Germany with Analeise (click here for more...)

I went to Germany with Analeise in early Deceber 2010.  We visited my old host brother from Belgrade and his family in Leipzig, and the University of Applied Sciences in Giessen.

Analeise in the Frankfurt train staton.

Pictures of Teaching and Finnish don't get knock-knock jokes (click here for more...)

Here are several picures of me teaching or in some recent classroom setting.  I suppose mostly this post is just for my mom.

More Silliest Games Ever for Professional Development and Business Communications (click here for more...)

Here are a few more ideas from students about good ways to improve thier abilities to overcome their Finnish Shyness - one of the greatest themes of this part of our professional development class.

Final Presentations for Advanced Topics (click here for more...)

I had excellent students this semester in the Advanced Topics class that I taught with Professor Kazi.  These are various pictures that I took of the final presentations.

 

Finnish class (click here for more...)

So I have been taking Finnish classes every Tuesday afternoon for 3 hours with my colleague Mirja Kinnunen.  It makes me tired to concentrate that hard for 3 hours.  Here are several pictures of our last class.

Our international class of Finnish as a Foreign Language led by Mirja Kinnunen.

Teaching Emergency Preparedness (click here for more...)

Yesterday 16 November, I gave a lecture about the Incident Command System (ICS) to Anasse's Emergency Preparedness class.

Here I am explaining the rudiments of ICS.  I got this jacket for 16 euros at a second hand store in Stockholm and it is one of my favorite jackets now.  (currently is a tie for first with the tweed jacket I got from Goodwill over 15 years ago.)

Presentations about 'How to Be Interviewed' and some silliness (click here for more)

This week in Professional Development and Communication Skills the topic was job interviews.  Here are some pictures from that day and an explanation of the silliest group exercise I have ever had in my class.

The above discussion of Body Language was very good.  Overall the students in this class give really good presentations.  Their strengths are that they don't have too much information, don't read and keep the presentations short.  They are head and shoulders above some of my American students unfortunately.

Tamk Consulting Academy (click here for more details)

Here is information about the TAMK Consulting Academy (TCA) for which I am an assistant, temporary coach.  It is an EXTREMELY interesting concept and is designed to give the International Business students experience in solving real world problems.  Below is a brief overview of our latest meeting.

By the way, Analeise babysits for Anni, the woman third from the left.  She babysits Leo every Wednesday afternoon.

Visiting the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (click here for full story...)

I went to the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (Työterveuslaitos).  This is the second longest word in Finnish that I am able to pronounce.  There I set up some more work to do for the rest of the year...

The office for this branch is right across the street from TAMK.  You can see that it had just snowed the night before.  Because it was somewhat warm that morning, it was really foggy.  As a side note, some of my students that are working on their Advanced Topics project are working on a project for security and terrorism.  Their original topic was HUGE and they would have needed several books to finish.  Instead I made several email inquiries and they are now writing their research on this building.  They have found and translated the best practices and regulations for Finnish building security and are comparing these to the emergency plans for this building (Hippostalo).

One of my Professional Development and Communication Skills classes wanted to look at Office Ergonomics. (Click here for the full story...)

I am teaching Professional Development and Communications Skills with Mike Garant.  I am letting the class choose their own topics.  Here is how the 'Office Ergonomics' talk went...

Getting started for practicing Office Stretches.

Teaching Financial Risk Management (click here for the full story)

My colleague Pia asked me to teach Financial Risk Management and I learned the similarities to Risk Control.

Places we shop in Tampere (click here for more...)

Here are some of the places that we either regularly shop at or are specialty shops we thought might be interesting.

Places to Eat in Tampere (Click here for more...)

Here is a list of some of the places we've eaten in Tampere...

The Most Beautiful Library (click here for more...)

The Metso Library is one of the most beautiful libraries I have ever seen.  It is very close to our house and we go quite often.  They don't have every book in English that I might want, but they do have quite a bit.  Last night Kate and I went there and took these pictures:

The walk to work! (click here for more...)

It takes me about 40 minutes to walk to work here in Tampere.  This makes a total of about 5 miles per day just walking to and from TAMK.  These are some of the more interesting things that I see on a daily basis.

 

The Last Day of Operations Management

We have been in Finland for almost 3 months out of 10.  I have been very busy teaching 2 sections of Operations Management at TAMK.  These classes were only 7 weeks long and had about 35 students each.  It was VERY intense.

I did enjoy teaching those classes.  The students are about 50% international students and 50% Finnish.  They are high-quality students and I am looking forward to teaching them more as the year goes on.

HOWEVER now that I have some more spare time, I plan to update this record of my teaching experience here regularly.

While you are waiting for more posts, here are some pictures of my Operations Management classes from Fall 2010: