Grab Your Things....

Vol 2 No 7

The following is a transcript of the words I used to open the Honors Studies Fall 2017 Dinner.  I hope you will enjoy these words....and perhaps next semester, you will join us.

Robert Frost once said that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Perhaps related to this is a song that has been stuck in my head for over a week now. The title or the rest of the song isn’t terribly important because it’s one line and one line only: “grab your things I’ve come to take you home…”

With those two quotes, I welcome you to the fall 2017 Honors Studies dinner.

Frost’s quote is a particularly valid one when we look at the admissions policies of a community college. We are an open admission institution, which means if students come here (and fill out the necessary paperwork), then we let them come. As a result, we get a wide range of students here from all walks of life with experiences that run the gamut from relatively uneventful to full of chaos and change. My colleagues will nod their heads when I say that as a faculty member, I’ve heard some stories that have broken my heart over the years. For every story of success, there seems to be a companion story of tremendous struggle and overcoming the odds. Paired with that, however, is the realization that what students find at FLCC, in general, is a place to belong and that belongingness is something they grow to appreciate more and more the longer they are here. The same is true for the faculty experience. I have found my 13 plus years here to be full of support and encouragement from my peers for myself and for our students. From senior faculty (of which I am now counted) when I first began here to the newer faculty who are keen to get involved in any initiative that centers on students, this truly is a community.

Honors Studies is no different and, like so many aspects of the Honors experience, it seems that we are an intensified version of what is found in the community of this college as a whole. My anecdotal experience is that those in Honors feel a little deeper, experience a little more profoundly, and are impacted a little more keenly as a whole than the entirety of the college around them. As a result, some of them come to us with the most heart-wrenching stories.

I recently asked two sets of Honors students to name one thing that scares them and the list was not what I expected. In those quick notes written in a manila folder, I learned that not only did they have powerful backgrounds and stories, but they were trusting enough to tell me what they feared. I expected to read things like spiders, or the dark, or confined spaces, or horror movies, or public speaking, and there were some of those, of course. What I did not expect to read was how many students were afraid of losing someone they loved or feared loneliness and solitude. I read about students being afraid of life, of oblivion, of death, of failure, of people, and of emotional turmoil. And the most popular answer among them all was that students were simply afraid of the future. This is a statement of our times, I think, and something many of us are feeling.

In other contexts, I’ve heard so many students in Honors tell stories of domestic violence, abuse, drug addiction, bullying, anxiety, depression, and unstable families. My heart breaks every time. There’s more that I could say, but I do not intend this talk to be a negative or troubling one…because all of the things I just recounted I tell you for only one reason, and that is to talk about the flip side of that. Because by whatever path those students took to arrive at this place where they tell me their dark stories, the point is that they have found a place to tell them. They have found belonging.

The way students talk about their Honors classes is as heart-warming as those other stories are heart-wrenching. Last year, a student took courage from class discussions to email Dr. Nye about her thoughts regarding the national climate following the election. Why? Because she “left these classes feeling closer to my professors and to my peers.” I had a black student stop after class just a couple weeks ago to thank me for talking about race issues in class because when she’d tried to do so elsewhere, she’d been silenced. When I asked a transgender student to tell me which pronoun he preferred, he told me that he has found more acceptance and tolerance here than he has in his own family. I’ve seen students in tears for the sole reason that we had reached the end of the semester and that chapter of their academic journey was ending. I once had a group of current Honors students pool their resources and send a box of clothing, gift cards, toys, and art supplies to a former Honors student they didn’t even know because she was a single mom who had fallen on hard times. I could go on and on from the little gestures of students supporting students and even when they reach out to me when they know I’m struggling with something myself. As much as curiosity is the brain of Honors; this is its heart.

