Hello everyone. I am blogging to "y'all" all the way from the great nation of Texas.
Cortney and I are at LeTourneau University attempting to fool the administration into hiring me. Using words like "learning outcomes," "strategic," and "collaboration," I have assumed the persona of "professional Steve" and no one will ever be the wiser.
Cortney and I were also able to catch up on the last two episodes of LOST, but since a speaker at my hooding gave away a major plot point I found myself slightly underwhelmed. I guess I don't know how I would have ended a seven year series any better than they did, but I kinda assumed that the growing mysteries of the island would be addressed in some satisfactory manner. As much as I loved LOST, I've realized you just have to be satisfied with this explanation: "Whelp, that was one crazy island, guess we'll never know."
But anyway, we are at LeTourneau, we got a gift basket, the Dean of Students picked me up at the airport, and everyone remembers Josh Wymore. The majority of people are really nice and they are treating Cortney like a high maintenance celebrity (chauffeuring her around, getting her food whenever she wants, making phone calls for her and trying to get her a job at a local high-school)
Today we are going to look at apartments because everyone is acting like we are definitely going to be here next year. Of course, I am assuming this is exactly how they treated the last guy they interviewed too. Needless to say, this is the most important I have ever felt before. If I get hired I expect this type of treatment to continue every day for as long as I am here.
I could have good thing going for me here at LETU so please, don't anyone tell them that I am just a kid.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Shakespeare II
Hey friends. Sorry it's been so long. Life has been hectic, and it's not slowing down for at least two weeks. I'm leaving for Texas, and then for Washington D.C. So you will probably have to be brave and live without my blog for a few days (if you can).
So I'll leave you with a parting thought. When I went to go see that play I was struck by a powerful line. King "Whats-his-face" feels guilty for the death of his wife. Some-one tells him to forgive himself and move on. He says this.
Whilst I remember
Her and her virtues, I cannot forget
My blemishes in them, and so still think of
The wrong I did myself
He finds the remembering his wife and her virtues is intertwined with him remembering his own transgressions.
So what if he forgets his sin? Will he forget his wife? Maybe this is why after 16 years he hasn't let go. I don't think that this means we should live in constant guilt, but I think that we SHOULD link our sins to God's forgiveness.
David says in Psalm 51:3
"For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me"
The difference between us and king "what's his face" is that even though both of us always have our sins before us, our sins are forgiven by the one we would remember. The haunting memory of his wife condemns him, but the memory of our god liberates us.
So keep your sins before you. Forget ye not the virtues of your Lord and remember your blemishes in them.
Oh by the way, in the end of the play the guys wife comes back, and he is totally redeemed, but the experiences he has had teach him a lesson and he lives the rest of his life as a changed man. Maybe there is a point in that too.
Have fun pondering Shakespeare and the Bible for a few days. And congratulations to Ben Blake, owner of Nevin Street Coffee. He got married last weekend!
So I'll leave you with a parting thought. When I went to go see that play I was struck by a powerful line. King "Whats-his-face" feels guilty for the death of his wife. Some-one tells him to forgive himself and move on. He says this.
Whilst I remember
Her and her virtues, I cannot forget
My blemishes in them, and so still think of
The wrong I did myself
He finds the remembering his wife and her virtues is intertwined with him remembering his own transgressions.
So what if he forgets his sin? Will he forget his wife? Maybe this is why after 16 years he hasn't let go. I don't think that this means we should live in constant guilt, but I think that we SHOULD link our sins to God's forgiveness.
David says in Psalm 51:3
"For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me"
The difference between us and king "what's his face" is that even though both of us always have our sins before us, our sins are forgiven by the one we would remember. The haunting memory of his wife condemns him, but the memory of our god liberates us.
So keep your sins before you. Forget ye not the virtues of your Lord and remember your blemishes in them.
Oh by the way, in the end of the play the guys wife comes back, and he is totally redeemed, but the experiences he has had teach him a lesson and he lives the rest of his life as a changed man. Maybe there is a point in that too.
Have fun pondering Shakespeare and the Bible for a few days. And congratulations to Ben Blake, owner of Nevin Street Coffee. He got married last weekend!
Friday, May 21, 2010
Behind Bars
Hello friends. Sorry it’s been so long. My life has been a “crazy town” in the words of Mallory Jones.
