Teaching College Students - Harder Than It Looks

This May Term I was lucky enough to get the chance to work with Dr. Jeremy Paden in a different way than I have before, not as a student in a class, but we worked together to teach his Spanish III May Term course while helping me prepare to be a Spanish Teacher next year in Memphis.

I invested in a Theory of Second Language Instruction book and Dr. Paden slowly worked with me to help me develop my skills as an instructor and as a speaker and writer in the Spanish Language.  We took it slowly at first but by the second week of class I was completely in charge of a test review and the administration of a test. I've taught lessons and lead discussions and felt pretty teacher-like in general, but I've learned that college students kind of lack the interest and creativity that they once had in their earlier years.

I've worked extensively with Middle School and High School students and even if their enthusiasm is misplaced and they don't always behave as they should, they are still excited about being in class (even if they're only excited because their best friend is there.)  So here is my challenge to you, whether a perspective student, Transy Alumn, parent, or friend: find a reason to be excited about learning, to be passionate about the things that you're doing whether or not they're required by your university, school, or job, be excited and be willing to learn!

*Stepping off my soapbox*

The cool thing about Transy is that students have the ability to do these kind of things, to work independently with professors on mutually interesting topics.

Hope you're having a great May!

The Great Inauguration

In case you hadn't heard, Transy has a new president this year, Dr. R. Owen Williams. And last week, which started on Wednesday due to May Term Break, President Williams, or Owen as I hear he likes to be called and how I usually refer to him, was inaugurated into our great university.  It was a great hurray that last three days and three nights and the students got to be fairly involved.

The first night there was a barbecue with live music and entertainment.

We had walking tours through campus and had a Civil War Expert Panel

Yale professor David Blight examined the war's legacy in American popular culture, particularly in the writings of Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren.

There was a fine-arts showcase featuring individuals and student groups

Members of ImpropTU, the improv group, and Formally Known As, the accapella group, collaborated 

The President was inauguration Friday Morning on the Steps of Old Morrison

For some reason, he got a brand new mace

The ceremonies crossed into the Crimson Affair, our Homecoming Dance of Sorts where we crown Miss Transylvania and Mr. Pioneer

Seniors Holly Milburn, a basketball player, and Matt Elmore, Vocal Performance Major were crowned

**All Pictures were taken from the Transylvania University Facebook Group**

Transy Gets Down with Philanthropies

Last semester was a big one for fundraising for our local philanthropies.  Along with my production of The Vagina Monologues, there were events that benefited Collin's Classic for Children with Cancer, God's Pantry, Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, Reforest the Bluegrass, Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, and many others.

Chi Omega's Campus Sing, on of the biggest events of the year, benefits God's Pantry by collecting cans and food items to donate which earns different organizations points to win the can collecting competition. Contrary to the name actually is more of a dance competition than a singing competition, the winners this year were the Independent Women and the brothers of Delta Sigma Phi.

The Indy Women rocking out.

The Sig's doing their thing

Delta Delta Delta's Water Wars benefits Collin's Classic is an aquatics competition with everything from raft relay races to belly flop contests.  The Delta's collect change and have a raffle to raise money.

Footage of the Belly Flop Contest

Phi Mu's Hoop-a-paluza benefits Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and is a free throw competition where the free-thrower gathers sponsors for each basket they make.  The event featured a game between the Female All-Star Basketball team and the Devastors, a F league fraternity basketball team. 

Delta Sigma Phi helps plant trees to Reforest the Bluegrass and Phi Kappa Tau competitively eat their way into donating money to the Hole in the Wall Gang.  The Whole Campus get involved on the Martin Luther King Day of Service and the men of the Kappa Alpha Order lead the men on campus in Walk a Mile in her Shoes.  The Brothers of Pi Kappa Alpha play in their Nintendothon to raise money and the sisters of Alpha Omicron Pi Bowl for Kid's Sake. 

KA's strut their stuff in heels

There's never a shortage of service opportunities, in fact we have a whole office, The Office of Community Service and Civic Engagement, dedicated to helping students find ways to serve the community. 

Fit for Life!

