Better Watch Out

Assessmental Studies
& Leadership Programs

The origin of grades & grading:

better watch out,
better not cry,
better not pout,
I'm telling you
why:

Students, Staff, Faculty,
Administration, Freshmyn
Seminarians, Recruiting
Instruments. We’re just
asking for it: grade me
grade you grading me
grading you: for the record:
no one wants coal & who
grades the grader.!




I took the privilege & pleasure
of assessing the latest
Recruitment DVD & Video,

It brought tears to my eyes,
Made me feel like Ebenezer:
wicked, & mean by comparison:
my cater-wauling & mumbling
words. Their enthusiasm &
testimony.

All good stuff going on. I'm
living in the lap of luxury &
quibbling: blind to paradise.
It's humbling.

Totally impressed with students
& staff —poise & genuineness,
programs and scenery (no way
we could mess up there)

Loved the bloopers. Softens
Shangri La somewhat. like
how Oprah has come out
with the fact she weighs
200 lbs: I admire her
more for this.

(I knew the dog was going to whiz
—sure enough. Calling that out
made me feel better about myself—
but it's still going to take awhile for
me to get my edge back, and grouse
& gripe with my usual presumption,
misanthropic forethought & ignorance.)

At the end, Milton’s shape note
chorus began to sing in the formal
gardens. Conjured a tear: that high
& lonesome sound. So much
potential.

&&&&&

PS. The morning after, thought of
other representative topics—side
bar like the Bloopers and Green
Walk ( a special edition DVD:
whole-istic, members only, internal
consumption.)

1) ½ of my excellent First Year
Seminar has been cited and warned
for drug & alcohol violation. Required
to take counseling. Representative?

2) The RISE project: funded to
address sexual assault on campus
—as interesting as Leeds and the
salvation of seeds & certainly
part of our environ-mental studies..

3) Dean of student’s office: overview
its role & the Counseling Program:
Whirl Wide Within. Again: an environ-
mental & sustainability issue.

4) Follow a student through an academic
week—class discussions, lectures, power
point presentations & homework patterns
—plus work and service & extra curricular
activities. Reality Show format.

As Emerson says, “thy goodness must
have an edge to it, else it is none.”

&&&&&&&&

With re ACADEMICS (aka “Question
Everything”) & Paula’s request for mid-
semester suggestions:

House-Keeping Concerns we have with
us always. Sabbatical & Travel and
Faculty Positions and Majors etc Not to
diminish their persistence, but can we jump
a level on Maslow’s hierarchy?

Pedagogies for the Depression?

Explore supplemental ways & means to
educe & generate the play of knowing in these
information-saturated daze, process vs.
product, media as opposed to message:
whatever generates local intellective food
& affective fire across our globule village:
eureka ooh-my-gawd tactics & such
foolishness as zero-based thinking,
re-inventing wheels, starting-up from old
scratch again & again to fix what ain’t
broken just to see what’s to see like building
ice cream parlors in hell: mission impossible
but there’s something to be said for that:
encouraging collaborative genius, maintaining
our amateur standing and providing dialectical
antithesis & antagonism to the dominant
professional get-R-done-take-the-credit-&-run
assess-mentalism of hire education as usual?.

Does the current meta-sustainable-economical-
systemic-world-wide-self-correction going on
& on right now have any impact on the way we
do our auto motivation business?

I’m just asking.
Is this a stupid question?
Stunning and worth study?
Or just plain stupid in the common sense way?
(Any one can improve my terms and images
just hit reply, or better: reply-to-all. Don't take
a 4:00 meeting time any more.)

xxxooo, Sam