I’m a bit intimidated now because I have just learned that my professor and guru, the one and only Tim Herrmann is now a follower of my blog. My blog has always been family friendly, but now I think I am going to be more conscious of my spelling and grammar. From now on expect all blog posts to be in perfect APA*
But anyway, now on to what I was planning on writing.
I went to see Shakespeare behind bars two days ago. What is that you ask? It is a bunch of inmates in a prison who perform Shakespeare. What? Steve attending something to do with Shakespeare? Did the acorns really make you that sick? Well, I initially went against my will but after the entire experience I was glad I went. So though I am not a Shakespeare guy by any stretch of the imagination, don’t be shocked with I speak of this experience in a positive light.
I’m not sure what you are envisioning here but let me start off by telling you that this is not a traveling act of white collar criminals on probation. You have to go to a prison to see this show. These actors (all men) were really, really into it. They sounded like a professional troupe of actors who had really given their lives to Shakespeare. Because in some ways, they have. This program has given them something to live for and a chance to be remembered for something other than their crime. There was a twenty minute Q and A following the performance. You should have heard these men talk about how Shakespeare has transformed their lives.
Some of the actors played the role of women. When asked how they did it so convincingly they explained how this process had taught them empathy. Truly truly taught them empathy. It gave them a greater understanding of their crimes and the way they had treated women before entering prison. I think most about the character whose actions in the play caused his wife to die with grief. In the second act (16 years later) he was so repentant and angry with himself you could see he blamed himself and wished he could change who he had been. That actor murdered his wife in real life and he had been in prison for 16 years.
I think I’m going to need a few posts to really capture what I learned from these inmates. Things were happening on so many levels. If you want to know more about Shakespeare behind bars click here. (Actually, this is not a link to the performance I went to. In 2005 there was a documentary made about SBB and this link is to that documentary.)
But just so you all know, I’m not going to start acting like I like reading Shakespeare now, I’m just glad that something so boring has redemptive qualities.
*Not at all true. APA tells me not to write with footnotes. I tell APA that he needs to get a girlfriend and stop looking over my shoulder to see where I’m putting my commas.
I’m a bit intimidated now because I have just learned that my professor and guru, the one and only Tim Herrmann is now a follower of my blog. My blog has always been family friendly, but now I think I am going to be more conscious of my spelling and grammar. From now on expect all blog posts to be in perfect APA*
But anyway, now on to what I was planning on writing.
I went to see Shakespeare behind bars two days ago. What is that you ask? It is a bunch of inmates in a prison who perform Shakespeare. What? Steve attending something to do with Shakespeare? Did the acorns really make you that sick? Well, I initially went against my will but after the entire experience I was glad I went. So though I am not a Shakespeare guy by any stretch of the imagination, don’t be shocked with I speak of this experience in a positive light.
I’m not sure what you are envisioning here but let me start off by telling you that this is not a traveling act of white collar criminals on probation. You have to go to a prison to see this show. These actors (all men) were really, really into it. They sounded like a professional troupe of actors who had really given their lives to Shakespeare. Because in some ways, they have. This program has given them something to live for and a chance to be remembered for something other than their crime. There was a twenty minute Q and A following the performance. You should have heard these men talk about how Shakespeare has transformed their lives.
Some of the actors played the role of women. When asked how they did it so convincingly they explained how this process had taught them empathy. Truly truly taught them empathy. It gave them a greater understanding of their crimes and the way they had treated women before entering prison. I think most about the character whose actions in the play caused his wife to die with grief. In the second act (16 years later) he was so repentant and angry with himself you could see he blamed himself and wished he could change who he had been. That actor murdered his wife in real life and he had been in prison for 16 years.
I think I’m going to need a few posts to really capture what I learned from these inmates. Things were happening on so many levels. If you want to know more about Shakespeare behind bars click here. (Actually, this is not a link to the performance I went to. In 2005 there was a documentary made about SBB and this link is to that documentary.)
But just so you all know, I’m not going to start acting like I like reading Shakespeare now, I’m just glad that something so boring has redemptive qualities.
*Not at all true. APA tells me not to write with footnotes. I tell APA that he needs to get a girlfriend and stop looking over my shoulder to see where I’m putting my commas.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Acorns
Friends, I just ate an Acorn.
