The President’s Blog

Since Mark Milliron’s talk last Wednesday, I have had three additional faculty add me as friends on their Facebook page. A common comment is that they just felt the need to try out the social networking aspects of Facebook to see if there is some application to their teaching. I believe that they will find it will add a new dimension to the way they interact with students as it has added a new dimension to my relationship with students. To this generation of students, it is just a natural communication method–like texting–OMG!

When I peruse some of the Facebook pages of my “friends” online, I am stunned by what I find. All too often there are photos that would be best left unpublished, or even deleted, and there are lists of music that are meaningless to me who literally grew up with rock and roll in the 1950’s. What is interesting though is how much people actually use the network throughout the day and night. I have found some of our students use Facebook as their primary means of communication. They post their mood changes, their chores, the status of their relationships, and reactions to world and local events throughout the day. While it would be difficult to carry on a face to face conversation with some of these students, I find an amazing amount of very personal information on their Facebook pages where all the world can see it.

Technology keeps moving ahead, and I am now trying to figure out how to use Twitter, an application that will allow me to follow people throughout the day as they move from one place and from one task to another. I really don’t see any practical application for me (who sits in a meeting room most of the day) but perhaps technicians can use it as they try to solve one problem after another throughout the workday. I’ll tune in to see how it works.

I had set aside the excitement of an approaching semester and replaced the excitement with concern. There are a lot of new procedures for getting students accepted, tested, placed, advised, enrolled, and paid before August 23 this year. So, I was glad that I attended Cedar Bluff Elementary School’s open house last Friday. How exciting it was to see children running down the halls with open arms to greet former teachers and to meet new ones!

“Dr. Bunney, Dr. Bunney,” they would shout as they saw my wife Sue standing in the hallway outside her classroom door. The shouts would be followed by big hugs and by the approving smiles of parents as they caught up with their child.

Once again, this year I will stand outside the front door of the Goins Building to greet students and to offer assistance if any is needed. I doubt if I will see students running to greet me, but I know that many of them still feel that first day excitement of new classes, new teachers, new friends, and high expectations. I’m beginning to look forward to it once again.

Sue and I had a wonderful time visiting with family on the Carolina coast this July.  From my 91 year old mom to the newest 1 year old great-grandchild, there was a lot energy on the beach and in the houses over the week.

My nieces and nephews started an interesting conversation one night by describing their first jobs.  Several of the women had done baby-sitting and some of the men had worked for their dads, but the conversation led me to think about their reactions and responses to the jobs we described.

My first paid job was picking cotton in South Carolina.  It paid 2 cents a pound and I, along with other neighborhood boys, would usually only spend a week picking since it wasn’t really our livelihood.  We would be lucky to earn 10-12 dollars over the course of a week, picking cotton for 8 hours a day in 90 degree heat.  Up and down the rows we would go trying our best to keep up with the black men and women who worked so hard at this to get money to feed their families.

It was brutal, hard, dirty work which left you exhausted from bending over and dragging a burlap bag along with you all day.  Interestingly enough, the job that my young relatives chose as the most difficult was not the hard labor of picking cotton, but working at KFC which one niece did when she was in high school.  The uniform was bad and the smell of chicken in your hair after work was too much to bear.

On the long ride home, as I thought about the week and about that particular conversation, I realized that my younger relatives had no frame of reference for understanding hard, physical labor.  They have never done any hard, physical labor in their very privileged world.  I am glad for them, but wonder about the implications of this for future generations.