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President: Tuajuanda C. Jordan, PhD
Christine Wooley and Colby Nelson
March 2016
cont’d from other side tain that she is more patient and accommodates a wider range of interpretations in class discussion, while I tend to be a bit more directive and persnickety about even the little details in class discussion. (Christine might claim that this is my “modernist-fascist” tendency). I’d also guess that I’m more hyperactive in class discussion, but that’s probably because I drink more coffee than Christine. CW: I’ve learned to be more open with my students from Colby – to be more of myself in class. How does your marriage influence your teaching and how does your teaching influence your marriage? CW: I think Colby is an amazing teacher – he relishes the puzzle of putting together a good syllabus, a good exam question, a good discussion. I tend to come up with goals that need a road map, and Colby is really good at helping me to figure out that map. CN: I don’t think being married has changed or influenced by teaching strategies in the classroom, but I do think having a family that I get to return to every day after leaving the classroom has been nice. I can get rather gloomy if my teaching is not going well and end up spending a lot of time up in my own head brooding and obsessing over what has gone wrong. But when I come home and spend time with my partner and kids, I get pulled out of that negative head-space and have to interact with people who like me, want to spend time with me (at least most of the time), and could not care less about my failure to get anyone interested in T.S. Eliot earlier that day.
I hear about what Christine is into or what she’s teaching. First, she’s super-smart, so most things that she talks about are already framed in interesting and insightful ways. But we’re also hard-wired at this point to already be thinking about how to present our interests to students in engaging ways, so it’s rare that I feel my eyes glazing over because it seems like she’s already anticipating what a more skeptical audience might think about the material. Having said that, I confess that it’s rare for me to pick up a nineteenth-century sentimental novel or anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne voluntarily, even if they receive my spouse’s endorsement. CW: I am by nature a proselytizer: I want other people to love what I love, and that means I am, at times, a little too insistent that Colby should read something I liked RIGHT NOW so we can talk about it. I am pretty sure Colby is sick of my suggestion that we should read Moby-Dick together over the summer, and I don’t think he is as excited as I am to go to the New Bedford whaling museum! That said, I think I am so lucky to be married to someone who knows what it’s like to care about teaching and literature. When we talk about work, we don’t have to explain what it meant for a discussion to go well, or worry about boring each other by talking about ideas for a new class. That’s a privilege that students don’t always understand when they ask if it’s weird to work at the same place as your spouse.
What are your greatest different literary passions; specifically, what does each of you rhapsodize about while the other’s eyes glaze over?
A newsletter for the community, faculty, staff and students.
SMCM Secures MIPS Grant St. Mary’s College of Maryland has been awarded a $97,361 grant, jointly funded by the Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program and vCalc LLC. The grant will fund student research and development of high-value, college-level math formulas and data for vCalc.com, a Wiki-based crowd-sourced calculating encyclopedia with over 7,000 calculators and users in over 100 countries. vCalc Chief Executive Officer Kurt Heckman and Chief Financial Officer Dave Reumont joined St. Mary’s College President Tuajuanda C. Jordan on Feb. 23 to kick off the project, which commences this summer with eight undergraduate students. L to R above: Josh Grossman, Dave Reumont, Richard Platt, Shizuka Nishikawa, Emek Köse, President Jordan, Kurt Heckman, and Randolph Larsen
The Legacy of Lucille Clifton Honored
CN: What a fun question and I am very interested in what Christine will say in response to this! I have to say that it’s pretty rare for me to zone out when
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Noni Ford ’17 read Lucille Cliton’s poem, “a dream of foxes”
It was a packed house in DPC on March 1 for the inaugural event “Creating the Compassionate Community: An Evening to Honor the Legacy of Lucille
Clifton.” The audience was treated to music and readings of Clifton’s poems by Karen Leona Anderson, Jeffrey Coleman, Iris Ford, Noni Ford, Brian Ganz, Kathleen Glaser, Michael Glaser, Vivian Jordan, Wayne Karlin, Ray Raley, Jeanne Vote and Crystal Worrell. During the event, President Tuajuanda C. Jordan announced the establishment of the Lucille Clifton Award, to honor a staff, administrator or faculty member whose interactions with students have both modeled and encouraged the qualities that Lucille Clifton lived in her teaching and in her poetry.
