It's NOT Just a Comic Book!

Vol 3 No 6

Today!  Go to ComicCon and earn a point of Honors!  All you have to do is go and experience as much of ComicCon as you can, then write a 500 word reflective journal, then write a reflective essay at the end of the semester that draws from all the Honors events (or other learning experiences you have). 

For the journal, you just need to reflect on the experience you had.  You can look into and explore questions like these...

• · I am/was most excited to learn… I am/was most anxious about… 
• · The thing I am most curious or confused about is… 
• · My ideas about this event come from/are informed by… 
• · I hope to connect this to my academic/professional/personal life through… 
• · I’m interested in this topic because I want to find out… 
• · Probably the most compelling/disturbing/lingering question raised by this topic is…. 
• · Overall, the most meaningful/surprising thing I learned from this was… 
• · Identify and reflect on specific moments in which something significant occurred (a realization, an obstacle overcome, a setback encountered, etc.). 
• · What prior skills and experiences did you bring to the course/event which either helped or hindered your learning process or your participation? 
• · How did your initial preconceptions and expectations of the course or topic compare with what actually happened or what you learned? 
• · Describe your feelings and emotions about aspects of the course or event. When/about what did you feel most comfortable? Most uncomfortable? Why?

As you can see, these questions are designed to get you thinking about the event as a learning experience and as something that is worth exploring on a deeper level.  It also firmly places YOU in the event.  It challenges you to think a little bit about who you are and how you interact with the world around you.  These are the kinds of things that go through the minds of those who are passionate and curious about their learning, the world, and their place in it.

There is so much folded into the world of comics, superheros, and graphic novels that I think you just MIGHT be surprised by the depth and complexity they contain.  Go, explore, and then reflect...

If you want to earn that point of Honors, just contact me at trista.merrill@flcc.edu and I'll let you know what the prompt is for the reflective essay.  In the meantime, go forth and save the world!

For more information about ComicCon specifically - head over here.

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!

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.

(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.

Welcome Back!

Vol 3 No 1

Welcome back, returning students and welcome to FLCC to all you new folks!

Honors has so many exciting things to talk about and we hope you are all rested from a summer that was satisfying in whatever it provided for you.  We also hope you’re looking forward to a fulfilling and productive semester at FLCC and that Honors will be an active part of those plans!  Speaking of which, we have a number of dates for you to put on your calendar…

Before we do that, though, we want to remind you that it is NOT too late to add an Honors class to your schedule!  There are plenty of seats in our two seminars and from what we’ve heard, they’ve already started strong and enjoyable!  One – Games and Storytelling – meets on Tuesday nights and has some great speakers and activities lined up.  The other – on Wednesday evenings – is about food.  How can you go wrong?  There are also seats in Perspectives on Tolkien (ENG 230), MAT 101 and Psychology of Killing (SSC 215).  Remember…just change the prefix to HON on WebAdvisor and you can see what’s out there.  Check with the instructor ASAP and good luck!

Now for those dates…

SEPTEMBER 13 from 10:00 – 2:00 – Table Day in the hallway outside Stage 14 – and guess who is going to be there?  That’s right – the new HONORS CLUB.  Head on over to see what SWAG is there and find out how you can participate.

OCTOBER 30 from 5:00 – 7:00 – Fall 2018 Honors Studies Dinner in Stage 14 – open to ALL students who are part of Honors or just curious about it, this dinner has giveaways and a few guest speakers from the college who will voice how much Honors is valued at the college.  Then we hand over the microphone to students to talk about their experiences and answer questions.  You may also hear about next semester’s classes as well.

DECEMBER 5 from 10:00 – 5:00 – Fall 2018 Honors Studies Convocation Poster Session outside Stage 14 – All Honors Students are invited to create a poster born from the work being done in Honors courses.  More information on this later in the semester, but be brainstorming how you could illustrate the work you are doing and show off the kinds of things we are doing in the world of Honors.

DECEMBER 5 from 5:00 – 6:00 –Fall 2018 Honors Studies Convocation Presentations in Stage 14 – Four students will take 15 minutes to orally present their Honors work to anyone in attendance.  As with the poster session, more to come on this as we get into the semester.

There will be many more things that we do this semester and the blogs will go back to their weekly schedule, so you have those to look forward to as well.  We will talk about Honors matters, invite guest bloggers, celebrate accomplishments, invite you to various opportunities and events, and generally celebrate Honors.  In the meantime, don’t forget these important things:

• THIS BLOG!  Perhaps bookmark it:  http://flcchonors.blogspot.com/
• Follow us on Twitter:  @FLCC_Honors
• Check us out on Facebook:  FLCC Honors Studies
• Check out Honors Club on Facebook:  FLCC Honors Club
• Email us!  honorsstudies@flcc.edu
• And last but not least, check out our visuals on Flickr:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/flcc-honors/

Have a GREAT semester and remember….stay curious!

Thinking Outside the Blog - Guest Blogger

Vol 2 No 31

Opportunity in life is everywhere, perhaps no more so than during your college experience.  This week's guest blog comes from Jennie Erdle, Director of Student Life and member of the Honor's Advisory Board.  Profoundly dedicated to student academic, intellectual, emotional, and social success, Jennie's office does amazing work for students.  In this guest blog, she reflects on one of those projects.  Not just a past project, but a project that continues on.  Information on how to be involved in Fall 2018 is included.

Thinking outside the Blog…

Honors Studies meets Women’s Initiative on Leadership and Curiosity Blooms

At the end of Fall 2017, Dr. Trista Merrill, Director of Honors Studies approached Jennie Erdle, Director of Student Life with an idea she was curious about. In an attempt to expand opportunities for students to gain more Honors Studies points, Dr. Merrill inquired about the Women’s Initiative on Leadership program that has been on campus for 5 years. Dr. Merrill herself has served as both a guest speaker, mentor, and part of networking sessions and was able to experience first-hand the impact this program has made on our student participants and how simple it might be to be interconnected back to their studies. You see, “Women” maybe in the title and yes, that is for sure the focus of this homegrown leadership program, but in truth this program has yielded over 480 student participants including women, men, transgender, and those students on the full gender spectrum showcasing both fluid identity and expression. For the first time in Spring 2018, this program counted towards Honors Studies Program points and within two short weeks of advertising we had four Honors Studies students participate, two of which had completed the leadership program in previous semesters.

This Fall 2018 Student Life will be kicking off their 6^th year, and the program itself has undergone a bit of a pick-me-up. With the ever changing societal influences, the program has updated some of the information that will be shared, so in a way it’s to keep the program vital and relevant to the rising tides of change. One small but important inclusionary item will be the addition of the theory behind Revolutionary Love in a Time of Rage, by Valarie Kaur. For more information on this, please take a moment to watch this Ted Talk found on You Tube. It is our greatest hope that with the inclusion of this topic will aid in arming students with additional skills to persevere though their college years with us and beyond. 

If you know a student who could benefit from not only extra Honors Studies points, but students who could benefit from a bit of self-discovery, civil discourse, and above all, is looking for a unique way to connect to the college, please do have them reach out to Jennie Erdle to be able to get them signed up.

Thank you and hope everyone is having a great summer!!

***

"Women's Initiative on Leadership taught me far more than leadership skills, and actually had me walking away with an increased understanding [of myself]" - Jill