Peabloggy

One year ago this week, college students around the country were united in prayer and support for fellow students suffering from shocking acts of violence. As when a brother is hurt or a sister slain, university students cried out as a family against the attack at Virginia Tech. Groups appeared online with courageous words of unity and strength among the collective body of higher education, students standing together with their peers. No longer rivals, colleges throughout the nation rose up to encourage a suffering campus.

University staff all over shuddered at the thought, “could it happen here?” As new emergency plans, evacuation routes, and alert systems have emerged and tightened over the past year, let us hope that the response of teams of campus professionals can prevent another painful memory. Let us hope that with wisdom we may foresee danger, and that the good within us will overcome disaster. We remember.

-Teresa Bagamery Clark

I was reading the Village Voice (I will warn the reader here that some content in the Voice is not child friendly) today because the cover story caught my eye. I like to read the Voice because I think the Social and Political writing is usually very good. The honesty of the voice and the transparency of the research involved generally make for an interesting read. That said, I started reading because the article was about home-schooling in New York City in the African-American community.  I was a little disappointed, though, that the article didn’t really delve into complexities of home-schooling, both in terms of its affect on the students and the commentary on the public school system.  Draw your own conclusions.

Yes, parents home school their kids because of religious views, concerns about quality and safety, and personal convictions about how their children are to be raised, I’m well aware.  Home schooling is not a solution, though.  It may work well for educated parents with time and resources to provide their students with a base of learning that will prepare them for the professional and social world outside their doors.  But, to be honest, I don’t trust any parent I don’t personally know to be able to do that, and I don’t trust a lot of them that I do know to be able to do it. Sorry friends.  The one thing I’ve learned at Peabody is that teaching is a complex profession, and doing it well is hard for the professionals.  To teach my own future children everything I think they should know about everything would require more time than I could ever give them.

As an M.Ed student I can understand how I might seem probably somewhat biased in my views.  I do want to be a teacher at an evil, corrupting Public School (wringing hands maniacally).  Let me explain away why I’m not.  I’ve had a lot of terrible teachers in my life.  Terrible.  Lots of them.  I was bullied in school.  I consider myself Christian (and I hope others do too). I think there is a lot wrong with public schools.  Yet, here I am, with a bachelor’s degree and honors from a major university and getting a master’s degree from a prestigious ed. program.  I have four brothers and sisters who would all be excellent poster children for surviving in spite of the system.  I attribute all that success to our parents and our upbringing.  All five of us have been in school since we were old enough to be sent to daycare/pre-school because my parent’s were relatively young and working long hours to support us.  Home schooling was never an option, and even when they had the resources to offer my youngest brother private school he turned the offer down, much to their consternation.

Why all the rambling, I hear those of you still reading asking yourselves?  I believe public schools are dying for the very same reason our politicians rush into things like wars or the open arms of lobbyists, because we are letting them.   What is the largest factor determining a student’s success and the improvement of neighborhood schools?  Parental and community involvement.   Everything else like funding, spending, and environment depend on what the taxpayers and voters of our democracy demand.  Lacking the funds to chose the best schools for my siblings and I, my parents taught us to love knowledge and be responsible independent people.  Lacking the parents to guide and raise their children with all the money in the world we get citizens like the Spears family or the Jacksons (of Michael, Latoya, Jermaine etc…).  There are exceptions. There are shades of gray.  There are no rules.  There is only motivation, understanding, and kindness.

Teach your own children if you want, that’s your prerogative. I don’t think there are enough lifeboats for all of us.  Maybe we should fix the whole instead.

–Luke Webb

When I started college in 1999, I moved into the same residence hall where my father once resided and served as an RA. And when I say the same, I literally mean the same furniture, same furnishings, and everything else. I didn’t really care that that hall had not changed in over 25 years…I was just happy to be out on my own. But then again, I am probably not like a lot of our students today.

I currently work as a Residence Director in a hall that is 95 years old, and it happens to be the most popular option for first-year male students at my institution. My wife and I might tire of the paper-thin walls and the lack of some amenities, but my residents love it for one simple fact: it’s a community. Community should be the big issue in housing, not catering to the individual. And it doesn’t cost $270 million to build a community that students don’t want to leave.

-Landon C. Clark

On the USA Today website, there is an interesting article about looking past rankings in college selection and college fit. Apparently, some want to use the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) data for colleges and universities as a ranking tool and advocate for making institutional results of this survey public. NSSE covers a broad scope of student involvement during the college years, and can in turn represent the level of quality that undergraduates might experience.
I found it quite interesting that none of the institutions that comprise the Ivy League have participated in the NSSE in the past. The reasoning given in the article by David Jamieson-Drake from Duke University about his institution not using NSSE was valid: the survey does not, and cannot, accurately measure student engagement at the elite institutions. While Duke is not a member of the traditional Ivy League, it certainly can attract similar students.