My colleagues will attest that while we may see this in other classes as well, we almost always see it in our Honors classes. Honors students support each other and form friendships; they challenge each other and respect each other; they debate and discuss and celebrate intellectual curiosity even as they share a laugh and tease one another. They are eager to share their excitement about the work they are doing and they are quick to ask one another for input and guidance if they are stuck or at a loss. I’ve seen hugs and outreach on a level that I haven’t seen anywhere else. I can think of no other more powerful word to use than family; and anyone who has ever heard me talk about my own family will know that this is not a word I use lightly. And so, my friends, as we share a meal together in celebration of Honors, let us remember everything that it stands for. Honors is reflection, analytical inquiry, and intellectual curiosity, but it is also so many things that we do not assess as a college and cannot measure. It is where you belong. And so, my friends, grab your things….and welcome home.

Dinosaur Thoughts....

Vol. 1, No. 4

I hand wrote this last evening while having dinner in Syracuse following a pre-retreat gathering with six other Honors Directors from various SUNY schools...

So, I am sitting at Dinosaur BBQ with a brain very full after just two hours of meeting with a (hopefully) comparatively small group of Honors directors.  Rockland, Canton, Ulster, Delhi, Brockport, New Paltz and, later, Potsdam were all represented.  There were as many different models as there were folks in the room;  everything from 'we have 400 students' to 'we just graduated our first'.  We were both two-year schools and four-year schools (and even one that is both) and we talked about all manner of Honors.

Here are some things that I learned...

1) Four years schools expect community service as part of their Honors programs.  They do not, however, expect their community college transfers (and they DO accept transfer students!) to have done any.  They don't lower the overall requirement, but since it is only 40 hours, that doesn't seem onerous.  They really seemed to understand that acclimation to the college experience is important and often even more so for community college students who so often have much more on their plates. It was clear that while they felt that service was important, it was not and should not be more important than students doing well in their two-year college and becoming adept in the academic setting.  This aligned nicely with what I feel - which is that service is important, but it needs to find its place and trying to universally apply it to a community college setting might be difficult.  So much of our population consists of first generation students, returning students, students with full-time jobs, students with children, students with other immense challenges.  I'm not saying we can't do it or it shouldn't be part of community college at ALL, I'm just relieved that it is not an expectation.

2)  Our "program" is unique.  For one thing, it is not a program, though we are in the process of gathering data about it so we can assess it like a program.  Many of my colleagues (in fact, I think all of them) have an admissions process.  This intake involves things like high school GPA, SAT and ACT scores, applications, and interviews.  Students have to APPLY to be Honors, even at the other community colleges.  And that works for them.  But for us, you really only have to be curious and I think that works for US.  If there is even a spark of honors in you, we will find it.  Every time I go to events, I worry a bit that our Honors will be dismissed or not taken seriously because it is unique in this way.  But I'm new - and what I'm learning is that Honors people seem to embrace and supper Honors as a concept, not as a model.

3) There are as many ways to realize Honors as there are imaginations to dream them up.  I told my colleagues about a student at FLCC who discovered Honors simply because she was interested in the topic of the course.  As a result, she changed her major, declared herself an Honors Student, and began to take other Honors courses.  Prior to this, she often lacked confidence because of a learning disability and bad experiences in the past.  When I told my colleagues this story, they nodded.  They said things like 'that is cool' and expressed excitement on our behalf that our Honors model allows this sort of self-discovery to happen.  The song of the day was 'what works for your campus' and it was a refrain that I'm learning more and more as I attend events like this and talk to other Honors Directors both local to our state and across the country.

4)  Capstone is an end word.   Someday, I hope that we will have what I would have called a capstone class or project to round out the Honors experience at FLCC.  But today, I learned that some don't like that word because it implies that the top has been reached.  This is problematic when we think about how Honors is meant to encourage lifelong learning.  Why not call it a signature project?  Or a milestone course?  Whether a student is going from a two year to a four year, two year to the work force, four year to post graduate, or four year to work force, the attributes learned in Honors will go with them.  The story is not ending just because the student is leaving our institution, and it seems like even our language should reinforce that idea.  It's all about the stories.

We all have stories.  And despite the work that seems insurmountable and never-ending, it's the stories that keep the heart of Honors beating, for four hundred students or four.  I am proud to be facilitating those stories and helping to write them and I am energized by the work my colleagues are doing across SUNY, across our own campus, and, perhaps most of all, across our classrooms.

What's your Honors story?

-T

"I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into?"

Sam to Frodo, The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien