I am glad to say, it’s the beginning of a new semester again. I remember it like I did my first, stumbling toward making sense of college life. It’s now 11 years since I began my days at LSU, and I remember them like yesterday. A student had managed to drink himself to death by having pitchers of the Three Wise Men (Jack, Johnny, and Jose.) I don’t know about anyone else, but that just sounds disgusting to me. I have moved away from drinking entirely these days, except for red wine and Guinness.
Two years away (from academia) definitely made me appreciate something I truly love the most. The pursuit of knowledge, and the development of excellence. If I knew then, what I know now, who knows what kind of trouble we’d be in. Actually, I honestly believe that I’d be exactly where I am. Though, had I been more serious with my studies and partied less hard, I would have my PhD by now. There is still time, and I am still very passionate about College Student Development. It is a goal I can and will achieve.
The roads I took to get here have turned my paths unexpectedly. At times, things were turbulent and I saw no end in sight. While other times I thrived, no matter positive, neutral or negative the experience, I learned a great deal from it. What I have learned through all of it is that you must take care of yourself at all times. We must engage in activities that allow us to breath and expel energy. Therefore, I blog. And I commit to blogging more to show the world that in order to learn, we must summarize daily the content we are processing.
Tonight, I went to Audubon Park and walked around the track. It was quite beautiful to see the busy-ness of an Uptown evening. It had been so very long since I’d been there, two years at least? I met a professor at St. Augustine while walking, by accident if you ask me, but I don’t really believe in accidents. He had noticed streams from the jet liners in the sky, we both assumed air traffic control had just done precise job directly these four jets in between the storm clouds that had rolled in this afternoon. There were four straight lines drawn in the sky. When he pointed this out to me, I had been immersed in my own thoughts, walking quickly and jogging at times.
Our conversation led to work, and he told me of his extensive career in Journalism. Unfortunately, my memory skills are poor right now, and I can’t think straight about his name. I will look it up tomorrow on the St. Aug website. (Awh, the internets is so freakin’ useful when it comes to those things!) Anyway, the one element we agreed up on was that students struggle with their writing skills these days. In the world of constant text messaging, emailing, and blogging, these young people don’t know how to efficiently express their thoughts in words without acronyms!
Today, we all have the ability to publish our thoughts constantly. This has struck my interest in developing ways to track usage of information exchange and content processing. If one theme has resonated in all the professors I’ve ever known, it has been that students do not write well. Blogging can engage them in scholarly writing relatively easy if we can define prompts that will enhance the synthesis of learning.
I will pilot what potentially maybe an amazing academic research project of the blogging world. Consider it daily practice in summarization and opinion formation. We shall see, hopefully we will know in four years when/if our students leave here and are continuing to use the blog as a part of their professional identity. I have ambitious hopes for this program. Now, take a deep breath and wait four years. It’s a measurable idea which I have the utmost hope. Please, God, let the students run with it and utilize its potential to the fullest extent. Only time will tell.
