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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
It was really just so encouraging to have so many people from, not just my family and friends, but from my professional circles as well and then my students uplifting me in that and saying, you know you're gonna make mistakes. We know you're gonna make mistakes, but we're already forgiving you, and we want you to be successful.
Narrator:This is the Transform Your Teaching podcast. The Transform Your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Ryan:Hello, and welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, we go behind the scenes as Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles chat with Eric Stroud. Professor Stroud functions as the sound engineer for our program, and he's also a new full time faculty member at Cedarville University in 2025.
Ryan:Thanks for joining us.
Jared:Well, Dr. McDole, we are here today at another wonderful recording of our podcast, and we are doing a behind the scenes episode that we haven't done, for a it's been a while.
Rob:Mean Because we have someone new
Jared:We do have someone new.
Rob:Behind the scenes.
Jared:He is our friend, and I hate to I don't wanna refer to you as mister L's replacement, but you kind of are, but I you're you are your own person. Thanks.
Eric Stroud:Thanks, Drew.
Jared:Eric Stroud is joining us.
Eric Stroud:He is. Is our
Rob:new shoes. The gap Yes. Left By by mister l.
Jared:By Jim Leitenheimer.
Eric Stroud:Yeah. I've got some sizes to go up too. Yeah. So,
Jared:so Eric was now serving as our behind the scenes producer. He runs the board, makes sure we sound good and all that stuff, and makes sure that all of our guests that come on sound good as well. And so we wanted to take some time in this episode to introduce Eric Stroud and, you know, find out who he is and everything else. So welcome,
Eric Stroud:Eric Stroud. Thank you for having me. This is actually the first time that I've been on a podcast for someone else. I produced podcasts before, but I've never been on somebody else's show.
Jared:So let's talk about your, background. Okay. Before teaching, tell us about where you came from.
Eric Stroud:So I'm actually a student of the former producer for this show, mister Elle. You mentioned that already. He was my professor when I was a student here at Cedarville. And I graduated in 2022 and immediately started working for a radio station up in Columbus, 1049 The River in Gahanna, Ohio. I worked there as the digital content coordinator for about three years, and now I work here at the school.
Eric Stroud:So mister l was considering retiring a while back, and I was considering going to grad school. And he messaged me about a month after my wedding and said, hey. Are you in grad school yet? And I said, no. Why not?
Eric Stroud:And he's he's like, well, can you can you be in grad school? I go, where are you going with this? So long story short, a very long story. He he retired, and, I've sent I've since taken up a lot of his responsibilities in his absence. They've split, his role into two people here at the college.
Eric Stroud:One of them is taking over his responsibilities at the student radio station, which I also was a part of. Mhmm. And the other role is my job, taking over some of his other classes. So I always said that I wanted to be half the man that mister l was, and now I get to fulfill that. I literally am half half of the role.
Eric Stroud:Officially half
Jared:the man.
Rob:So let's let's talk about that goal life achievement. I mean, now what? What's next for you?
Eric Stroud:I don't I don't know. There's still so much that I've I'm going to Disney World. I'm gonna eat a bowl of Cheerio's podcast. Yeah. I've been thinking about that lately.
Eric Stroud:So, actually, this is something that I've been wrestling with over the last several months, really, ever since I got the phone call from mister l. I feel like I have been fast tracked to my my dream job a little bit. Because originally, when I was working at the radio station, that was a great job. I loved working for my radio station. Like, truly one of the most fun experiences of my entire life, and just excellent coworkers, excellent workplace environment.
Eric Stroud:The job was awesome. Then I get this phone call from mister l, and it's I had I had since put off grad school when I had graduated because I didn't have any money. So I I was just waiting for the opportunity to, like, go back. I was saving up a little bit, then things got busy, and I ended up just putting it off indefinitely. He gives me this phone call, and now all of a sudden, I gotta get to grad school fast.
Eric Stroud:I enrolled in a program in a at an online program through a college called Lindenwood University out of Missouri. I'm still in that program now. So when I started my interview process for the school, when I was taking over for mister l's classes, the registrar's office contacted me and said, hey. For your interviews, we need copies of your transcripts. I go, okay.
