The Blog Returns with Brianna

Vol. 3 No. 16

Hello, friends.  This blog has been quiet for a bit as we work out how to launch a somewhat new approach to the blog.  We are going to start trying to have more and more students share their experiences with Honors and the work they are doing in their Honors classes.  If you want to share some thoughts, please email me at honorsstudies@flcc.edu.

This week, our blog comes from Brianna Smith ('19) who is an AA Liberal Arts and Sciences : Literature major who is graduating this May.  She is heading up north to SUNY Potsdam to continue studying Literature and would like to someday be a professor.  Perhaps at a fine community college like this one!

Honor’s Blog.

When I started my search for transfer schools, the second question (after: do they have my major?) that I asked was: do they have an Honor’s program? If the answer was no, they were automatically shifted down my list of potentials. But if the answer was yes, I began to delve deeper, needing to know if transfer students could be accepted and what the program looked like. I settled at last on SUNY Potsdam, who offer an Honor’s program for which transfer students are eligible, a program which, like Honors Studies at FLCC, promise smaller class sizes and an enhanced learning experienced. This search however was not unprompted nor the result of errant curiosity.

Since I began my collegiate journey I have found that my experiences as an Honors student have been among the most formative of my time at FLCC. Though I stumbled into Honors quite on accident I became immediately smitten and soon designated myself an Honors Studies scholar. The Honors courses at FLCC have allowed me to realize a more complete image of myself and for the first time craft a vision of my future which feels both satisfying and achievable. During my time in the program, I have completed thus far twenty-four honors credits, have attended dinners and convocations, and have been invited to speak to faculty about what the program means from a student perspective. Yet I’m not unique in this.

The gift of Honors is that it opens students up to a world of possibility they often never knew existed before. By fostering curiosity and the academic tradition through conversational avenues, Honors Studies gives students the gift of exploration – both of various topics, and of themselves. Honors also gifts to students a chance to share their unique experiences regaining their Honors events and courses and fosters an environment where student voices are highly valued and variant perspectives seen as equitable in what they bring to discussion. The reason so many students come back to Honors semester after semester is that it gives a chance to find and share one’s voice, and oftentimes a platform to do so beyond even the walls of the classroom. Through Honors, students build deep and lasting relationships with one another and rapport with professors and staff, bonds that last far beyond the walls of the Honors House.

This is my last semester at FLCC, and though a stringent schedule has prevented me from adding to my Honors class-list I still consider myself deeply entrenched in Honors Studies. Perhaps this gets at the most beautiful, most poignant lesson I have yet learned through Honors: that it never leaves you. Honors is not a spring flower which withers away, but rather is a bud which, when properly nourished, plants roots deep inside of your heart. The lessons which have strengthened me as a learner and an individual, the unforgettable nights spent in three hour seminars, the friendships I have built through the program – they will all remain with me long after I have last looked upon those hallowed halls. I want too, to believe like that though I shall soon be whisked away from the smell of brewing tea and the soft whispering of carpeted footsteps, some semblance of me will remain with the house and with Honors. Because Honors’ greatest gift is its people, the students and staff who make it possible, who give Honors a life all its own. We are all a part of that life, whether a student earns three credits or thirty. I’d like to image that when I am in a new Honors program, even three hours from this place which has become home, I will carry Honors with me with the certainty that it now carries some of me in exchange. 

Monkeys and Magic

Vol 3 No 5

This is a special blog that invites you to help FLCC Honors Studies by filling out a survey through Survey Monkey.  If you are enrolled in an Honors Studies class or are formally declared as an Honors student, you should have received a link via email.  You may have even received it more than once.  This blog is to shamelessly implore you to take a few minutes to complete it.  It is only 10 questions and it would help us a great deal.  Why?

Well, because Honors Studies is nothing without the students.  That is such a constant in a college environment.  In some ways, education is different than any other sort of business in that everything employees of an institution do is nothing without the students...even if they have nothing directly to do in the process.  We make policies and create programs, we hire folks and let folks go, we encourage and support professional development, we have finances and reports, contracts and unions and the list goes on and on.  But without all of you, we are nothing, really.

So, it is so important that we stop every once in awhile at the very least, to ask you what you think.  That's what this survey is about.  I've spent quite some time make a 63 page Honors Studies User's Guide that has so much information in it.  I've create rubrics and talked to various committees on campus.  I've talked to other colleges.  I've done so much to help make sure that Honors is sustainable and will continue to grow because it has firm roots in the ground. 

