Horse of a Different Color

Vol 3 No 4

On Friday, I spent the day in Syracuse meeting with other SUNY Honors Directors and Administrators.  Our conversation covered many issues that Honors and Honors students are facing across SUNY.  Attendees came from all over the state - New Paltz, Brockport. Binghamton, Oswego, Albany, Delhi, Ulster, and MCC.  We shared struggles and concerns relating to enrollment, persistence, budgets, faculty and staff support, transfer, and completion.  I learned, or rather had reinforced, that many Honors students at numerous schools of differing degrees and demographics face many of the same issues.

One thing that came out of the meeting that may be of specific interest to some of you is that I have a meeting coming up in a few weeks with MCC and Brockport so we can talk about how us two-years and that specific four year can work together to help our students.  Not just with transfer, but also with developing intellectual scholarship and networking opportunities for Honors students regardless of what college they are attending or will attend.

Also in the realm of tangible items accomplished, I also developed a survey that will be going out to all current Honors-declared students as well as all students enrolled in an Honors course this semester.  You’ll see a variety of questions about your perceptions of Honors and the time you spend in the classes and your plans for the future.  I will use this information to help ensure that Honors at FLCC is serving its specific group of students.  And that leads me to the things I gathered that are less tangible, per se.

Similarities.  Shared experiences.

One thing that comes home to roost every time I talk with other Honors directors is that Honors must always work to serve the population of the college in which it is housed.  Every institution is so different from every other one that part of what I love about gatherings like this is that it forces me to rethink what we are doing and why.   We are so different from other Honors “programs” (first and foremost – we are not a program), and while that once made me feel self-conscious or that we were “doing it wrong”, that has since changed.  Now, I feel more and more strongly that Honors here is the way it is because of who are students are.

I also wrote an email to learn how I might hold workshops for our faculty so that we can have more Honors offerings taught by new Honors faculty.  New seminars and new discipline courses is an important part of the future of Honors at FLCC.  I think there’s at least a handful of faculty out there who want to teach Honors, but aren’t really sure how or even if they can within their disciplines.  (Yes, they can – we just need to work out HOW).

I don’t want to suggest that all the SUNY colleges have Honors that have nothing in common with one another, they absolutely do.  Especially in philosophy.  All Honors are built on developing interdisciplinary, reflective, lifelong learners.  It’s just the paths to get there can change.  Some welcome transfer students, some don’t.  Some require community service, and some do not.  Some are Honors Colleges within a larger university, some are programs that you need to apply for.  Some classes have Honors students sharing seats with non-Honors students.  Some require Honors theses, some have capstone projects.   They require anywhere from 9 to 26 credits of Honors and all have GPA requirements – though they range, too.

All struggle with funding and having the money they need to do things.  All feel understaffed and overworked.  All have some level of flexibility to work with students in different situations, particularly the community colleges.  All want to have stronger ties with their alumni and want to find more and more ways to fund initiatives that will help their students do more and achieve more.

But one thing was abundantly clear.

Every single one of the people there wants to find better ways to help their Honors students become everything they are capable of becoming and I am no different.

Like horses of different colors, we are the same in so many different ways.  Or different in so many of the same ways.

"This is My Fight Song" - Self-Discovery

Vol 3 No 3

Last week, the blog focused on vulnerability and how it’s okay to be uncomfortable sometimes.   As a rule, I send the blog around to various folks, including Honors faculty.  One of them. Dave McGuire, responded with this:

[T]here is also a lot about self-discovery in Honors, how we each have huge tracts of dimly sensed, vast shrouded tracts of as-yet unknown, unrealized potential self that we sometimes yearn to plumb—also scary, perhaps—we might find things we did not expect, or that contradict or threaten the persona.

I love this idea of self-discovery as one of the characteristics of Honors.  It’s actually folded into the idea of reflection and how, in Honors, we try to focus on ourselves as learners in any context.  By doing so, we can break down the walls that separate one discipline from another and can help us transfer learning strategies from one class to another.  We also try to foster a sense of life-long learning – that we will never stop being curious, being exploratory, being passionate delvers into the world around us.  But perhaps one of the core aspects of this that is largely unstated is the fact that it’s not learning in the sense that we are acquiring knowledge.  It’s experiencing the world.  It’s understanding as much as we can.  It’s resisting the urge to fall into a resigned existence formed on habit and comfort.  Thoreau once said that “[t]he mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” and this is the fate from which we would save as many as we can.  To do this – to experience the world with all its glory and its grimness – we must also understand ourselves.  Sometimes, looking inward is the hardest direct to look and doing so from the comfort of a supportive classroom or a gathering of fellow students can ease that process.

It is a classroom in which a student can comfortably refer to her own “gay little feminist heart” with no fear of reproach.

It is a reflective essay in which a student can realize that the wrong environment “can throw [her] so off kilter that [she] do[es] not have the mental capacity for anything other than mindlessly playing with [her] phone”

It’s a male student who realizes that a course that is solely about women “may not affect me directly but certainly matter to me greatly”.

It’s a student who comes to realize “[w]e are all motivated by not only our mental state, but our circumstance” and who feels comfortable discussing her own battles with mental illness in a class about women who face the same battles and make horrific choices as a result.

