Does great risk equal great reward? I guess it depends on the risk. Though, despite my rebel tendencies, likely due to my fascination with Star Wars and wanting to fly an X-Wing and fight for the Rebel Alliance, I’m really not that risky of a person in life. Overall,  I like to stay in balance; taking risks feels unstable, dangerous. Professionally, and yes, I’m hip-with-professional-jargon, taking risks equals growth. I mean, look at all the books written about this very concept. Throughout my years (almost a decade!) at GCC, my favorite risks would be the following: applying and surviving the interview process to be hired full-time; leading a team to create and implement a campus-wide mentoring program for developmental students; presenting at conferences, especially about how to support students with executive function differences; teaching in a learning community of ENG102/CRE102 with Sherry Wangen; putting my students into learning teams at the beginning of the semester to achieve the course competencies by solving a community issue and creating real-life deliverables where students tangibly connected the classroom and their community; serving as an Assistant Chair; leaning into the hybrid and, then, hyflex modalities; trying all the shiny, new tools with students: PearDeck, Weebly, Prezi, Voki, Animoto, SoundCloud, FlipGrid, Kahoot, etc. etc. etc.; and most of all, being vulnerable with students in teaching by providing models from my own life experience, constantly learning, being open to feedback from students throughout the semester (What’s working? What’s not? Stop-Start-Continue), and not being afraid to make mistakes.  As I look back, I think I answered my own question; indubitably, the risks I’ve taken while serving as faculty at GCC have been some of the greatest rewards of my professional life.

On Thursday, my students and I were chatting before class as I prompted them to respond to the Poll Everywhere word cloud: “Finish the sentence: I spent my Spring Break ______________.” Soon, words began to populate the screen: “Sleeping, family, Disneyland, beach, Six Flags, Universal…” While the dominant responses were sleeping and relaxing, most responses were a flashback to pre-pandemic life. Where the familiarity and unfamiliarity join quickly left its impression upon me; aloud, I jovially remarked, “Wow! Look at that. It’s looking like things are returning to life as we knew it. It certainly feels like we’ve all been dealing with a proverbial psychological hangover from the past two years. I think this year, we just held our breath, hoping to make it through break without anything crazy happening. So far so good! Knock on wood!” as I knocked loudly on the top of the desk. A student, smiling while raising her eyebrows, pointed and looked at me as if to say, “You better find some wood to knock!” This, as they return from break with a “masks encouraged” policy, and me, relieved to see their smiles, yet feeling like I don’t recognize them without their masks on. It’s such an odd in-between space.

Returning to the classroom in-person this Spring felt like an alternate reality. Do I pass out handouts? Can students work in groups? Can they walk around? Do I have to clean everything in the classroom every time? What if I forget something? What if I mess up? For my students, I noticed how eager they were to TALK to each other. When they discuss in class, the energy is palatable; I honor the space for them to have it. This anecdote may sum it up best: last week, I checked out about ten books from the library to cart to Banned Books and Censorship, offering resources for students to use on their projects. The books were heavy and uncomfortable to lug across campus. I even required special permission to check out so many, but I did it because I thought that’s what my students needed. When class started, I was proud (and I’m a bibliophile) to show them how many resources are available to them in our amazing library, lifting up each book, explaining its contents, and pointing to where the information may be applicable to them. Afterwards, students met to plan projects. The books sat there; students didn’t go to the books, look at them, or give them any attention. Confused, I thought, well, maybe I should take the books TO the students. When I enthusiastically said to one group, “Oh, The Handmaid’s Tale is in here, look, a Summary and Background of Censorship!” 

My student responded, casually, “Cool. Can’t I get that electronically, though?”

It took me a second to adjust, and I said, “Yes! I think so. Let’s look.”

We did. She could, a juxtaposition of “let us talk to each other, and let us use our tech.” 

We all know the effects of the pandemic have forced us to evolve as teachers, as humans. In fact, TYCA (Two Year College Association of National Council of Teachers of English) created a taskforce to study the impact of 2020 on instructors. In crafting the survey, our questions began to sort itself into categories to include: instructional modalities, cognitive/emotional/self-care, impact to workload, institutional support, and teaching. We are just beginning the literature review and hope to start collecting responses in Fall 2022. Overall, collectively, I don’t think we’ve processed the impact 2020 had on us. We may still be running on the adrenaline it took to get us through to the other side. 

My work has changed because my life has changed. I have changed. The logistics, of course, are the easiest to talk about. In a forced instant, we learned how to live in a world of Zoom and Google Meet and WebEx and Live Online and HyFlex and work from home and vaccines and masks and sanitizing and social distancing and how many times we could tolerate hearing the word “unprecedented.” My dining room table turned into my office space and my classroom. Now, instead of a centerpiece and placemats, it’s filled with two monitors, a ring light, my laptop, and a wireless keyboard and mouse. Underneath all the vocabulary, though, I think we also learned to be even more patient (like the judge when the lawyer was a cat: “Sir, I’m not a cat.”), flexible (“Anyone need an extension?”), compassionate (“I am so sorry to hear that you are sick. Please take care of yourself.”), and expert with referrals (“Find free Wi-Fi here. Drive-Thru Food Distribution here. Counseling here.”) I learned we can do hard things (like having to work while home-schooling a kindergartener, a sixth grader with ASD, and a sophomore…Ay!). Though I will never stop learning, and I could likely talk about it a long while, these are some of the lessons I’ve learned from living and teaching in a pandemic.