Eric Stroud:I can send you the ones from community college. I can send you the ones from Cedarville. Should have those already. I can't send you the ones from my grad school yet. And they're like, why not?
Eric Stroud:I'm like, well, because classes started a week ago. This was back in January, and they haven't generated a transcript for me yet. So that one's gonna have to wait. So all that to say, it is a really weird feeling going from lowest of the totem pole at this radio station straight out of college to now I have the opportunity to do what I've considered my dream job for the last couple of years much, much faster than I had originally anticipated. I thought I was still gonna be waiting several years to be in this role.
Jared:When you think about it, it gives you an opportunity now to, like, dream even bigger and you've this goal has already been met. So, you know, if this is what's happened just after a couple years, like, the next steps could be, you know, easily achievable if you wanted to.
Eric Stroud:Yeah. Well, we're trying to easily achieve the MFA first. Oh, gotcha. I get that. I I've got I've got, I think, at least a year, maybe two left on that program before I can start thinking about bigger achievements.
Jared:What's the MFA in? What's your?
Eric Stroud:The MFA is in interdisciplinary media arts. My original goal was to do a residential program where I could learn more about concepts of sound design and cinematography, but that ended up not working out for a variety of reasons. So this online program is more theoretical. I'm doing more writing than I have ever had in my entire life for this program, and I'm enjoying it. It's been a lot of fun.
Eric Stroud:It's just not nearly as hands on as the classes that I'm teaching.
Jared:So you mentioned you have reached your, dream job per se of teaching. Let me ask you. We are nearing the end of your first semester. Are there things that have surprised you or you didn't expect this semester that's set up?
Eric Stroud:Oh, yeah. A lot a lot of things that I didn't expect. First of all, I didn't there's actually there's there's a good one, and then there's a not so good one. The good one is actually, I'll I'll I'll do three. One, like, good, bad, and the ugly.
Eric Stroud:We'll do that. So the good one Dang. This is good. The good one is my my students, for the most part, seem to have a great deal of respect for me, which I have been I did not expect that at all. I'm 25, and the students that I teach are 18 to 22 year old students.
Eric Stroud:Mhmm. I thought it would be a much harder uphill battle to get respect from them, and they have so far treated me with a lot of respect. And especially stepping into a legacy position like mister l's, like, that that dude is he's the giant that people stand on to call themselves tall. That's what I'm trying to do. You know?
Eric Stroud:Mhmm. And so stepping into a role where I knew these students, for the most part, had interacted with him and, learned from him and, mentored under him in the ways that I had, I know how special that relationship is. And so to step into a role that's sort of taking that away, I was expecting a lot more pushback, a lot more like, well, mister l would have done this or, you know, that kind of reaction. I have not ex I've not gotten any of that. It's been very encouraging.
Eric Stroud:So that's the good one. We'll do the ugly one first because that one's fun. The ugly one is I did not expect the I'm trying to find a way to put this nicely. Lack of common sense from some of my freshmen. Okay.
Eric Stroud:Which, for the most part, they're all very bright students. But I had a situation couple weeks ago where it was, it rained on campus really hard, and all my freshmen came in soaking wet and you know, because nobody bothered to bring an umbrella. I had one student, start to take off his shoes in the front of my class, and I'm like, alright. That's a little weird, but I'm not gonna call him out on it. His feet are wet.
Eric Stroud:That's fine. Then he starts taking his socks off, and I'm like, I don't know. Where do I go from here? Because now people are starting to, like they're they're whispering behind his back. They're smiling and laughing.
Eric Stroud:And I'm like, I'm gonna lose my class if I was to say something.
Jared:Classroom management thing when we have our education students go
Eric Stroud:through this. It it gets better. So not only now he's unrolling his socks. He's taking his socks off. And you know the exhaust fans on the backs of laptops?
