Marshall Pauling Graduating Class of 2011

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I am so proud! I will scan the graduation booklet and post it up here, or maybe just email it to Melissa, but it was nice to see our SRINQ students all over it. Intro, Valedictorians, Senior Video, and changing of the tassels all SRINQ students.

I am really sad that Marshall is closing forever, and it seems like this is how it is working with public schools. You get really invested and really love the students and the school, but then it closes. Such a frustrating thing when this school is the epitome of idealistic ethnic and religious diversity. Marshall is a utopia for the multi-cultural canvas that is America, and it is closing because of bureaucracy and budget cuts. At the same time, as educators and mentors, we cannot let these frustrations cloud our goals, and we cannot forget the reason we are doing this to begin with. The students. With or without Marshall, these students, these young adults are still going to be a success and still going to be strong and courageous.

Thank you Senior Inquiry, particularly at Pauling, for giving me a chance to have good memories of high school!

Jefferson-McNair Panel reflections

Remember that incredible McNair Panel I described here? Well the students reflected on the experience back in their classroom at Jefferson, answering these three questions:

1. What were the most important insights offered by our panelists?
2. What was the most unexpected advice?
3. What was the most useful information?

Instead of retyping 20 reflections, I am going to scan them and upload them in a way you are able to read them anonymously.

The missing Jeff visit

Jefferson visited PSU last week and I never blogged about it. A shame because it was a SUCCESS! I have done a lot of blogging just now, so this might not be super descriptive, but I might come back to this and add more.

We had Smith labs 448 and 450 reserved, the students were finishing up an assignment about cover letters and resumes. I noticed some students struggling with Word. We worked in the lab for about an hour or so then we headed to Melissa’s VERY well planned panel of McNair scholars in the Urban Studies building, on the second floor. There were 5 or 6 McNair scholars and they all told their unique and moving stories of overcoming hardships and their journeys through education and

it

was

simply

amazing.

I’m serious.

The Jeff students were full of questions at the end, it was AMAZING, I am getting chills and tears in my eyes just thinking about it a week later. I am sure not all the Jeff students have struggled, sure, but I know for a fact that there are a couple of young mothers in the class, people whose family are in a different state, and in different countries- these students needed someone to relate to and now they have 6. It was beautiful experience, and I could tell the McNair scholars got a lot out of the visit themselves. At then end, after Q&A I saw some students get the contact info of the scholars.

I got an email from Michael that they had the students reflect on the experience and that the responses were really encouraging. He is going to share them with us next week.

BREAKTHROUGH!

MP x 2

MP came to PSU on 1/20 and I went there on 1/28.

 On January 20th, the seniors of MP were kind of all on the field trip, so there were a ton of students not in the class, but it wound up a really successful visit in my opinion. We opened up with the students taking the Heterosexuality Quiz. It had questions such as:

• If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer that?
• The great majority of child molesters are heterosexual. Do you really consider it safe to expose children to heterosexual teachers?

And so on. We had the students fill out the questionnaires in private and keep them for themselves. We were hoping that this would make some people realize how stupid some questions are, and hopefully also steer them away from asking those types of questions to Birch, our guest speaker. Then we had the students tell us about the readings they have done- not only telling us the content, but also in how they phrased it we were able to get a grasp of what the students themselves got out of it, and how they interpreted the messages. After all of that, M introduced the concept of learning through stories, and then introduced Birch and he went right into it. I thought it was a fantastic presentation. I can’t even imagine how odd it would feel for me to get up in front of a group of strangers and talk about my sexuality. Anyway, Birch did a great job explaining his story- he has such honest eyes… sighhhh… it was not hard for the class to give him their full attention.

—-

On January 28th I took the bus up to MP to attend their final presenations. I am so glad I was invited, it was such a great opportunity for me to attend. It was set up like a conference, where the students each had trifold presentation boards and they had a panel for what they learned, a panel for what they believe and a panel comparing and contrasting the two sides. Some students frightened me, not because their opinions were different than mine, but because of the manner in which they expressed themselves (ie. God gives people deformations and AIDs to punish them), while other students secured my faith in humanity with the level of respect they had for viewpoints they disagreed with, or even better, other students whose own views were softened or changed through learning about sexuality. No matter what, M and I decided that we’d like to get the QRC involved for some sensitivity trainings in the future. Even if people are not homophobic, sensitivity training is always good and doesn’t get old.

SUCCESS!

Knowledge is power

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The theme for the Jefferson visit of January 19th was “Knowledge is Power”. I many choices of what I could do with our three hour visit, and due to the month of January resonating with MLK day and the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, I had my options narrowed to these two focuses. Since Michael told me that he had been considering doing MLK things, and since I KNOW the students know about MLK, I thought I’d allow us to focus on and honor Haiti. To remind you, here is the agenda with commentary of how things went:

Theme for our visit: Knowledge is Power

• 9:50-10:10 10:25 warm up. Read BBC news articles (I picked several from the Jan. 18th regional homepages) in table groups, discuss how to summarize and one person from each table should volunteer to share with the rest of the class.

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12212843

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12205338

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12220862

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12214195

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12214905

  This turned out very well actually, even though we went way over. I had the students present: name of article, what is going on, why is it important to people in article and how it is significant to us at Jefferson/in the US. I loved that most of the students were very serious, taking notes, highlighting and writing on scratch paper. I LOVE THEM!! One thing: it is a pet peeve of mine when people refer to Africa as a country, and although no one did that today, one of the students made it apparent to me that they are not familiar with the incredible differences within the continent. I really want to have the students go back to the CIA World Factbook and compare DRC to South Africa or something- two countries that are on pretty extreme ends. DRC would be interesting because of the INSANE wealth in natural resources yet poverty of the people. Note: email Jeff fac about having my friend Joe come in some time…
  

• 10:15-10:35 10:25-10:40 Income from HS to BA to MA to PhD http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf go over entire document. Ask if students know why measure with median and not average is beneficial.
  The numbers and figures were kind of discouraging, but also really important to know, and as the theme goes: knowledge is power. I emphasized how this is an official government article, but I regret making it sound so absolute. Although I believe the numbers to be accurate, as with any research and measure there is interpretation and presentation which can be really dramatic one way or another. I’d kind of like to emphasize that revelation next time I see them.
• 10:30-10:45 10:40-10:50 Read article http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/harvard-apps-2011/?emc=eta1 and talk about it
  I had forgotten to make copies of this so M projected it and we still discussed it. I just now sent the students an email with the link for them to read closely on their own.
• 10:45-11:20 10:50-11:25 in lab- Haiti project.
  Before leaving to the lab I handed out the worksheets and described the activity. I told them about paying attention to dates of when data was collected and to question the significance, especially in relation to a country like Haiti who has suffered from a recent disaster.
• 11:25-12:10 LUNCH BREAK

• 12:10-1:20 in lab
• Recover passwords for people in need (a good quarter/third of the class, dang)
• Accessing grades and transcripts on banweb
  This seemed to be extremely helpful for students. It occurred to me earlier that it might be a good idea to go over myths about college, such as attendance expectations… or maybe just that one.
• Eportfolios, be sure everyone adds jeff teams email as an owner (only 9 have already)
  Now we are at 24 added, I think it is like a 30 person class, maybe a few less, so we are close.
• Work time for students to finish Haiti hunt if needed and work on eportfolios more

Day=success!