Patricia Matchette, instructor, Seminole campus, St. Petersburg College
By JAN WESNER CHILDS
Published November 16, 2003
What do you teach?
I teach the humanities classes. Humanities is the study of a culture, the artifacts within a culture, the philosophy, history, all the things that make us human. I also teach a film survey class, just an introduction to motion pictures. We talk about some of the elements of film, we do a little bit of film history, we talk about the great directors, we talk about genre of film. We might do gangsters. That's always fun.
What's your average class size and type of student?
About 38 to 40 students, because humanities is one of the required classes. Most students that come through here have got to take a humanities class. It's a part of their general education requirement. My typical student, hmmm, this is hard. Of course, I have students who are in their 60s, and I have students who are 18 and 19. We have a wide range of students. Most of our students are right out of high school. Many of them will transfer either into the four-year program, or to a university, generally a state university.
How many hours a week do you work, and do you have the summers off?
I wish, no. We have the spring and fall semester plus the summer semesters that we generally work. I do additional things, though, many of us do. For instance, I'm a liaison with the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, as well as our own art department here on this campus. And there's always papers. Of course, research is part of our job.
How is teaching at SPC different from teaching at a more traditional university?
Generally our students work, they have jobs, very often full-time jobs. When I was teaching at USF, I didn't find that. Most of our students, probably 90 percent of them, work, making their lives busy and pressure-filled, just as mine is. So I have to be aware of that without watering down my curriculum at all. I think the key is for me to be flexible. They're learning more in the classroom than just the subject matter. They're learning how to be adults, essentially.
What kind of credentials do you need to become an instructor?
Most of us here have master's degrees. I am personally about halfway through a doctoral program.
What do you tell your students on the first day of class?
Expect to work hard. Part of what I try to teach them is even if they don't know what humanities is, or they do know what humanities is and they don't think they're interested in it, act interested or pretend to be interested because quite often the interest will follow that. We offer three (humanities courses) on this campus. We have Humanities 1, which is prehistory up through the Renaissance. And then the second half of the course, Humanities 2, is the Renaissance up to the present. And then there's a third course that we call East-West Synthesis. We study the cultures of Asia, Africa, Latin America and whatever else we can fit in that is not purely European Western. And I think that's a real important course to take these days. We also have a unit that we do on Islam.
Is St. Pete College a community college or a four-year school?
Both. We have almost two different colleges. We have the two-year college and then the four-year college. It's quite unusual. It's pretty innovative. It was designed to meet the needs of the community.
Do you teach any classes online?
I do. I have online humanities classes. That's really interesting because what I found teaching online is I have to be hyper-precise in the way I speak to my students because, of course, it's the written word. I've learned a lot about my own communication style. They can't see me and I can't see them. A lot of times we have students who are disabled or work full time. A lot of times, we teach students online who wouldn't take classes otherwise. It's very challenging.
What do you look forward to in terms of the future at SPC?
I really am interested in our expanded art program and what we're doing with our students.
