**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.