Eric Stroud:So he gets an a for creativity. He folds his laptop in half, and now the fans are running. So he drapes the wet socks over the fans, and I can tell he's trying to dry them off. I'm like, Alright. And so now it's now it's to the point where my glass is starting to smell like wet socks.
Eric Stroud:And I'm like, I have to call him out. And I look at him, I'm like, hey, bud. Not not here. Not here. And he looks at me like I'm the weird one, and he says, oh, okay.
Eric Stroud:And then he puts his socks back on.
Rob:But he put his shoes back on?
Eric Stroud:Oh, he put his shoes back on too.
Rob:Yeah. That's nice.
Eric Stroud:But that's yeah. So that one that was, like, a a moment for me where I was like, I had never in my wildest dreams, man. Never in my wildest dreams. Yeah. And then the bad one is just, like, lack of, I guess, preparedness on my part and self confidence.
Eric Stroud:It's so weird to step into a position where I am the authority in a classroom, and I had never had any formal teaching training. I didn't go to school for this. You know? I know how to use the equipment that I teach about, but I don't know anything about classroom dynamics, about, really, pedagogy in general. There's a lot of things that I feel like I'm missing from, is from enabling me to be a good teacher.
Eric Stroud:And a lot of that is, like, it comes down to I was just talking about this with my wife recently. I don't know how much of my students' success is based on my teaching versus their willingness to learn. And I'm struggling with that recently because I see my students a lot of them work really hard. Like I said, I have really good students for the most part. But then there are some where I I see them struggling to maintain these, these concepts that I teach in class, and I don't know how much of that is the fault of me for not teaching it well enough or their fault for not receiving it or internalizing it.
Eric Stroud:So that's a lot of the unexpected things that I've been dealing with this semester.
Rob:Some of our listeners may be wondering why in the world do we even do, you know, a behind the scenes episode? And I think this is exactly some of the things that we like to bring out in terms of transform your teaching. Right? Is especially in higher ed, you come in as a professor. Most of the professors, unless they've actually had formal training in in education, they're exactly in the same spot you are.
Rob:And they and because they care, they ask some of the same questions. How much of this is my student, I. E. Their motivation, and how much of it is my lack of being able to explain it to them in a way that they get? So the good news is you're not in an odd place.
Rob:Mhmm. There's also a lot of people even within your own area that can help with that, especially given the communication arts, the faculty here. You know, they've learned so much, I'm sure, over the years.
Eric Stroud:Yeah. My colleagues are exceptional people. Mhmm. They and that's the cool part too about being such a recent grad. Most of my current colleagues were my former teachers.
Rob:Mhmm.
Eric Stroud:So we already have an established relationship that way, where I feel like I can talk to them about pretty much anything.
Rob:That's good.
Eric Stroud:Especially my associate dean. He's an excellent mentor and role model here.
Rob:But I think it serves our listeners to know that this is not an abnormal thing. Sometimes you come to teaching in the strangest ways. Yeah. Like, Eric is telling us, I wanted to do that, but it was something off in the distance.
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:But then God was like, well, you know, through mister l, now is the time. And you're like, oh.
Eric Stroud:That has been the single biggest source of my impostor syndrome over the the past year and a half. Because it's it's one thing entirely to fantasize about going to grad school and learning how to teach and taking up the role that your role model set up for you, and then it's another thing entirely to have a phone call out of the blue from that role model saying, I need you to do my job. And it's an incredibly humbling feeling. It was so encouraging over the past eighteen months to have so much support from mister l, from my wife, from even the students when I got here. Well, I have to tell you one of the coolest things that happened when I started teaching.
Eric Stroud:Day one, I admitted to my upperclassmen, this is the first time I've ever taught this class. You are the second class I've ever taught in my life. I'm not mister l. And they took that in stride, they said, hey. Listen.
Eric Stroud:He told us about you, and you're gonna do great. And I had one student stand up, and she was like, do you want us to pray for you? I'm like, only at Cedarville, man. And it was and it was the per it was really just so encouraging to have so many people from, not just my family and friends, but from my professional circles as well and then my students uplifting me in that and saying, you know you're gonna make mistakes, we know you're gonna make mistakes, but we're already forgiving you.
Ryan:Mhmm.
Eric Stroud:And we're we want you to be successful.
Jared:Yeah. That's good. Yeah. I I I would echo the same thing that that Rob said. I was gonna say when you said, I don't know if it's me or it's my students, I was gonna say welcome to teaching because that's something Rob and I both can attest as we're teaching now that you never really know.
Jared:You can create the clearest content if you think about the, you know, I know you're the receiver and the sender when
Eric Stroud:it comes
Jared:to the communication channel. You can eliminate all barriers, make it as clear as humanly possible, and just let it have students, it just bounces off for some reason, and you're like, what did I do? So yeah, but it's something that you can't something I struggle with is I take it personally when my students don't do well. And it was a struggle I had all through when I taught K 12 as well, is that I would take it personally if my students failed. I'm like, oh, it's my fault.
Jared:And it became to a point where it's like, no, education's a two way street. You gotta meet halfway at some point. And it's gotta be something where you do the absolute best that you can, through the you know, bathe it in prayer, pray over your students as much as you can. Prepare? Prepare ahead of time, everything else.
Jared:But but again, the most prepared lesson can just fall flat. Like, I last week, I was going to teach my class, everything well prepared, and then I go into the classroom and it's, like, 98 degrees. The heater's on full blast, and we can't have class because it's way too hot. So I had to cancel class. I had everything prepared, everything ready to go, and I had to cancel class.
Rob:So And it wasn't Dante's Inferno.
Jared:It wasn't. We were actually, it was great. We were going through Gatsby, we're going to the chapter where they have the the dinner party at the really hot hotel room.
Eric Stroud:It would have been perfect stuff. Yes. Oh, man.
Jared:It would have been perfect, but we couldn't stand the heat. So, you know, there are other factors that are gonna play into that. You just have to do your absolute best and pray for it and see what happens. So
Eric Stroud:Yeah. I think going back to taking it personally, for me, it's less about am I taking it personally is am I I'm taking it more of, an indication of how I'm performing professionally. Because especially as a first year faculty member Sure. It's not that I'm worried about the hammer coming down, but it's, like, it's this constant reiteration of the thought in my mind. Is am I doing enough to Mhmm.
Eric Stroud:Fill this position that's been given to me? You know? Am am I really worth it here? So it's a it's a struggle of wondering, is this the place I'm supposed to be? And, of course, I know it is.
Eric Stroud:Like, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't. Mhmm. And I think there I could go through a very long story of the reasons that I believe that, but it doesn't stop me from wondering if my performance is worthy of teaching at this college. So
Rob:what would be one thing that you wish you would have known before you came?
Eric Stroud:I think the one thing that I I was not initially prepared for is how much work grading was gonna be. And it's it's it sounds stupid because I don't grade a lot. There's no writing in my class. All of my work is hands on. So a lot of my colleagues will be teaching fundamentals of speech or some similar such class where there are essays being handed in every week.
Eric Stroud:I don't have written things. All of my assignments are things that I can listen to, podcasts, audio dramas, interviews, things like that. And so as a result of that, I don't consider myself using a ton of time to grade those things because I can just listen to them. I don't have to read critically. Critically.
Eric Stroud:I I just just listen listen to to the the things. Things. Couple weeks ago, my students all turned in a 30 podcast. I have 18 students in a class. You do the math.
Eric Stroud:So that part was tough. I didn't get them their their grades back for several weeks because it just took so long to listen to it. So that that was something that I I I probably should have been prepared for, but, yeah, grading. Grading just took a lot more out of me than I expected it to. One of the other unexpected things that happened is this is something that I had to teach myself because I was initially expecting my students to come in with some level of familiarity with how to use the technology we would be using in class.
Eric Stroud:I teach an introduction to audio editing class. Not a lot of students know really how to use the software that I use. It's called Pro Tools. It's because it's an expensive and, like, really top level kind of software. It's the industry standard for audio editing, which is why we teach it here.
Eric Stroud:I initially expected some students at least to have familiarity with recording equipment or at the very least how to use a computer. I have found in both of those cases, very few people use know how to use a recording piece of recording equipment, And there are even some students in my class who don't know how to use a computer. I had no less than five students at one point come to me and tell me they have never used a flash drive before. Wow. And that was a really big learning curve for me because I remit it took me back into my community college days when I was still when I was first learning the concepts that I'm learning now or that I'm teaching now.
Eric Stroud:We had a whole class dedicated to hardware and how to use a hard drive. I erroneously made the assumption that that information had already been given to my students. Here's how you use a hard drive. Here's why you should back things up. Here's how to use a file browser on a computer.
Eric Stroud:Apparently, that hadn't been taught to them. That's on me now. That's my responsibility to teach them. So I had to sort of reformat week two or three how I was teaching some of these skills because they rely on a foundational knowledge of how a computer works, which apparently, they just don't teach in high school as much as they used to when I was a student. Right.
Eric Stroud:And I just I that was one thing that really caught me off guard. I called my dad who is a curriculum coordinator at a high school up back in New York, And I said, do you teach computer classes anymore? And he goes, oh, a lot of places don't because they just assume that students
Jared:Yeah.
Eric Stroud:Have grown up with something and they already use it.
Jared:Yeah. The digital native idea. Mhmm.
Eric Stroud:But the effect there is their I I told I I kind of explained it this way. I was expecting them to have a a digital literacy with a certain type of technology. Their literacy is in a different language. They're used to using iPads. They're used to using a Chromebook.
Eric Stroud:I grew up on Windows and Mac machines. That's what we use in my classroom. So they know how to do stuff on TikTok, on Canva, all of these, these apps that are accessible and free, which is a really good thing. I've had conversations about how to reformat my lessons according to the terminology being used by softwares like Canva and TikTok. But it presented a weird situation for me where I had to really rethink the terminology and the pacing of my class because they just weren't ready for some things.
Jared:What's great about that, I mean, you're you're recognizing that, but you're also adapting, which is super important. You're not just plowing through and going, kids these days don't know how to use Microsoft Word. They better look up a YouTube video and I'm not stopping. You're stopping, you're adapting, and you're making sure you meet the needs of your students, which is admirable, especially for a first year teacher like yourself. Well, Eric, thanks for so much for being willing to, number one, step into this role.
Jared:You didn't have to do this. You could have just said, no. It's enough to learn how to teach for the first year, but you decided to step in and help us with this, keep this podcast rolling. So we're very thankful and blessed to have you on the team to help us out with that.
Rob:And it's also, I think, we need to say to our listeners, Eric is not foreign to us here at CTL.
Eric Stroud:I was about to mention Oh, yeah. I forgot. Yes. He did. We we didn't say this a single time during the webinar.
Rob:But but to be fair, Eric worked for us as a student worker Yeah. Back in the day and did an excellent job and was just a joy to work with. And so it's been a joy to have you come back.
Eric Stroud:Oh, it's been so fun.
Rob:Our respect for you has grown immensely, and it's been cool to watch you grow.
Eric Stroud:Well, thank you.
Rob:And know that we support you. We support what you're doing. We're thankful to have you here, and I know mister Elmo certainly was. So if you ever have any doubts as to whether or not the Lord and I I don't think you do, but occasionally, those probably surface especially especially when you're in, like
Eric Stroud:Especially around, you know, the hours of 11:30, 12:00 in the morning. You know?
Rob:Why am I doing this?
Eric Stroud:That's frequent.
Rob:Yeah. Keep putting one foot in front of the other and know that, you have folks here, not only your colleagues in your because I know they care about you, but we care about you as well. We're very thankful for you.
Eric Stroud:Well, appreciate that, Rob. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.
Jared:We appreciate you having you on, buddy. It's good to have you on board.
Eric Stroud:Yeah. It's good to be here.
Ryan:Thanks for listening to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions or comments about our episode today, please feel free to reach out to us at ctlpodcast@cedarville.edu. We'd also love to connect with you on LinkedIn. Finally, don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.