May I be your serving wench?

It's late, I'm tired, and I don't much feel like staying up to report on tonight's hurried and largely uneventful meeting of the SOCCCD Board of Trustees. I'll just make a few notes and put up some pics. I'll do more tomorrow. Or not.

The trustees had a special meeting at 3:00, then a closed session at 5:00, and then this open session that finally started around 7:45. So you can well imagine they were in a big hurry to get done and get home. Can't blame 'em, I guess.

For some reason, this year, they made a big freakin' deal out of the faculty who attained tenure. These instructors stood up, we stared at 'em, and then they were sent off for cake and punch, just outside the entrance of the Ronald Reagan Room.

I was told that, written upon the cake was one word: "CONGRATULATION." Raghu must've been in charge of that detail. 

Gooey cake brings out the worst in people, I guess. Upon hearing about this celebratory confection, several trustee eyes lit up. Their lips moved. "Yum," they said. 

Raghu's no dummy. He immediately told Tracy to get seven fat slices, tout de suite. She scurried out the door.

Tracy hurried back with the slices. But then, get this. Raghu insisted on serving each trustee personally. I listened very carefully, and I do believe he told each trustee, "May I be your serving wench this evening?" 

"Yep."

There was only one public comment. Some kid came up to carp about all the smoking going on at Saddleback college. To hear this kid tell it, this smoke is like nuclear fallout or worse. We all stared at 'em. His pitch kinda petered out. At the end, even the kid didn't seem interested in his proposal, which is to move the college closer to a "no smoke" zone.

Me, I'm thinking we should move to a "no Raghu" zone. With smoke, lots of it. I don't care.

"May I be your serving wench this evening?"
"Yum."

All tomorrow's board meetings

The South Orange County Community College District Board of Trustees will meet twice tomorrow.

• At 3:00 p.m., they’ll convene for a Special Board Meeting (pdf) (in the Ronald Reagan Room, near Health Sciences).

According to the “notice,” the board will convene “for the purpose of discussing the Concept Plan at the Advanced Technology and Education Park in Tustin.”

Members of the community will be given an opportunity to make comments at the start of the meeting.

The city of Tustin needs to sign off on the district’s plan for ATEP. But it has been clear for quite some time that the plan is unacceptable to city officials. Unless things have changed recently, the district is likely headed for litigation.

For the last six months or so, Chancellor Raghu Mathur has made a great point of noting the rapidity of growth (courses, headcount) at ATEP. Some insiders have suggested that Mathur has pushed and highlighted development there in order to put the district in the most favorable position in the event of a legal tangle with Tustin. 

• The regular board meeting will start with a CLOSED SESSION at 5:00 p.m. and an open session at 7:00 p.m.

You can download the agenda for the regular board meeting here (“current agenda”).

Item 3.1 includes a board request for a report “on Reduction of District Property Tax Rate.”

Now wait a minute. As a “basic aid” district, we want property valuations in OC to stay high ‘cause that means we get more money. What we don’t want, then, is for property owners to request a downward valuation of their property.

So this ironic, right?

Tuesday’s discussion items are the “basic skills initiative” and “curriculum.” So we can expect the usual dog and pony shows. You know, embarrassed administrators, doing Mr. Goo's bidding.

Item 5.12 concerns ATEP in Tustin: approval of an agreement with “Austin-Foust Associates, Inc. on a time and material basis.” AFA is a consulting firm that does “traffic engineering and transportation planning.”

Item 5.19 seems odd (to these fiscally challenged eyes). It’s an amendment to the district budget. The update involves a change in expenditures, I guess. One item—07/08 Allocation to Saddleback, basic skills—shows the odd allocation figure of $5. What’s that about? Maybe nothing.  

Item 5.22 is ratification of contractor agreements. This lists such agreements as a $60K ATEP landscaping deal.

Oddly (again, to these fiscally challenged eyes), among the contractors are four that (as per recommendation) are slated to get $0, including “The City of Tustin.”

Apparently, the Tustin item involves a “Landscape Maintenance Agreement to require SOCCCD to install certain parkway improvements for the ATEP project.”

Item 6.5 is approval of the Santander, Spain “study abroad” trip. It’ll be interesting to see what Wagner and Fuentes do with this. Usually, they vote against it, I think, 'cause they're very staunch, as you know.

Item 6.9 concerns academic personnel actions—the hiring of instructors. Part-timers, mostly.

I noticed that, included among the “temporary part-time/substitute staff” is a Doctor of Chiropractic. (He started work in January.)

What on earth does this fellow teach for us? And do we teach homeopathy and acupuncture, too?

