Hannah Hecht's Blog

Senior Jaimie Fast prepares for a nursing final

It’s approaching 9 p.m. Sunday night in the Hickman Johnson Furrow Learning Center. Usually, at this point in the weekend, students have retired to their rooms to finish off the night with some of the Walking Dead or maybe a couple games of Madden, but today is different.

Three-fourths of the library tables are occupied and completely covered in study materials: chemistry books, philosophy notes, nursing study guides, and cups of coffee from the Spoonholder. Students seem to be on edge, brows furrowed as they type out that concluding paragraph to the senior thesis that is the culmination of their college career. Others look as if they’re moving closer to the “screw it” stage; heads on the desks and a blank Microsoft Word document open on their computers.

From the very atmosphere, it quickly becomes obvious that it is finals week at Morningside College. During the last week of the semester, students can be found across every college campus in the country consuming inordinate amounts of caffeine, pulling all-nighters to study, completing ten page papers in one marathon session, and sometimes even breaking down crying.

However, here at Morningside, a student’s finals week experience can vary greatly depending on his major, class load, and grade level. Some students end up using the fall semester finals week as a break from class, a time to watch movies and hang out with their friends, while others have to dedicate the entire time to work and study.

Some of the most stressed students end up being freshmen who are going through it all for the first time.

“I had a panic attack yesterday,” said freshman Jen Bentz after the end of Thanksgiving break. “We didn’t really have finals at my high school, so this is all really intense.”

As a music education major, Bentz will have five different finals, two of which are based on music performance.

Other students have it much easier. Junior computer science major Michael Andrlik just has one test during finals week.

“Pretty much, my finals week consists of procrastination and eventual work,” said Andrlik.

For Andrlik, and many other students in project and writing-based majors, the week before finals week is actually the most challenging week. His finals week is a bit of a break after an arduous penultimate week filled with deadlines and presentations.

“During actual finals week, if it’s getting close to my test, I’ll be actually doing stuff, but for the rest of the week, I’ll be playing video games,” he said.

Many professors in writing-based majors find that it is difficult to assign a true final because grades are due so soon after finals.

“There’s a short turnaround between finals week and the day grades are due,” said associate professor of mass communications Ross Fuglsang, “So, it’s difficult to assign essay tests and get them graded by the deadline.”

Other students, especially those in subjects that lend themselves to easy-to-grade multiple choice tests, find that the last two weeks of the semester feel like an extended finals week, a jam-packed marathon of studying and writing.

“For me, both weeks are pretty hard,” said sophomore biology and chemistry teaching major Evelyn Edge. “I have a bunch of papers and presentations this week [the week before finals] and then next week I have finals in every class but art. I spend finals week in my own little hovel in the library. “

Many students across campus wish that Morningside would imitate other colleges in implementing a “dead week” policy. Some larger universities (and even smaller ones like Dordt) enforce policies where professors can’t have major deadlines or tests during the week before finals. The idea is that students will have an extra week or so to prepare for finals.

“All of my high school friends are at bigger schools or community colleges, and they have a dead week,” said Bentz.

Senior nursing majors Jaimie Fast and Anna Christensen both have tests in the week before finals.

“Even if Morningside would just give us half a week off, that would help, because it would stop teachers from giving us tests right before our finals,” said Fast. “When it gets to finals week, you pretty much just have to cram because we’re too busy studying for our other tests to prepare in advance.”

Where some students like Andrlik use finals week to unwind from a busy semester, Christensen tries to use every second of her week to prepare.

“Here’s how my days go: Wake up as early as you can, study a little, eat breakfast, drink an energy drink, cram, take a test, cry, drink a beer, take a deep breath, and start to study for the next one,” she said.

