Higher Education Observer

Embrace the process. It does no good to whine about it. See it as getting something done at your college that wouldn't have been done otherwise. Get good writers on your team. In general, pick your team for expertise, not just "broad-based-ness" (although that's important too). Proactivity. Talk to your liaison. Get it done. Someone wise once told me, "Go to your boss with solutions, not problems." Great advice. When you go into the provost with "issues," go in with resolutions to those issues. Topics should be focused. Critical thinking for a college of 8,000 students may be impossible to get consistent assessment on. Also, it must be student learning outcome focused, not "start a program we always wanted" focused. Expect that external forces will throw you a major curve while you're in the process. WE picked learning support (developmental education) and the state agency/government made two huge changes that total

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/june/historicaladam.html This is a long but very interesting article on human origins, i.e, the historical Adam and Eve. Did God use evolution to bring "creation" to a point where He could endow it with His image, and then it rebelled? Can we reconcile Christian theology of the gospel with a view that billions of years of death and decay led to the Fall? Will the church separate over this, with the scholars going one way and the laity going another? Let's talk about it, as my old pastor Ben Haden used to say.

A lot has been going on in my life the last month or so. Our town was devastated by tornado, I watched my brother die and buried him, I've got new responsibilities with my mother, my son graduated from college, a close family member has agressive breast cancer. I have posted to my other blog but not this one, and few have visited it. However, I have a job, too, and although I don't start teaching summer session til June 15, I have the weighty responsibility of chairing the QEP committee at our college. For those of you who know about QEP, you have my condolences. If you have been the leader of the committee, you have my pity. It's a huge job, and some days I really don't know what I'm doing. Other days, I feel more secure, but then another tentacle comes up and grabs me around the neck. It is truly an octopus. This is from a woman who chaired another self-study, who has written three novels, who balances a full life, who raised a great kid, ran a teacher a