I agree that for a small number of elite institutions, the NSSE results hold little or no value in guiding initiatives or attracting quality students. For other institutions, the data would undoubtedly help in these areas. However, I am still skeptical about using NSSE data for rankings, and I am even more skeptical about making the data public.
- Landon Clark

I am taking a course on young adult literature this semester. The assigned reading for the class includes the usual Newbery award winners and feel good stories about the values of hard work and education. In addition to those family friendly faves, however, are books that deal with the issues of homosexuality, sex, and rape, all in the high-school-age setting. I personally hold no illusions about what my students will already have learned about these subjects by the time they get to my classroom, and hold no objections to teaching literature that deals with them; but the multiplicity of problems that could arise when dealing frankly with such issues in school worries me. The story of a parent barging into a teachers room, demanding a teacher’ head on a platter, waving an assigned book that contains the “F” word, and insisting that her child had never been exposed to such language at a public school was recently relayed to me. The absurdity of such a statement, unfortunately, does not render it powerless. At what age, then, and in what setting, does it become acceptable to discuss such sensitive issues? Would parents rather they learned it from CSI and Grey’s Anatomy or a credentialed, accountable, highly educated professional instructed in how to teach those topics?

I understand and respect the rights of parents who may actually succeed in shielding their children from all things bad in this world, and would happily make exceptions in such cases. There, I said it.

Luke Webb

As I was walking through the parking lot behind the Commons rushing to class in Payne, I noticed something new: the Commons “Composting Center.” Right behind the dumpsters, three large open bins contain organic waste at various stages of decomposition, along with a short description of the purpose of the center. I’ve written in the past about the efforts within the Peabody community to “go green,” but this endeavor is especially heartening to me. Stop by and check it out!

Read more about this and other work toward environmental sustainability at Vanderbilt at “Sustain VU.”

- Rachel Bowers

Previous: Peabody’s Green Commons

Teresa Cambria has an interesting take at InsideVandy on the Commons Center, newly opened on the Peabody campus:

The structure is impressive, but it lacks the Vanderbilt spirit. The students and buildings on this campus make Vanderbilt stand out. That’s why we love it here. I felt none of myself in that building, and I suddenly felt irrelevant to my own campus.

I’d be interested in hearing others’ thoughts about the Commons Center or campus architecture in general.

–Kurt Brobeck

Writing is (most often) a painful process. We procrastinate, stumble around our ideas, fumble through drafts, and still have to proofread. But most of our jobs and degrees require that we write - and write well. I’ve been writing for school, work and personal expression for over twenty years, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get paid to write for well over two years. But I still procrastinate and stumble around my ideas, concerned that I don’t have anything intelligent to say.

This fall, I will be working part-time as a consultant at the Vanderbilt Writing Studio, a place of support for students as they organize ideas and work to complete writing assignments. As I consider how best to support students, I’ve been thinking about what helps me feel comfortable enough to actually start writing. In addition to a fresh cup of coffee, good lighting, and a moderate amount of low background noise, I’ve found that two things help me focus and accomplish the task more easily.

First, it helps to feel that my writing is, on some level, a collaborative process. Even though I know I’m the one who has to put the words to paper (or screen), talking through my ideas or writing with others in the room keeps me from feeling so isolated by the blank page.

Second, my writing is easier (and better) when I know that it will find an audience. When I’m afraid no one will read it, my motivation plummets and the writing suffers.

As I consider the ways we teach writing, those would be two of my main goals for students: encourage them to collaborate (at least in the prewriting stages of generating and organizing ideas) and provide as wide and positive an audience for their writing as possible.

Anyone else have any other “conditions” for writing that make the process less grueling?

- Rachel Bowers

The streets around Vanderbilt’s campus were eerily quiet yesterday. I crossed Blakemore in 4pm sunlight without a car in sight. Thursday night, I walked into Fido’s at 6 p.m., stunned to find most tables empty. I’m a little weirded out by this sudden dissolve of activity from Nashville’s landscape, but I also know that the quiet represents a resurgence of mental energy and creativity for the thousands of us who have been caught up in the day-to-day of academic life since last August.

In these summer months our minds will steep, infused with ideas about pay-for-performance initiatives (and whether or not they’re a good idea), race matters in the classroom, the challenges of teaching grammar to secondary students, the unlikely marriage of education and politics…

Anyone else have a list of perplexing issues to consider this summer? What is on yours?

This post is mostly for students that are either currently in the Human Development Counseling (HDC) program, students that thinking about applying for HDC, or students that are in another Counseling program and are going to go on to earn licensure in the state they are in.  Most states, including TN, require counselors to pass the NCE. 

This exam was created by The National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC), which is under the American Counseling Association (ACA).  The exam entails 200 multiple choice questions that are to be completed within four hours.  There are many study guides put out to help counselors study for this exam, because it covers a incredibly large amount of information. 

I completed the NCE on Saturday.  It took me 3 1/2 hours.  I began preparing for the exam a month in advance.  I used the Encyclopedia of Counseling by Rosenthal, as well as the $24.99 book with practice questions put out by the NBCC that you can order online.  Before taking the test, I felt that even if I had prepared for a year, I wouldn’t be ready for it.  However, after taking it, I believe I was ready.  Of course there were questions I was unsure about, but overall, I felt confident about my answers.

Peabody’s HDC program is CACREP accredited.  The NCE is based on CACREP areas.  I believe this program helped prepare me for this important exam by covering all the 8 CACREP required areas through out our coursework. 

I want to encourage those of you already in the program, to begin looking into the exam and preparing for it.  I also want to encourage those of you who are considering Vanderbilt’s Peabody HDC program, to set up a meeting with Gina Frieden, the director of the program.  Investigate the program and see if it is a good match for you.  I graduate in three weeks, and I am able to say that this program was a great match for me.  I am very glad I chose Vanderbilt.

 ps- I’ll keep you posted on how I did on the NCE.  I will not get my results back for another 6 weeks!

-Anna Oparah