I just realized that I can still do one more campus event journal, so here goes. Earlier in the semester, I went to the International Writing Centers Association conference in Orlando, Florida to present a project on our Morningside Writing Center’s collaboration with the local Sioux City high schools. While we were there, we attended a bunch of sessions educational and writing center theory that pretty much taught us how to better serve our clients. The most useful ones, for me, were a couple of sessions that were dedicated to teaching tutors how to better serve ESL (or ELL, or whatever the politically-correct term is) students. One of the sessions talked about how tutors and educators ought to view ESL students’ writing as “writing with an accent.” As long as it makes sense, we ought to make sure to spend more time on higher-order concerns such as organization and content rather than word-by-word construction. The presentation kind of reminded me of some of the stories that we read that were written by writers whose first language was not English. For example, Zitkala-Sa’s writing read with a bit of an “accent,” both because of her sentence construction and the content and metaphors that most Caucasian Americans would not have thought to come up with.

One of the most important times in a college student’s career comes at the very end of the semester: finals week. The last week of the semester is where students can be found across every college campus in the country consuming inordinate amounts of caffeine, pulling all-nighters to study, completing ten page papers in one marathon session, and, sometimes, breaking down crying.

However, at Morningside, a student’s finals week experience can vary greatly depending on his major, class load, and grade level. Some students end up using the fall semester finals week as a break from class during which they can watch movies and hang out with their friends, while others have to dedicate the entire time to work and study.

The end of the semester can be a tough time for all students, especially freshmen who are going through it all for the first time.

“I had a panic attack yesterday,” said freshman Jen Bentz after the end of Thanksgiving break. “We didn’t really have finals at my high school, so this is all really intense.”

As a music education major, Bentz will have five different finals, two of which are based on music performance.

Other students have it much easier. Junior computer science major Michael Andrlik just has one test during finals week.

“Pretty much, my finals week consists of procrastination and eventual work,” said Andrlik.

For Andrlik, and many other students in project and writing-based majors, the week before finals week is actually the most difficult week. His finals week is a bit of a break after a difficult penultimate week filled with deadlines and presentations.

“During actual finals week, if it’s getting close to my test, I’ll be actually doing stuff, but for the rest of the week, I’ll be playing video games,” he said.

Other students find the last two weeks of the semester to be a marathon of studying and writing.

“For me, both weeks are pretty hard,” said sophomore biology and chemistry teaching major Evelyn Edge. “I have a bunch of papers and presentations this week and then next week I have finals in every class but art. I spend finals week in my own little hovel in the library. “

Many students across campus wish that Morningside would imitate other colleges in implementing a “dead week” policy. Some larger universities (and even smaller ones like Dordt) cancel classes for the entire week before finals. Others enforce a policy where professors can’t have major deadlines or tests during their dead week.

“All of my high school friends are at bigger schools or community colleges, and they have a dead week,” said Bentz.”They don’t have class for an entire week, so all they do is study.”

Senior nursing majors Jaimie Fast and Anna Christensen both have tests in the week before finals.

“Even if Morningside would just give us half a week off, that would help, because it would stop teachers from giving us tests right before our finals,” said Fast. “When it gets to finals week, you pretty much just have to cram because we’re too busy studying for our other tests to prepare in advance.”

Where some students like Andrlik use finals week to unwind from a busy semester, Christensen tries to use every second of her week to prepare.

“Here’s how my days go: Wake up as early as you can, study a little, eat breakfast, drink an energy drink, cram, take a test, cry, drink a beer, take a deep breath, and start to study for the next one,” she said.

Against a backdrop of national and local political battles to raise the minimum wage, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed takes on a new level of relevance to American society. The book, even though researched and written during the booming economy of the late 90’s, makes a statement that even a minimal standard of living is not available to our country’s growing population of minimum wage workers.

The book follows Ehrenreich as she travels to three cities with nothing but the clothes on her back and a small amount of start-up cash and finds three “unskilled jobs” and three places to live. She then attempts to get by only on her earnings, starting with waitressing in Key West, Florida; moving on to a housework job in Maine; and concluding with working the sales floor at a WalMart in St. Paul, Minnesota.

