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| Last car in the IVC staff parking lot. Thursday night. |
* A familiar axe to grind: the absence of evening oversight continues. The new lighting (in some areas) does not make up for the utter absence of any administrator presence during the long dark evening hours when classes are full, students have questions, faculty have resource needs, etc. Rebel Girl observes that students tend to go to the well-lit coffee cart to ask their questions. Don't get her started about evening classes dismissing early or the numbers of people she observes on their knees in inky drifts of toner in front of the decrepit copiers in A-200 ...As faculty no longer have access to a printer to even print out copies to copy elsewhere or project with document cameras, she has also observed frustration and tears. Once her own.
* Another axe: Professors of English such as Rebel Girl all too often moan about the diminishment of the language. She caught herself doing just that during the week when she advertised the recently extended deadline of the IVC Foundation scholarship program to her WR 201 classes. It was, she announced, an opportunity for them to apply and for Rebel Girl to write more recommendation letters. Rebel Girl can speak passionately and persuasively about scholarships (and grants) because she cobbled together her own higher education with plenty of them (CAL, Pell, Regent's, Assistance League, etc.). She turned on the projector, pulled up the website and began to guide her students through the process.
The students noticed before Rebel Girl did because she had her back to the screen.
The misspelling. The erratic capitalization. The comma splices. The class had just reviewed these issues in their own work.
Here's just one example:
Sigh. It was a teaching moment. So, Rebel Girl taught — about the application process (spelled elsewhere on the website "APPLICAITON") as well as the need to proofread with care in case one's authority and message was lost, diminished. It was a good discussion which also covered the point that the message was indeed not lost despite the many errors and yet, the class acknowledged, it was unfortunate. After the initial titters, everyone seemed vaguely embarrassed.
