Announcements:
(Leslie Brinson/Dot Doyle)
§
Asked
faculty to sign up to volunteer to bring snacks for our subsequent meetings.
§
Informed
us that Gail Hudson would explain emergency procedures at a later meeting.
Any student who has a psychological emergency should be sent to Gail.
§
Urged
2000 committees to meet; no chairs appointed.
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Myra
Halpin informed faculty that dorm sign ups were looking great.
List of pairings will be sent to double check.
There are at least two adults on halls.
§
Shiela
Butts is concerned about health plan HMOs dropping off; she has sent email to
Anne Cannon and Delacy Bradsher to request a meeting, especially for those being
forced to change plans. Anyone else
interested? Let Dot know.
§
Please
email Leslie Brinson with what you believe the mission of Faculty Council.
§
New
Faculty Re-introduced:
Humanities:
Jim
Nazzal from WA state. He is teaching four sections of Critical Issues.
Kay
Johnson is directing choral this year.
Mathematics:
Dr. John Morrison is teaching Advanced Functions and Modeling, AFAM, formerly known as pre-calculus.
Dr.
Carol O’Dell also teaches AFAM and calculus.
Science:
Brad
Sturgeon is teaching chemistry and mentorship.
Tom Trocano returns to NCSSM and is also teaching
chemistry and mentorship.
Anglelina
Windborn is teaching physics.
A
Few Words From Dr. Jerry Boarman:
Jerry updated us as to the nature of the computer system at school. NCSSM had no firewall. Thus, potential problems existed as some kids tried to download inappropriate material or programs that drained the system, such as Napster, porn, gambling, and AOL. Instant Messenger. ITS worked on that this summer to prevent this ability. While infrequent, some instances of alleged web abuse last year have been verified. This protection will be moved to all computers of teachers. Jerry emphasized more than once, however, this is not an effort by the administration to censor the faculty or make research difficult. If this effort impairs your ability to do your work, let Richard Alston know. The kids are fine with it. Jerry said a committee will be formed to look at long range planning for technology. Dot suggested that the faculty members for that group should probably be members of the ATC. Addendum: Gretchen Skidmore noted to the group that the network is very slow. PowerPoints may not able to work like last year because they are taking an incredible amount of time to load. ITS is working on this.
Junior
Experience
(Myra Halpin)
Hall Volunteers:
The hall volunteer teams look to be in great shape. Rumor has it that the boys very excited to have someone on hall. What are we to do? Meet with SLIs and RLAs to see what they would like us to do as adult members on campus. No formal plan exists, although the Junior Experience Committee (JEC) hopes the teams will meet once a month and talk about the hall. Suggestions include dropping in after tutorial, baking food, hanging out, or watching basketball.
What
about the rest of the plan?
The JEC collected data to identify students who might
have academic trouble in science and math. Kathy Allen pulled grades on all students on probation last
year. Algebra II list and probation
list had no correlation. JEC
created list of indicators. After
supplementals, the JEC will see who receives supplementals and compare that list
to the one it created. Please
examine the supplemental sheet and give good data, and don’t give the kid the
benefit of the doubt. Then we’ll
decide on an intervention. If there
are there any patterns, the info will be passed on to admissions. Gloria Barrett
informed the faculty that if a student on watch list gets a supplemental, the
advisor will be notified so that advisor could get info from the student’s
teachers and SLI. The committee
felt strongly that teachers shouldn’t be notified before there is a problem
because perhaps there won’t be one. In
the future, senior probation can be implemented to help us in the effort to help
rising seniors who technically could be on probation first quarter.
Senior
Experience Update
(Jim Litle):
Rising juniors would be invited to apply and 15-30
seniors would be selected to participate in this program.
Research in biology and chemistry would be subsumed and those students
would apply and undertake this as their program.
A faculty person would take on a student at the rate of $500.00 per
student per year, and be responsible for planning plenary sessions with other
faculty mentors. Plenary sessions would be interdisciplinary and have one
person from each department even if no one (for example) had applied of been
accepted for a mathematics project. Potentially,
this could be offered for a select group of juniors (those that might apply for
the summer program).
Jim outlined two different problems – will the
program go on if no additional faculty may be hired? This program was not envisioned as an add-on.
There could be graduation with honors, though this was not included in
the program’s description. How
large is this experience? The
honors program would be a period in the students’ schedule that would be a
common research period, but it would not encompass their entire day; for
example, they would still be in calculus.
What is the selection process? That is still to be determined.
The intent is
that
it is student, not faculty driven.
What happens now? Shall we continue with this concept? The committee needs to know. (There seemed to be general consensus among the faculty present that the Senior Experience was worth pursuing.)
Would
the students get credit?
Yes. One elective credit would be awarded with perhaps a half a credit
for the summer component. Discussion
about the program and its implementation focused on the concern over
dropping/changing the current research in bio. and chem. classes, funding and
staffing, and the need for faculty to share expertise across disciplines to make
the program work.
Steve
Warshaw commented that a lot of groundwork had taken place, noting that faculty
effort thus far has been impressive.
Homework
Expectations:
Is there agreement on work load? How
much out of class time may we reasonably expect our students to devote to their
courses? The general consensus was
that for each hour spent in class, faculty could assign one hour of homework.
Thus, a class meeting four periods per week should have about four hours
of work for the average student, outside of class.
Various suggestions were made as to how to track the out of class time,
from having students keep logs to encouraging them to set time limits and
ceasing to work once they exceeded the time suggested for completion of the
assignment. Additionally, students should be encouraged to go get help,
rather than struggling for inordinate amounts of time.
Teachers were encouraged to not buy into the hype that kids are always
overworked; like us, they like to complain about how much work they have to do.
Gail reminded us that juniors may be struggling academically for the
first time in their lives, thus asking for help is sometimes difficult.