is a cost, but if you get proper exposure and sales, the cost is low enough. You must make sure the service is legitimate, but there are plenty of them with a good reputation.

Armed with information, I wrote my release and hired a service. Then I just had to wait to see which news and other agencies in the world picked it up. The service I hired sent me an email later in the day with a list of those news sites. There were even hyperlinks to the pages where those folks posted my release. It was thrilling to see my press release on the website for television news stations in major American cities.

As I looked through all the people who picked up my release, a pattern emerged. Many of the pages were in the financial news sections of their site. Some of the sites were entirely business and financial news. Why would a press release about a novel be picked up by the money people?

The press release had both a heading and a subheading. When I wrote the heading, I tried to pick something that would catch people’s attention. The heading was, “Who owns the company that owns your employer?” The subheading was, “New novel Hour of Consequence addresses this and other questions.” Looking over this, I think I figured out the issue.

I imagine that news services are flooded with press releases all the time. Like everyone else facing too much digital input, they probably use software to sort through it all. It is unlikely that a person decided that my press release was worth printing. A computer made that decision. At the same time, the keywords in the heading made the release look as though it contained business news. That’s why all the finance-oriented pages and sites picked up the release.

Fortunately, I saw the humor in that. The experience taught me several lessons. Since my day job involves software, I should be able to predict how software will view my next press release. My headings will contain keywords that computers will funnel but must still be intriguing to human readers. It should be an interesting exercise.