Sp ot l i g ht C oup les Edition:
Christine Wooley and Colby Nelson
For married-in-real-life couple Christine Wooley (assoc. prof. of English) and Colby Nelson (lecturer in English), teaching literature is the tie that binds. You have an interesting array of expertise with respect to AfricanAmerican literature, covering from post-bellum (Wooley) to modern times (Nelson). As a couple, was it a conscious choice to study different periods of the same genre? What advantage does it give you both? CW: Colby and I met in graduate school; part of my undergraduate thesis was on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, so my interest in African-American literature definitely predates him! CN: We began dating in 2001; I had completed my qualifying exams and was just beginning to put my dissertation together. So by that point, my primary areas of interest had already been set, and the fact that we both were working with African-American literature is more or less coincidental. But that’s not to say that we haven’t made it advantageous for our teaching! If I’m prepping for a class and need a refresher on nineteenth-century historical context, it’s quite a luxury to have a scholar right there with the information. CW: As my research has pulled me more into the twentieth century, I’ve been lucky to have someone at home who suggests things to read and provides some depth to my generalities about the twentieth century. You both teach “Reading and Writing in the Major” and “Methods of Literary Study”: how to you distinguish your own approach to teaching these courses? How are your teaching styles similar? CW: We want students to talk! When we first got to St. Mary’s, we both spent a lot of time thinking about how just doing the assigned reading isn’t enough to prepare students for discussion. We both assign reading questions because it gives students a sense of what’s at stake in their reading and provides a chance to think about the reading before being put on the spot in class. CN: My “Methods” class is at least 90% identical to Christine’s. She designed that current version of the class from the ground up, and I provided an occasional
Post-Graduate Study in Ireland for Goldman Robin Goldman ’16 has been accepted in the Children and Youth Studies master’s program at UCD Ireland for Fall 2016. Goldman, a psychology major and educational studies minor, says “I love to travel, and it is an interesting, inter-disciplinary, and relevant degree that is more affordable than most options here in the US. I also made wonderful friends when I lived in Ireland pre-
viously, so I will have some familiarity with the people, the campus, and the education system, which makes the idea of graduate school a little less scary!”
Sensational Staff & Alums
Colby Nelson and Christine Wooley
suggestion or two as she was trying it out for the first time. CW: More than an occasional suggestion. Talking with Colby about how to approach Methods helped me to figure out how I wanted to teach that class. CN: Methods was such a success, and we both have such a similar philosophy about what that class is supposed to do for students, that I was more than happy to ride on her coat-tails. I think the “Reading and Writing” is the opposite: I designed the pilot version of that class, and she inherited all of my materials, so those two classes also look very similar. CW: I am very grateful for those “Reading and Writing in the Major” materials. Colby has actually taught more composition than I have, so getting the chance to build on his arc for that class has really helped me to teach writing more effectively. CN: In terms of teaching styles, I don’t know how to put this other than in a self-deprecating way: I am almost cercont’d on other side
What’s Happening in Sports Baseball coach Lew Jenkins has announced his retirement following the conclusion of the 2016 season. St. Mary’s has planned a celebration of Jenkins’ career for Saturday, April 9th when the Seahawks host Southern Virginia University in a conference doubleheader starting at 11:00 am.
Mike Cummings, director of admissions, and Kelsey Bush ’94, together with Kyle Wise ’14 and Jim Cranmer, welcomed 7th and 8th graders and school counselors to a Seahawks basketball game and reception on February 13. The event was part of a new partnership with the Military Youth Council, helping
youth of military families who are new to the area get acquainted with what the community has to offer.
Kudos to...
Jeff Hammond (prof. of English and George B. and Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts) has recently published the chapters “Confronting Death: The Early American Elegy” in The Cambridge History of American Poetry (Cambridge Univ. Press) and “Michael Wigglesworth” in American Poets and Poetry: From the Colonial Era to the Present (Greenwood Publishing Group) in 2015. He has also published the creative nonfiction essay, “Eight-perFive” in Under the Sun 3. Mandy Reinig (director, int’l education) has published the essay “The Small/ One-person Office: the challenge of being both practitioner and scholar” in the book International Higher Education’s Scholar-Practitioners: Bridging Research and Practice. The book launches a dialogue about the perception and reality, potential and promise, of the scholar-practitioner in higher education today.
Mary Grube has been promoted to the position of Budget Analyst and Special Projects Assistant to the Vice President for Business and Finance. In her new role, Mary will support all offices in the division of business and finance. Barrett Emerick (asst. prof. of philosophy) has published the peer-reviewed article, “Empathy and a Life of Moral Endeavor,” in Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy, in 2016. Ben Click (prof. of English)has published a book review for Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor by Harold H. Kolb, Jr. in 2015. This accomplishment follows his publication as co-editor and contributing author of the book Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts (Scarecrow Press, 2013).
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