Last week, I was at a scholarship dinner with the recipient of an award and we happened to be seated at a table with the Provost of FLCC.  He asked her what it was about Honors that was so appealing to her and she immediately responded with “Honors is home.”  From there, she went into a lengthy description of what Honors courses, faculty, and students were like and her passion for it was no less than her passion for conversation about her major, her educational plans, and her desire to teach at a community college.  I’ve seen so many students come through Honors and have some powerful conversations about Tolkien, about Women Who Kill, about the power of memoir, about the beauty of literature, about the future of the world.  But I’ve seen just as many students share heart breaking and uplifting stories about who they are, where they’ve come from, what they are afraid of, and the very things that make them vulnerable.

Not that it is all the sort of thing that keeps me awake at night worrying, or gives me goose bumps as I listen.  Sometimes, it’s just a simple realization that they love a subject more than they thought.  Or that maybe math isn’t outside their skillset.  Or that writing papers doesn’t have to be a painful chore every time.  Even these little self-discoveries are worth savoring, for they may be a ripple in the pond that makes for big changes down the line.  Or maybe, it just made that student's Monday a little bit easier*.

Like a small boat

On the ocean

Sending big waves

Into motion

Like how a single word

Can make a heart open

I might only have one match

But I can make an explosion

“This is My Fight Song”– Rachel Platten

 *Apologies for this late blog…I had some family issues that were pressing…and, as we all know, sometimes life happens when we are busy making plans.

The Path of Honors

Vol. 1 No. 21

The following is the speech given by Denise Button at the Honors Graduation and Awards Ceremony held on May 10, 2017.  Denise has graduated (with 21 credits of Honors) and will be attending the University of Buffalo in the fall to study Business Administration with a focus on International Business.  Her words, as you will see, are powerful.

To all our graduates, congratulations.

First, I would like to start off by congratulating each of the honors students for all of the hard work that we have done to get to this point. 

I think that especially at a community college, it is a struggle sometimes to get through the semester between work, school, and figuring out our new place in this world.  College is a place where you get to decide who you want to be and how you want to get there.  And we all made the choice to be here, not just in college, but in honors.  When you started school and the honors program, you made a promise to yourself to work hard and earn not just an associate’s degree, but either an honors diploma or certificate. 

Once that promise was made, that meant that we had to commit to that promise and everything that it entailed – which meant going into the unknown.

Trying something new, whether it be in college, honors, or life in general means taking a risk.  And it takes courage to take risks, to be brave enough to embrace who each one of us are, and to share that with the world.  I know that when I first started attending FLCC that I was scared.  I was scared of the normal things that most people are, such as: how to afford school, how to juggle all of my many responsibilities while making new friends, and figuring out how to fit in all the other thing that I’m passionate about.  But I was also scared that I wouldn’t do as well in college as I had in high school and that maybe, just maybe, I would discover that college just wasn’t for me.   

But when I applied to FLCC, one of the first people I talked to was Trista Merrill.  I had messaged her because I needed to take an ENG 101 class, but was confused because I had noticed that one of the classes was designated as “honors”.  I didn’t know what being in “honors” meant so, after emailing back and forth with Trista, she encouraged me to try honors.  So I did.  I didn’t just learn about English from Trista, but she got me excited to go to class, and to be in school.  We all think that school can be dull, boring, or monotonous, but this wasn’t my experience in the honors program.  The learning was involved and even fun.  Yes, I learned the material, but I also learned more about myself as a person.  Honestly, some of the best classes that I have taken here at FLCC, were honors.  Honors isn’t just about hard work, but connecting with others and investing in one’s self.

I’m sure that most of us are moving on from FLCC and either continuing our education or going out into the work force.  I think that each of us will soon be able to see just how much hard work pays off.  Because each of us has earned an honors distinction that will separate us from our peers in a way that says “Hey, I didn’t just go to college, but I was also willing and dedicated to take on extra work along the way.”  This experience in college and in the honors program is something that no one can take away from you.  You have made an investment in yourself and your future.

 

And I’m sure that if you’ve had any similar experiences as I have, sometimes you get stressed and overwhelmed.  I think that we have all gotten to a point in a semester when we realize that – “I’m not doing as well as I want to this semester”.  Once you get to this point and soon realize that if you want to continue on the path that you have set for yourself, the only choice you have is to push through this feeling.  And most importantly, that it’s okay to fail and to be disappointed.  Success is a terrific thing.  But how do you get there?  The moments that define you, your character, your strength, are the moments when all you want to do is cry and give up, but you don’t.  Those defining moments when you choose to not accept failure, but to move on and keep working at your success is why you are here today. 

Not only that, but your professors probably didn’t let you give up either.  I know that without my professors here at FLCC, I wouldn’t have been able to handle going to school and juggling all of my other responsibilities.  But I always went to my professors when I knew I needed help.  My professors were more than my teachers in academics, they were teachers in life.  When I needed help, I knew that I could always turn to my professors, especially to my honors professors because I knew that I would be met with understanding and a true concern for me as a student and an individual.  So I would like to congratulate each of you again for being here.  But I would also like to thank all of the honors professors and Trista for dedicating your time to teaching and helping each one of us and reach our true potential.  Without you, we wouldn’t be here today.