The Undersea World of Clint Gardner

I’ve been attending the annual TYCA-West at Clarkdale, Arizona campus of Yavapai College. Yesterday I attended various sessions on assessment of composition classes. The first one focussed on retention of students and the reasons why students drop. I shall be exploring the findings more later, I think. I also attended a session on student anxiety with the same course. I am particularly interested in this because we in the writing center world seem particularly obsessed with student comfort and their has been a great deal of scholarly work on the implications of being “comfortable” in the center.

To be succint, the WC discussion centers around whether or not it is the writing centers place to make students comfortable, particularly since learning can be an uncomfortable thing. I won’t be writing on that issue further today, as I am currently in a session on RSS, and it seems quite rude to be writing this and listening to the presenter.

More later, plus pictures!

So as I mentioned in my last post, I threw my hat in the ring for TYCA (Two-Year Colleague Association of the National Council of Teachers of English) Secretary. I was honored to actually win the election, even though I know my colleague Jeffrey Andelora of Mesa Community College would have been a fine selection as well. I know I will probably take guff on the matter, but I actually voted for Jeffrey. Now that is not because I don’t believe in myself, but simply because it seems extremely self-centered to vote for oneself in any election, and abstaining isn’t much better unless you know, for certain, that the other candidate would be harmful to the job. Jeffrey has some great ideas for the job, and has, in fact, inspired me to think about other things I could be doing as TYCA Secretary, by working on recruitment etc.

Ultimately, I want to “leverage” my position as TYCA Secretary to bring to the fore writing center issues, and to make more contact with writing center professionals at two-year colleges. I think that two-year writing center folks can benefit a lot by talking to each other and by being more aware of organizations such as IWCA that actively address their concerns. I also hope to make more folks in TYCA aware of writing centers and our perspective on things.

It should be a good three years!

I’ve been a member of the SLCC’s Thayne Center for Service & Learning Service Learning Advisory Board (SLAB) for several years now. It is a great place and offers SLCC students and faculty many opportunities to engage in service, and learn from those experiences. In order to engage more faculty, the Thayne Center is starting up a new blog: The Engaged Campus. I’m looking forward to helping them out with getting the blog set up and contributing ideas and posts. It should be a good opportunity for faculty to share ideas. Each month it will have a theme. This is to spur commentary from faculty and drive the blog forward. I suppose contributors could write on what they like, but the theme does keep it focussed.

Well I feel compelled to write something, given that it is the end of the semester. I will, therefore, make notes:

1. One can tell the student who has been working on her or his paper for a long time by the state of their attire. Sweats and bad-hair-day beanies mean the student is pulling an all-nighter to hopefully get the paper done. The well-dressed student who does not have that desperate look in her or his eye is the one who took more time or (I hope this is not the case) such students just don’t care.
2. Something or someone must be trying to hack WordPress, as my administrator account was deleted. Time to upgrade, I suppose.
3. The end of the semester is notoriously unpredictable. Our rush days came early this week. Now it is relatively quiet.
4. I am looking forward to getting back into the classroom next semester.
5. I feel scatter-shot at the moment.
6. I have a peer review to write that I thought I had finished. I understand why the editors want more now, but at the time I was under the happy delusion that my enthusiastic acceptance of the piece in question was enough.

Random notes on a random day.

SLCC President Cynthia Bioteau and SLCC Developmental Education Division Chair discussed the roll of a community college in general and the role of SLCC in particular yesterday on KCPW. (Click on the bottom link.) This was in response to the PBS/Learning Matters documentary Discounted Dreams: High Hopes and Harsh Realities at America’s Community Colleges. I haven’t had the opporunity to see the documentary yet, and will not comment directly on it at this time.