I found the book to be very moving. Ehrenreich’s experiments show that you can’t even meet basic human needs on low wage, hourly jobs, but it was her co-workers experiences that really shook me. A woman in Maine snaps her ankle, but continues to scrub floors, another in Florida lives out of her car, and many go hungry so that their children have something to eat.

The book concludes with a statement explaining and criticizing the current state of the economy which has put an increasingly-large class of people into such an awful state of living. Her experiment shows that having a job (or even multiple jobs) is not the ticket out of poverty that many people say it is. Low income housing in the U.S. is overly-expensive, dilapidated, ill-located, and disappearing. In addition, low income jobs prevent their employees from organizing in any way to fight for their rights in the workplace.

My favorite part of the book was the section where Ehrenreich works a sales floor job at a Minnesota WalMart, mainly because I spent the past summer doing a similar job at Target. I thought that she captured the experience really well, even though out of the three, the WalMart job was probably the least physically and mentally taxing.

According to the book’s Wikipedia page, it has come under some criticism for the author’s methods in her journalistic experiment. Some people say that she doesn’t accurately reproduce a poor person’s experience, since she starts off the experiment with a car and some money in her pocket.

I think that the critics’ point proves Ehrenreich’s conclusion even more so. If a physically fit, single woman with a Ph.D., a means of transportation and some start-up money can’t get by on a low-wage job, then how can we expect anyone to do so?

Overall, after growing up in an upper-middle class family, I’m really happy that I read this book. I honestly wish that more voters and legislators in our society would read it, because it points out problems that our society works very hard to hide. I’d give it four out of four stars.

The two pieces of art that hang in the HPER lounge are probably what some people would call “hotel room artwork.” Hotel room artwork, like elevator music, is meant to be pleasing to the eye, without making too much of a statement. These particular pieces match the warm, school-spirited maroon of the walls. They aren’t too flashy; their main purpose is to decorate the wall while refraining from drawing attention away from the main attraction: the pool facility seen through a glass wall on the opposite side of the room.

The background of each artpiece is a patchy quiltwork of different shades of beige, maroon, and a light forest green. The edges of the pieces look like the borders of states or countries, softly jagged and as if they have been erased and redrawn many times. The focus of each piece is a series of four straight-edged, defined rectangles. On the left painting, two adobe squares lay atop an adobe rectangle with a black shadow, as if light was coming in from the top left corner of the painting. In the middle of the rectangle sits a black and white striped smaller rectangle. The painting on the right features a similar design, except it looks like the rectangles have been moved out of the way, revealing a diversely colored tunnel.

The overall effect, when “read” from left to right, seems like the middle box has been rotated and unlocked, to show something more varied and interesting beneath.

The artist of these paintings seems to have used a few different techniques. Some patches look more sponged on, while others seem to have been applied with a brush. As for a critique, the art is pleasing to the eye, but it (the collected two, since I don’t think they’re meant to be separated) isn’t a piece that would stop you in your tracks. It is however, the type of thing that my mom would like to hang in our living room because she likes interior decorating and because the people in her favorite staging shows on HGTV would probably use it to bring out the color in the walls or something.

1. Last week, we spent time working on our final paper, especially our thesis for our final paper. From the exercise, I gleaned that my thesis wasn’t quite specific enough, but I think that I’ll be able to fix it after I’ve completely finished the researching and writing process. That way I’ll know exactly where my paper went before I have to use the thesis to say where it is going. I’ve spent a lot of time (and plan to spend a lot more time) on my paper this week, and I feel like I’ll have a pretty solid draft by the due date on Sunday.

We also spent some time talking about our senior portfolios and the objectives for the department. Looking back at some of my essays from my freshman year, I can see a vast improvement in both the style and content of my writing. Considering that I’m planning on going into a very writing-heavy field, I think that the skills I’ve learned through our English department should serve me well. I think that the Language and Grammar course alongside my creative writing classes, work in the Writing Center, and work on the Kiosk will prove especially helpful when I go into the field of publishing.