The belief at the heart of what I do in my teaching practice is to always do what is in the best interest of students. This belief goes back to my first days of teaching at Tolleson Union High School in the chalk powder, maps-from-1952, musty-carpet smelling Old Main.

One of my colleagues, Patricia “Pat” Gordon, was a spindly, former nun, tough as nails, the New Jersey kind, 40 year plus veteran of teaching. She was not easy on me, and even though my last name was Solley, she would deliberately say in her commanding raspy-from-being-a-smoker voice, “See Sully? This is what you have to do,” when referencing anything she thought I did not know how to do. Apparently, I knew nothing.

Pat would take on anyone from administrators to students, pointing her finger, and they would end up thanking her for it. Her toughness paired in equal measure to the compassion she showed her students. They, simply, loved her. One of Pat’s To-Dos (given over teacher’s lunchtime lounge conversation in-between the ones about the good ‘ol glory days) for me was to read The First Days of School: How to be an Effective Teacher by Harry and Rosemary Wong: “Sully, you gotta read this before every school year. It’ll get you ready.”

Out of curiosity and open to anything that would calm my I-just-graduated-from-college-first-year- splotchy-neck-red-in the-face-“I’m teaching seniors in high school” teacher nerves, I found the book at Barnes & Noble. Initially, I thought, what kind of old school antiquated crap was this? It was so rigid and matter of fact, definitely distorting my textbook-ripping John Keating perception of what teaching could be (“Oh Captain! My Captain!”). The Wongs’ book contained such crazy notions like: set clear expectations, be organized, be consistent, what you do on the first day will set the tone for the whole year, and, oh yes, classroom management is paramount. Looking back 23 years later, I have to laugh because I don’t know what I was thinking or why I scoffed at it.

It turns out, Pat was right. Of course she was. She knew that by practicing these matter-of-fact things in her classroom, she indubitably kept her students’ best interest in the center of her classroom. Eventually, Pat became my mentor, and, in her retirement, asked me to take over as sponsor of Interact Club, a service organization paired with the local Rotary Club, “Sully, you can do it. It’s easy. You sell the popcorn. You raise the money. You go to meetings. You volunteer. The students love it. Win-win.”

In 2003, Pat passed unexpectedly after a long day of teaching; at her memorial service, I had the opportunity to publicly acknowledge her enduring impact on my career. To me, she is one of the first people, professionally, who guided me, albeit many moons ago, into the belief that the most effective teaching is always doing what is best for students.

**I’m late to the writing party, but I’ll be adding more than one post this week.**

On the way to class today, I heard an eager, “Hi Ms. Dewey! Ms. Dewey! Hi!” One of my former students sought me out. Immediately, I recognized him with the nagging realization that oh boy, time flies, as it has been at least six years since he enrolled in my ENG091 class, then subsequently for ENG101. He is a veteran, and when he came to GCC initially, he struggled with navigating how the skills he learned and used as an innate leader in the military could integrate into his daily life as a civilian and student. I remember the chilling first lines of his narrative: “If death was a person, I would have shook his hand on October 1, 2009. During a combat patrol in Afghanistan, I was with my platoon of twenty men.” This morning, he wanted to let me know that though he had taken a few years off, he is back and here now to finish his degree. Little did he know that in the earlier part of this week I was finding inspiration in Seattle at the Innovations Conference with the League for Innovation in the Community College, so I couldn’t help but respond with, “Awesome! I think that’s what community colleges do. Our students come, they may have to leave to take care of things, but we are always here to educate them when they come back.”

It is nothing short of appropriate that I ran into him today, when I did, as yesterday, I flew home to Phoenix guiltily mulling over what I was going to write for my blog posts I’ve clearly been postponing. At the conference, the theme of innovation, of course, was ever-present in a majority of the sessions, along with the encouragement that though we are in precarious times in higher education, the importance of the community college remains steadfast. Roy Spence of The Purpose Institute and The Promiseland Project kickstarted the innovative insight with a quote from Emerson, “Do not go where the path may lead, go where there is no path and leave a trail.” This is something, he asserts, we should be conveying to our students as we help them to find what they love to do. After a video of a Norwegian quartet crooning with a beautifully haunting rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” he reveals this is what purpose in our work sounds like because: “Everyone needs to know the words to the song, listen to each other, stand up for when it’s your turn, and it sounds pretty awesome when we sing it together” (Spence, 2020). As community college faculty and leaders, we have a great song to sing.

