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A heavy lunch of Whole Foods pizza, courtesy of Heather at the SEIU Executive Committee Meeting, gave me the energy for a long afternoon walk through Rock Creek Park. I entered the park from the Whittier Trail, which I found after trying to circumnavigate the Walter Reed campus. I then followed the Valley Trail upstream until the exit to Grubb Road. The return trip to the Takoma Park campus via East-West Highway reminded me of the four such commutes I made by bike in fall 2011, when for two weeks I rented a basement bedroom in Chevy Chase before finding a closer apartment in historic Takoma Park. Back on campus, I worked in RC111 to prepare a quiz and a lesson for tomorrow's class. It will be nice tomorrow morning to have all the printouts ready to go and not to worry about last-minute misfeeds through the photocopier.
The last of three community conversations concerning the proposed Math Science Center took place tonight in SN100. Once again we heard the local residents lamenting the loss of athletic facilities when Falcon Hall gets demolished. Framing this concern in terms of its detrimental impact on future healthcare workers, who are envisioned as eventually dispensing exercise advice to their patients without having experienced its benefits while in school themselves, neatly protects the local residents from an accusation of narrow self-interest, or as Rupert less charitably put it, their fear of having to swim with darker-skinned neighbors in community pools whose existence is a less well-kept secret.
My own contribution to the conversation---the only written comment I've left after attending the first two sessions as a passive spectator---went roughly as follows:
The aversion to losing athletic facilities---expressed at tonight's meeting and last month's---is predicated on the fact that we remember the past but not the future. The Takoma Park campus was around and providing athletic facilities for decades before the other two campuses were even in planning stage. During those decades did the Rockville or Germantown residents complain about losing the opportunity to exercise on a community college campus? If we could remember the future as well as the past, we might justifiably complain about the loss of a modern space for science and math education, during these protracted attempts to appease a privileged minority of affluent homeowners (who are outnumbered in a ratio exceeding 50:1 by the students we serve on this one campus, not to mention the thousands of other students who commute from upcounty to take Takoma Park's unique course offerings).
Signed, a part-time faculty member assigned to teach a science course next semester in Falcon Hall.