Last month, I went to the MAC event where we hosted a couple of slam poets. I absolutely loved it. It was very apparent that as the poets were performing (because it was a lot more than just reciting) their pieces, the audience was completely engrossed in the performance. Their poems were emotionally moving in a way that I rarely find poetry to be moving. I think that a lot of their effectiveness has to do with their medium. In Capstone, we talk a little bit about how different mediums of writing go in and out of style. Back in the era that we’re studying, the pathway to becoming a successful writer was through short fiction published in popular magazines. Nowadays, the demand for short fiction is much lower than the demand for novels. In the same way, the college student audience probably wouldn’t have responded to someone standing up and reading Walt Whitman-style poetry as well as we responded to the slam poetry. Part of the poets’ success, I think, came from knowing their audience and being able to talk about issues that we care about in a way that was exciting and interesting.

One of the Friday is Writing Day events that I attended this semester was the marathon reading of Maze Runner. Honestly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the book, even after I borrowed a copy from a friend and tried to read through it from the beginning. Some of what we talk about in our class is the difference between more “literary” and more “popular” fiction. Millions (and I just made this number up) of stories were published in magazines in the time period that we’re studying, and part of a literary recoverist’s (now making words up) job is to separate the high-quality, groundbreaking fiction from the more formulaic popular fiction. Personally, I thought that Maze Runner was definitely a lower-quality work, even for a children’s book. Last month, SNL did a skit (linked here) that exploited a lot of the tropes that exist in today’s popular adolescent fiction (especially Maze Runner, Divergent, The Giver, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games). Although there may be good arguments for some of these titles’ literary merit, I thought the skit did a pretty good job of uncovering the formula for a successful, if sometimes empty, modern work of adolescent fiction.

A while back, I went to the noon Bill Russell event for FIWD (although I believe it was on a Tuesday rather than a Friday). Having never heard from someone who writes plays, I found it to be pretty interesting and informative. The event that I went to focused mainly on the writing of the musical “Side Show.” The whole endeavor of writing the original play, rather than the revival, reminded me of a lot of the stuff we talk about with literary recovery. However, instead of recovering literature, Russell and his co-writers were recovering history: the lives of the Hilton twins. They had to dig through all sorts of old documents so that they could stay as true to the actual twins lives as possible. At one point, he talked about how a friend found an old pamphlet in a flee market in Texas or something that led to a huge breakthrough in historical information. Were it not for that pamphlet, they wouldn’t have been able to know near as much about the twins’ lives as they ended up knowing. When we spoke with Dr. Page at UNL, he had a very similar experience with the library book with Breuer’s writing in it. I guess that the methods of research in literary recovery can be applied to other fields as well, especially historical fiction.

At the beginning of the semester, I went to the FIWD event where Dr. Coyne read his newest short story, “Taken In.” The event was interesting to me as a writer, since it went to show that all writers go through the same stages of writing, sharing, and revising that I’ve been through with my own work. I also had never heard any of Dr. Coyne’s writing before, so that was an interesting experience as well. I really enjoyed the story.

Looking back on the event, the story kind of reminds me how ignorant people can be about oppression and injustice when it doesn’t directly affect them. In the story, the main character’s female friends are persuaded (or maybe forced) to do the police sexual favors in order to get the main character and the other boys out of trouble. The main character doesn’t even realize what his female friends went through until decades later when someone tells him. Looking back, he realizes that there were hints, but the signs and signals went over his head.

I guess that that whole idea relates pretty well to a lot of the things that we’ve read for this semester. Zitkala-Sa directed her work toward rich white women because she knew that many of them were unaware of (or unwilling to open their eyes to) the injustices that her people had suffered, and she knew that they, in their position of power, could help with the problem. In the same way, the main character, with his relatively affluent background, could have had his parents come down and sort out the whole thing, but he didn’t even see the signs that the girls were being abused.