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I arrived at the Math Learning Center half an hour before it was scheduled to open. As it turned out, a campus-wide lockdown in response to a suspicious gun-wielding man delayed the opening of the learning center until almost 10:00. In the brief time I had before the end of my shift, I got to work with a MATH 150 student on calculating derivatives using the power rule. Throughout this session the words of Prof. Wang echoed in my head, "an entire class period devoted to teaching them how to subtract 1."
Wandering around campus after my shift at the learning center, I uncovered more details about this morning's incident. Finding a satisfactory resolution to this drama, I relaxed in the library with the national and international news stories. I wonder if Trump is thankful to Brett Kavanaugh for distracting Americans from Trump's embarrassing performance at the UN meeting this week. Tomorrow's testimonies by Kavanaugh and his accuser Dr. Ford are likely to dominate the national conversation through the weekend and possibly into next week.
A mid-day presentation by Angela Nissing gave me the opportunity to ask how she sees the employment landscape in coming years for people entering the ESOL profession. In her response, Prof. Nissing lamented not being able to offer as many courses this semester as in years past, and she encouraged the students in the room to help boost enrollment by recruiting their friends and family members into ELAP classes.
At 2 p.m., acting president Dr. Cain hosted a Town Hall in the Cultural Arts Center. Much of the discussion focused on security issues, although plenty of questions addressed class cancelations, union contract negotiations, and the financial health of the college. Michael LeBlanc, entering late, gave a frank and impassioned recap of the breakdown in negotiations between the college and AAUP over salary increases. My own question, about the pitch that college administrators use in Annapolis to lobby for state funding, received from Dr. Cain a response along the lines of "collaboration, not competition," which response Prof. LeBlanc was not present to hear.
I had the good fortune to run into my dean at this afternoon's Town Hall. I pressed him to explain why the advertised full-time faculty position in the Takoma Park math department was not filled this year. Dean Hamman deflected the question with an assurance that the vacancy would be re-posted over the winter break. In response to my question about which applications might stand a better chance of surviving through the final round, he said "teaching here already is great" (quotation possibly mangled due to the noisy room), but that the strongest applications would be those that highlight the candidate's extracurricular student engagement.