I was outside on Huntington's beautiful campus and the ground beneath my feat was littered with acorns, or as I like to call them, "nature's tootsie rolls." I thought to myself "If I was a squirrel, I would be so pumped right now. There is food everywhere!" And then I wondered why squirrels get all the easy breaks. I want copious amounts of free snacks whenever I walk past Beth Hale's apartment, and since I'm a white man in America I am used to getting what I want.
So I put one in my mouth and tried to keep walking all nonchalantly. Because if anyone saw me doing it I wouldn't want to look too chalant. I crack it open with my teeth and go after the "meat" inside. And you know what I learned?
I learned that there is a reason man does not eat acorns. Evolutionary psychology states that if something tastes like a sweaty guy peed in a shell and threw it in the mud, you should not eat that thing (Ohman, Mineka, 2001).
After spitting for a while a resolved that if this "nut" or "devil-spawn" was not poisonous I would master its ways and learn to enjoy it so I could impress my friends and make them jealous as I effortlessly snacked on nature while they stood by watching like hungry cavemen unable to harness the environment to feed themselves.
Turns out they ARE poisonous. The Tome of All Knowledge and Josh Wymore's most commonly visited website told me so. But painstaking and time consuming processes can remove the poison (tannin) from the Acorn to make it an edible food. The Native Americans (or First people) ate them regularly and it was a staple in their diet. It is exactly this kind of ingenuity that allowed them to find America first.
All that to say, I probably wouldn't have been hungry enough to start eating acorns today if I hadn't eaten a stupid SALAD for dinner. I thought eating a salad would be as good as real food, but like a guy taking his cousin to prom, I found out that sometimes you're just lying to yourself.
So next time you are out on a beautiful day like today and you happen across a cache of delicious looking acorns, remember this story and the lesson we've learned. Don't eat salads.
This story is 100% true.
Ohman, A.; Mineka, S. (2001). "Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning" (PDF). Psychological Review 108 (3): 483–522. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.483. Retrieved 2008-06-16.
I was outside on Huntington's beautiful campus and the ground beneath my feat was littered with acorns, or as I like to call them, "nature's tootsie rolls." I thought to myself "If I was a squirrel, I would be so pumped right now. There is food everywhere!" And then I wondered why squirrels get all the easy breaks. I want copious amounts of free snacks whenever I walk past Beth Hale's apartment, and since I'm a white man in America I am used to getting what I want.
So I put one in my mouth and tried to keep walking all nonchalantly. Because if anyone saw me doing it I wouldn't want to look too chalant. I crack it open with my teeth and go after the "meat" inside. And you know what I learned?
I learned that there is a reason man does not eat acorns. Evolutionary psychology states that if something tastes like a sweaty guy peed in a shell and threw it in the mud, you should not eat that thing (Ohman, Mineka, 2001).
After spitting for a while a resolved that if this "nut" or "devil-spawn" was not poisonous I would master its ways and learn to enjoy it so I could impress my friends and make them jealous as I effortlessly snacked on nature while they stood by watching like hungry cavemen unable to harness the environment to feed themselves.
Turns out they ARE poisonous. The Tome of All Knowledge and Josh Wymore's most commonly visited website told me so. But painstaking and time consuming processes can remove the poison (tannin) from the Acorn to make it an edible food. The Native Americans (or First people) ate them regularly and it was a staple in their diet. It is exactly this kind of ingenuity that allowed them to find America first.
All that to say, I probably wouldn't have been hungry enough to start eating acorns today if I hadn't eaten a stupid SALAD for dinner. I thought eating a salad would be as good as real food, but like a guy taking his cousin to prom, I found out that sometimes you're just lying to yourself.
So next time you are out on a beautiful day like today and you happen across a cache of delicious looking acorns, remember this story and the lesson we've learned. Don't eat salads.
This story is 100% true.
Ohman, A.; Mineka, S. (2001). "Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning" (PDF). Psychological Review 108 (3): 483–522. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.483. Retrieved 2008-06-16.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
"Called" out
So the other day I'm having a conversation about acsessability in higher education. (The same type of thing all of you readers were probably also talking about the other day.)
The issue, in a nutshell, is that everyone wants higher ed to make degrees more available to everyone. Let's make America a more educated place. Good call, but if you do that, it's going to devalue existing degrees. It's like saying "Hey, people are poor, let's print more money." It's not really a win-win situation. In the short run it's a win-lose, and in the long run...I'm not really sure.