Martha Kanter continued the message with news on College Promise juxtaposing some of the nation’s challenges like “99% of new jobs are awarded to workers with some college; the cost of college has increased times twelve over the past thirty years; students have accumulated 1.6 trillion in debt; fourteen percent of community college students are homeless” (Kanter, 2020). In Kanter’s keynote, we also heard from a young woman who spoke about her past as a homeless trafficking victim with an eighth grade education who could not speak at the age of 27. Ten years ago, she found an escape in attending community college and is now in a Ph.D. program and leads a non-profit in downtown Seattle. She gave immense gratitude to her community college instructors for changing her life’s trajectory, essentially for saving her life.

We live in challenging, uncertain times, especially in the community college when students have more options for higher education than ever before and are simultaneously facing increasing basic needs insecurity. Indubitably, the Innovations Conference was introspectively motivational regarding my current role and pedagogy. It seems we must remain optimistic, innovative, and continue to believe that, “In doing our work, our community colleges are building the real American Dream for our country” (Kanter, 2020). We will always remain relevant for our students and our communities.

Sleepless in Seattle!

This is my Week 3. I’m behind.

Assessment and evaluation are not exciting words. Are they? Maybe it is the connotation surrounding the words. In twenty years of being an educator, the amount of essays I have graded must be in the billions. A hyperbole? Perhaps. Billion certainly feels like an accurate number sometimes. As a composition teacher, when I think of assessment and evaluation, I think of my students writing essays. It was not until I attended a conference about ten years ago when my view of assessment changed. The district I was working in, at the time, began assigning us to Professional Learning Communities. The definition of a PLC was a group of teachers at the same level, all the senior teachers for example, working together to create common assessments for all of the students. We would meet once a month. At some point, I became the Lead Senior Teacher. All of the PLC Leads were sent to a conference on Learning Communities and Assessment by Solution Tree. There, I heard inspirational solutions from Rob Marzano, Richard and Rebecca DuFour, and Anthony Muhammad. The culture of assessment presented was ground-breaking, research-based, and credible with real-world examples of proof. It made me want to change the world. Well, the assessment world. While I was exposed to definitions and examples of formative and summative assessment, the vital piece of information about assessment that I gleaned from the summit was a protocol of three questions to ask myself about evaluating students:

1. What do I want students to know?
2. How will I know if they learned it?
3. What will I do if they do not?

To me, there was not a choice but to choose to incorporate this innovative way of thinking. Once I embedded the above into my pedagogy, there was no turning back. Of course, the cornerstone of my teaching philosophy is my guiding statement of always doing what is best for students; however, it could not be accomplished without assessing their learning by asking hard questions and being honest with the answers, especially with number three.

Yesterday, in a meeting with a textbook publisher, a question was posed to those in attendance: What’s your favorite class? I started to think about how I would respond, and with each response, I started to realize they are ALL my favorites for varied reasons. I was stuck. How would I respond? Fortunately, my keen colleague to my right said, “What about your favorite one this week?” Ah ha! I could answer that properly.
My favorite class this week was my ENH295 Banned Books and Censorship class. It is taught in a hybrid format and is a concurrent honors/non-honors course. While each week offers rich discussion and thought-provoking inquiry, this week, students were discussing the role of YAL novels and their individual reading selections. One of the books a group read was also a selection that another student had read in a prior K-12 educational setting. She relayed to the class that in the previous instance, the book had a word in it that was considered inappropriate and was thus black-Sharpied out of every text. In our class, she told everyone that she never figured out what the word was. Fortunately, a peer had a copy of the text, and we conducted our own investigation to find the word. Did she find it? Yes! Though, of course, it isn’t appropriate to write here. We then discussed how much energy must have gone into censoring one word. My favorite classes to teach are the ones where my students are engaged and invested in the content. This week, one of those times was in ENH295.

It is simple to say, “Be kind.” It takes more work to apply it. It takes even more work to synthesize it (Right, CRE Learning Community Colleague Sherry? I’m bringing in my Bloom’s here.). One way I think about crafting my skill of kindness is to think of myself, thanks to Carol McCloud’s work and my first grader, as either a bucket filler or a bucket dipper. A bucket filler is a person who practices kindness by proverbially filling people’s emotional buckets. The best way to fill a bucket is by being kind. Listen. Give a compliment. Show gratitude. Of course, the yang to this cheery yin is the gloomy bucket dipper. A bucket dipper is someone who empties other people’s buckets by saying or doing cruel things.

A moment of authentic kindness functions as a salve to soothe emotional shards of absolute grief, frustration, sadness, desolation. Despite this, research shows that our brains pack boxes of negative memories and associations, because of their impact, for safe-keeping more frequently than those that are positive. I believe that seconds of genuine kindness can reverberate, sink in, sponge through the bones eventually attaching themselves to our long term memory, and begin to overlap or push over and supersede the negative.

At the end of the day, we are in the work of helping people and doing what is best for students. When you have the choice to fill or dip, I hope you decide to fill and pass it on.