Holidays

Attitude of gratitude

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

Today’s blog is appropriate for Thanksgiving weekend. I am thankful for the wonderful students I have. When you teach at three colleges and have a total of ten courses to teach across a four-month span of time like I do, it is easy to get discouraged by students who do not put forth effort.

But then I run into students who are facing unplanned difficulty while trying to keep up with a crazy work, home, and school schedule.  These are folks who let me know when they are confronted with difficulties beyond the normal hassles and challenges of daily life.

One of my students was an older man facing life-threatening heart problems. Another student woke up one morning to find her bedclothes covered with blood. Diagnosis? Advanced breast cancer. Another gal faced the unexpected death of her 30-something hubby in a car crash. They still haven’t figured out exactly what happened, but alcohol and drugs were not an issue and it was about 5 pm when his fatal one-car accident happened.

These people all had one thing in common: they soldiered on in the face of great odds. Two of them ended up having to postpone the completion of their courses, but one of them will actually graduate on time.

I am thankful for the opportunity to help guide my students through their challenges and consider it a privilege to do so.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dr. Sheri

Using holidays effectively

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

My topic for today is how to use your holidays to get ahead on your schoolwork.  Let’s say that you have Thanksgiving off. Oh, my, you do! What do you do with those four days of not being in school? I suggest you work ahead. Here’s how you do it:

Take your syllabi for each class and figure out what is due in the next three weeks of classes. Do your reading and research for any upcoming projects. As you do the research, make sure to mark down every where you got the information and bookmark the site if that is possible.

Lay out your research in piles according to topic and then begin to go through the piles and organize the piles within the piles. For example, let’s say that you have three research papers due in three different classes. Try to do the research in one fell swoop. I always email the articles I have found to myself, requesting a style format such as APA and MLA. The online library will send you the document with a cover page with the correct formatting that you need, which will save you a lot of time.

I always printed the articles out, marked them up so that I could see what I needed from each article, and then separate them into piles according to class. As you write the essays, you have the sources at your fingertips, with all of the information you want to use right there. (I made notes of which page numbers would have the most helpful information on those cover pages, so that I didn’t have to flip through the article as I wrote.)

Get as much done over the four day break, so that you have less stress at finals time. How do you make good use of the four-day weekend?

Best,

Dr. Sheri