VELVET UNDERGROUND: All Tomorrow's Parties


Nico does same, in the eighties: All Tomorrow's Parties

Gracias a la Vida (Rebel Girl)

     Sometimes it is a charmed life, Rebel Girl remarked to Red Emma late Thursday night as they hurtled south on the 405 in their rattling tin can of a Corolla. The observation sounded like a bad line out of a mid-century novel but she didn't care. She said it anyway and squeezed his hand. He knew what she meant.

     They had spent the evening at UCLA's Royce Hall, named after Josiah Royce, that California philosopher idealist. Rebel Girl invariably teaches him every semester. She wondered if she could remember Royce's words chiseled in pale rosy stone which spanned the stage. She could: 

Education is using the tools the race has found indispensable.

     Then, Joan Baez came on that stage and for the next two hours sang selections from her nearly fifty year career, opening up with "The Lily of the West" and closing with "Gracias a la Vida," and in between was just about everything else, new and old, or so it seemed. 

     Rebel Girl has noticed that she weeps more easily these days. It started, she believes, when the little guy was born.

     So she sat last night in that grand hall and wept from time to time as the music did its conjuring act, summoning people and the past so it seemed that the great hall wasn't filled with strangers but was instead filled with everyone she'd ever known. Then, as the audience filed up and out, Rebel Girl and Red followed a friend backstage. 

     The friend they followed had worked closely with Baez back in the day and could tell stories about Bob Dylan's appetites.

     Rebel Girl and Red met this friend when they were political organizers and now had known each other, they reckoned, for about 21 years. The friend seemed concerned and a bit confused that she had not, during all those years, introduced them to Baez before. They reassured her that it was okay. They wore blue wristbands which they showed from time to time to the people who cared about them and shuffled through a series of rooms and hallways, pausing, moving, waiting. 

     Then, there was Joan Baez. A barefoot, elegant beauty who looked a bit weary but was gracious all the same. 

     Rebel Girl shook her hand and managed to stammer out a "thank you" and that was about it. It was enough. She watched Baez greet the small group, laugh, share a few stories. It was more than enough.

     

     Then they were in their rattling Corolla, the heat turned up, heading south. And Rebel Girl thought about her charmed life, where she came from and where she is now, as they drove past the exits of nearly all the places she lived as a girl who began to listen to Joan Baez because Baez was a brown girl like her with long dark hair: Los Angeles, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Gardena, Torrance, San Pedro. 

      Gracias a la vida indeed.

TigerAnn—or Chupacabra?

Sometimes I just snap away promiscuously. I went outside and did that today. I then downloaded the pics, and this was one of 'em.

It's just that silly cat, TigerAnn, enjoying some grass.

Protests at Cypress College

Above is the OC Register’s brief video coverage of yesterday's protest, at Cypress College, over display of a photograph. The photo shows a young woman wearing a shirt that is similar to the flag of Vietnam while standing near a bust of Communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.

Protests were threatened a year ago at Irvine Valley College over the display of the Vietnamese flag among a discreet presentation of "flags of the world" along the "atrium" of the Student Services Building. IVC administration chose to take down all of the flags. Some on campus objected to the de facto knuckling under to what they felt were offensive demands and threats.


Cypress College has consistently refused to remove the offending photograph. As you can see, thus far, the promised protests haven't amounted to much.

As some of our readers have noted, more than a few members of Orange County's Vietnamese community have joined in the defense of free speech and have denounced the censoring spirit of some of these protests. 

Rebel Girl's Bad Dream

In her dream, Rebel Girl was contacted by the college and informed that a famous theologian would be soon making an appearance. Rebel Girl imagined it would be an event similar to the recent one with Ray Bradbury and that she was being contacted as part of the course. You know, writer comes to campus, contact the English teachers.

But no.

The theologian would be speaking, it seemed, not in the new theater but in the bedroom of Rebel Girl's six-year-old son. The college had contacted her so she could be ready.

Wait a minute, Rebel Girl said.

"What?" the college replied. (In dreams, colleges can talk.)

"You can't do that," she complained. "My son's room has only one chair and besides, it's a mess. I mean, seriously. Littered with Legos since Christmas. It's really not the right venue. And parking in the canyon is terrible."

The college was adamant.

Another professor weighed in. "You can't hold the talk there," she pointed out in an email to the college president. "It's not even on campus. It's in the canyon."

The college refused to change its mind.

Rebel Girl, not knowing what else to do, started cleaning up her son's bedroom and prepared for the hordes to arrive.

The speaker arrived first.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

And then, thankfully, Rebel Girl woke up.

“I deserve a A”

From the New York Times:

Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes

… “Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor [Marshall] Grossman [of U of Maryland] said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
…
James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.

Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

Sarah Kinn, a junior English major at the University of Vermont, agreed, saying, “I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B.”….