Well, the pre-week is over and the semester is about to begin. In a lot of ways, this week was a lot like a stage race prologue in that it has set the themes and served to focus the participants on the task at hand. Monday was meeting day. Lots of meetings. We started off with a joint faculty/staff meeting that was pretty insightful. usually, these things are where service pins and bland announcements are made but something must have gotten into the President's mind because he was full of news and plans and explanations and that sort of thing. Very newsy. We undergo "reaffirmation of our accreditation" this year so there was a good bit of discussion about that as well which is always interesting because there's this underlying tension caused by the small amount of uncertainty of passing the process. It's very, very unlikely that we won't get reaffirmed but the very thought that someone can come in and tell us we're not doing our jobs is enough to send a lot of academics to grumbling like curmudgeons without their morning coffee. After that was a faculty meeting that was fairly innocuous and a division meeting where we elect faculty reps to the various committees on campus and the Division Chair runs through a list of do's and don'ts. Since all of our division's faculty returned this year that went pretty smoothly.
Tuesday through Thursday were new student oreintation and registration days. I had another meeting or two and each day I had to give the "They're not in college anymore" talk to the parents in the morning. Afternoons were given over to trying to get schedules for students with more excuses than preparation. We did have a few students who looked to be fairly sharp that were at the tail end of the process for various reasons. The thing that struck me this year about all this is how many of the students didn't seem to have any traction in getting things figured out. We call this "Academic Literacy" and it's a big part fo our new Quality Enhancement Plan that we need to have for reaffirmation. I was talking with the wife at lunch one day and she said something that really struck me. She works at the local K-12 district doing the information system things that need to be done for students to go to school in today's information age. She told me that one young lady had had her schedule changed three times in a week. This led to a discussion about the registration process in high school and I learned that students write down what courses they'd like to take and a schedule sort of magically appears in the weeks (or in the case of this year, months) that follow. The student really has no idea how any of that happens. The high school does this because one of the big accountability measurements is academic progress/graduation rate and they're not about to leave that to a 14-18 year old (poor numbers have funding consequences).
When the student gets to us we expect them to have some sort of clue as to how the college environment works but given the high school environment it is very unlikely that many of them will really have much to go on. We assume that they know the difference between classes, courses and sections as well as the difference between their instructor, advisor and counselor; all of which have somewhat different definitions than they did in high school. It's gotten me wondering what other assumptions we make at the college level that might have been valid 20 years ago when there wasn't No Child Left Behind, Adequate Yearly Progress and Social Promotion but aren't so valid now. My wife used the analogy of the jungle to describe this. There is a law in the jungle of "Higher Education" and all of us professor types learned it through survival of the fittest and the sharpest. Most of us had a head start from strong college-prep programs in high school that were really just for the top students in the school. We know the laws and we understand them. The problem is that when you drop the city-boy into the jungle, there's a good chance that he'll end up as food. Not because he isn't sharp enough or strong enough to make it, he just doesn't know to avoid the snake with the spinning, hypnotic eyes. So, I think I'm going to spend a lot of time this year trying to figure out OUR assumptions (I have a pretty good idea of what the student's assumptions are) and see if maybe I can add something to the discussions when it comes to our QEP.
The final day, Friday, was another faculty meeting where we've taken up the thorny issue that our pre site visit evaluation brought up-Area C. Here in Georgia we have a common "Core" curriculum that all 35 public institutions have agreed to follow. I think it's very cool because transfer is really easy. One of the areas in the Core is Area C-Humanities. The student takes two classes that along with a year of english comp is supposed to make up a student's general education exposure to the areas of the humanities. Our present Area C allows a student to select from a fairly broad list of courses including literature, the various appreciations, philosophy, language and speech. The accreditation agency pointed out that a student could take only what they refer to as "skills" courses such as public speaking and introductory langauge courses to satisfy the requirements and thus not have to take any actually humanities courses. while I don't like it much, I have to agree with them. So the discussion has begun on how to fix this problem. The question is whether or not we are going to require that the students take one literature course. I'd like to see something broader that includes philosophy and the appreciations but I have a feeling that the Humanities Division will push for he lit only option. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I think I have a lot of listening to do to understand the issues.
This weekend will be spent finishing up some planning as well as lab rewrites as we get ready for Monday and the new class of 2006. I'll see mostly sophomores that day but many of them still need to be taught a little bit about college lavel work and my physics classes will likely be the place where that will happen.
Thanks for Reading.