Honors is so many things to the students who invest their time and energy into it and it's their stories that add the magic to everything I do.  The user's guide has a picture of an Honors student who is clearly laughing and if you look at our Flickr stream you will see so many students who look passionate and engaged and happy.  This is the magic.  The things I've talked about in other blogs about students feeling at home and welcomed in Honors, even if they also feel challenged and uncomfortable. 

I often collect stories, and we of course read your thoughts in your reflective essays and in your journals.  I gather anecdotes in Facebook messages and in emails, in my office and in the halls, and in Honors events like the dinner (10/30 at 5:00 in Stage 14).  These reminders of what Honors means to the people living in it are so very important.

Without you, there is no magic.

This survey is a different way to learn what you are thinking and to gather important information so we can keep making Honors Studies better for everyone.

If you did not receive the link, please contact me at trista.merrill@flcc.edu or honorsstudies@flcc.edu and we will send you the link.

Thank you!

"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.

(Un)Comfortable

Vol 3 No 2

I recently polled my Perspectives on Tolkien class and my Composition I class – both Honors – and asked them to give me one word they thought of when they thought of Honors.  Now, these classes, for the most part, are made of up two different groups of students.  Tolkien is small – just 9 students – and most of them are not new to Honors or to the college.  The other class has 19 and many of them are brand new not just to Honors, but to FLCC altogether.  All of them knew they were signing up for an Honors class, though, so they had heard SOMETHING about it prior to registration.  The Tolkien class each gave me two words because they wanted to not be limited (and I complied).  Here are the compiled words.

Amazing	Uncertainty
Homey	Stressful
Advanced	Fun
Gifted	Outlet
Home	Refreshing
Powerful	Exclusive
Curiosity (appeared twice)	Advanced
Drive	Rad
Freedom	Open-Ended
Unique	Unique
Welcoming	Learning
Terrifying	Extraordinary

Now, part of me wanted to leave a few of those words off the list – like stressful and terrifying – but I knew I couldn’t do that.  And, quite frankly, I’m not sure that I really DO want to leave them off.  They aren’t the most positive words, of course, but they aren’t necessarily as negative as they may appear.  Last year at the National Collegiate Honors Council, I heard someone say something to the effect of “Come in and make yourself uncomfortable” and that has stuck with me.  I’m also reminded of Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice to “do one thing every day that scares you.”  Being challenged and afraid and uncertain do make us terribly vulnerable…but there is something powerful in vulnerability, too.  So, yes, an Honors class may challenge you to face things that scare you – like having to participate in class or not being able to ‘hide’ in the back – but you’ve chosen to do that because you have some of those other things in the list.  You are also amazing and unique and you have a penchant for learning.  You will very quickly learn how welcoming Honors is and how much it can come to feel like home. 

I recently watched a student struggle with some of these concepts even though she was a firm believer in Honors and fully endorses all that it offers.  Folks who know Jill Bond know that she is one of the most prolific delvers into Honors, but it’s not always an easy path even for her.  As part of FLCC’s Women’s Initiative on Leadership, she read Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly:  How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way we Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.  She was not a fan of the book at first, even going so far as to say that she “despised and rejected this entire ideology since vulnerability has never quite seemed to work out.”  The more she reflected, however, the more she realized that “Brown was right when she said vulnerability is the key to creativity and inspiration, since the more I shared my work and received feedback on it, the more motivated I was to continue working and striving towards increased skill and ability.”  In the end, she vows to “actively try to be more vulnerable since clearly it is helping in the creation of my own artistic and academic pieces.”  

This is a powerful realization and a testament to what Roosevelt encourages of us.

While I remain committed to curiosity as the cornerstone and tagline of Honors, I wonder if it has two other core concepts.  “Come in and make yourself uncomfortable” may not be the most welcoming of messages, but it is something to realize about Honors.  Being uncomfortable isn’t such a bad thing if you know that you are in a safe place in which to push yourself beyond your comfort zone.  And inviting students to be vulnerable may not encourage them to join us in Honors, but what if they come and find themselves ‘at home’ – then, perhaps, they can feel comfortable enough in their discomfort to reveal who they are and where their passions lie.  After all, our passions are close to our hearts as well as being close to our minds.

Come to Honors and share with us…you might find yourself feeling vulnerable and terrified and stressed – but, more importantly, you will feel welcomed and supported.

Come in and make yourself (un)comfortable.

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.