But I was defending my point of view by saying that degree inflation is making it very difficult for even trained people to find a job. For example, I (Steve Conn) have a master's degree in higher ed. and am having difficulty finding entry level positions as a hall director at small Christian schools. That's basically like a D-1 college basketball player getting cut from a church league basketball team becuase for some reason the church league is FULL of D-1 college basketball players and you are no longer as special as you thought.
Then she drops the bomb on me. She says "is it really that you can't find a job or is that you are only looking for jobs in higher education?"
I thought to myself "Well what else WOULD I be looking for? Remember how that's what I've spent two years and $20,000 explicitly training for? But then I realized something. Even in white America there is still a great disparity between socio-ecenomic classes. Most people in this country (let alone the world) are looking for work so they can have money to pay for their needs. I on the other hand am so priviledged that I can delay working for two years AFTER college to go to more school, then look for a specific job in a specific field. Some of my peers even have the audacity to be even MORE selective and be choosey about WHICH small christian school hires them to be a hall director. I actually know some people down-right DISSAPOINTED becuase they have a job at a school that is "so-so but not great."
People are starving and some of us are upset becuase they forgot the cherry on our ice cream sunday.
I forgot that I'm not having a difficulty finding a job. I'm having difficulty finding a job that serves my desires, interests, and personal goals. I think allegedly I got an education to be a public servant, but it would appear that me (and most of the people I know) expect that my education is going to provide me with all the stuff I want.
Generally speaking, isn't a job supposed to be an exchange? I give you my time and you give me some money? But I believe that most of the people I spend most of my time with (including me) think that a job must be a "win-win" situation. You give me money, and you also give me a sense of personal fulfillment, and you give me professonal development, and you give me good supervison, and you give me a good balence of challenge and support, and you give me a good community. Then maybe I will consent to giving you my time, as long as it is spent on stuff I kinda enjoy.
No one would have said it that way...but it really describes a lot of people. And if you are getting your master's degree in higher education right now...it might be you.
The issue, in a nutshell, is that everyone wants higher ed to make degrees more available to everyone. Let's make America a more educated place. Good call, but if you do that, it's going to devalue existing degrees. It's like saying "Hey, people are poor, let's print more money." It's not really a win-win situation. In the short run it's a win-lose, and in the long run...I'm not really sure.
But I was defending my point of view by saying that degree inflation is making it very difficult for even trained people to find a job. For example, I (Steve Conn) have a master's degree in higher ed. and am having difficulty finding entry level positions as a hall director at small Christian schools. That's basically like a D-1 college basketball player getting cut from a church league basketball team becuase for some reason the church league is FULL of D-1 college basketball players and you are no longer as special as you thought.
Then she drops the bomb on me. She says "is it really that you can't find a job or is that you are only looking for jobs in higher education?"
I thought to myself "Well what else WOULD I be looking for? Remember how that's what I've spent two years and $20,000 explicitly training for? But then I realized something. Even in white America there is still a great disparity between socio-ecenomic classes. Most people in this country (let alone the world) are looking for work so they can have money to pay for their needs. I on the other hand am so priviledged that I can delay working for two years AFTER college to go to more school, then look for a specific job in a specific field. Some of my peers even have the audacity to be even MORE selective and be choosey about WHICH small christian school hires them to be a hall director. I actually know some people down-right DISSAPOINTED becuase they have a job at a school that is "so-so but not great."
People are starving and some of us are upset becuase they forgot the cherry on our ice cream sunday.
I forgot that I'm not having a difficulty finding a job. I'm having difficulty finding a job that serves my desires, interests, and personal goals. I think allegedly I got an education to be a public servant, but it would appear that me (and most of the people I know) expect that my education is going to provide me with all the stuff I want.
Generally speaking, isn't a job supposed to be an exchange? I give you my time and you give me some money? But I believe that most of the people I spend most of my time with (including me) think that a job must be a "win-win" situation. You give me money, and you also give me a sense of personal fulfillment, and you give me professonal development, and you give me good supervison, and you give me a good balence of challenge and support, and you give me a good community. Then maybe I will consent to giving you my time, as long as it is spent on stuff I kinda enjoy.
No one would have said it that way...but it really describes a lot of people. And if you are getting your master's degree in higher education right now...it might be you.
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