I'm not sure how much you've looked into the curriculum requirements for graduation but at Transy one of the classes that every single student with hopes of graduating must take is Lifetime Fitness.   The university says it's important because it,  "underscores the University's belief that a sound body is the natural complement to a sound mind. The class emphasizes that physical activity leads to improved cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, strength, and endurance for everyone. Proper nutrition, stress management, and other wellness concepts are also key to this program."  Or in other words, it's kind of like a health class and a PE class all rolled into one.

At the beginning of the semester you take pretests in both your cardiovascular health (1.5 Mile run) and your muscular health (a variety of weight lifting, push-ups, etc.) the pretest is supposed to show you where you need improvement and allow you the ability to reflect on the progress you made at the end of the semester when you take your post-tests in the same areas.  In my case, I was not surprised that I felt like death after my run and I couldn't hardly bench press 10 pounds, I scored among the very low on the proficiency scale in my weight lifting ability and was in the slow part of the class on my run.  Now, don't get me wrong, I use to be an active athlete in high school and has intended to swim at Transy but as it goes so often with the best intentions, I didn't swim and my activity was limited to walking around campus, walking downtown to work, and dancing on the weekends.  The idea of a post-test is what motivated me to get my butt in shape and to work hard to become more fit (well that and the fact that my sister is getting married in June.)

At the beginning of the semester I was, no joke, afraid of the weigh machines; I though I would hate every minute spent on them but I soon found that I got to move up in weights when I got strong enough and it became a competitive game for me.  I got to focus on the muscle groups that I wanted to tone (my arms for the strapless bride's maids dresses) and was set free to work on my own pace.  The professor monitored our activity through fitness journals so I also wanted to show him that I was making advances so that was another motivator to do well.  I enjoyed the weights but still loathe cardio, thankfully the Beck Fitness Center has an amazing assortment of machines to work out on so I got to use the elliptical (or the stationary bike if I had some homework to catch up on) and got to avoid running until our post test.

We had lecture once or twice a week and covered topics from cancer to STI's to cardiovascular health to nutrition.  Our professor, Don Lane, was the basketball coach at Transy for many years and had a lot of interesting stories as well as a lot of practical knowledge both in the gym and in the classroom.  After my post-test run, I was having a lot of trouble breathing and he hypothesized I was having an asthma attack and helped me regain the ability to breathe and sent me to the nurse who confirmed his diagnosis of exercise induced asthma (something I had thought was a possibility since my swimming days in HS but had never had checked out.)

I had put off taking Lifetime for sometime but I'm glad I took it when I did because it really did get me back into the shape I was when I was a high school athlete, I lost 5 lbs and two pant sizes, gained a lot of muscle, feel much better about myself.  It's a class that a lot of students think is unnecessary but for the .5 credits and pass/fail grade it was worth it for me.

Senior Projects Take Over the World!

Hello dear blogosphere!

I hope that you're enjoying your spring, we've been experiencing monsoon season here in Lexington but we've had a couple glimmers of beautiful weather.

My last entry left you all a couple of months ago in the middle of winter semester.  While I was only taking 3.5 credits (classes), last semester was definitely was the busiest I've ever had.  This was due mostly in part to my second senior seminar, my Computer Science Senior Project.

A part of every major on campus, senior seminar allows students to complete a final and culminating work in their major field of study.  Most majors produce a major research paper, like I did in my Spanish Senior Sem, but there are some that do project based learning, like my computer science course.  Don't get me wrong, we had to write, oh we had to write; we ended up writing over 20+ pages of technical documents and proposals in addition to a final research paper and we also produced a final project.  A unique trait to the CS senior project is that we all worked in pairs to complete most of the work for the course except for personal reflections and the final paper.  The idea is that there is seldom a time in the CS field that you'll work on a project on your own without collaboration with at least one peer.

My partner and I created a interview tutorial and simulator targeted at the first time interviewer; I worked on the webdesign and the collection of information and population of the tutorial and my partner did the simulator.  We worked with Michael Cronk from Career Development and Gary Deaton, the director of the Writing, Rhetoric, and Communication program to bridge both information on how to conduct yourself verbally and nonverbally in an interview.

A screen shot of our web interface

If you're interested in checking it out, you can find it at the KING Interview Tutorial and Simulator.

Some of the other projects that were done include a spider identification project (SPIDA), a class scheduler, a work scheduling system, an interactive genetics tutorial program, and a couple of other neat things.  If you're interested in Computer Science at Transy feel free to email me or leave a comment here if you want to know more about our senior projects.