Introductions:
Instructors:
Carol Christ – MFA CSU,
Corey Palmer –
Daniel Stites – MA Washington
University, St. Louis
Lecturers:
Madge Becker – ED.D. Northern
Bonnie Butler – MA CSU,
Aryn Kyle –
Maria Cuthbert – MA Instituto
Anglo-Mexicano de Cultura
Nancy Trimm – MA –
Kathy Smith –
Judy Pruess – MA
Administrative Assistant:
Syd Smith
Budget Breakdown for 2004-2005 Academic Year
Languages and Literature
Travel Money: 10,200.00
(That’s an average of 600.00 for each tenured/tenure track faculty member, to be distributed on a competitive basis. More on that later.)
Budget for
Languages/Literature (OCE):
38,081.00
Mandatory Expenses:
Phones: 16,872.00
Long Distance Calls (Estimate): 240.00
Postage (Estimate): 2,600.00
Copier (Estimate): 12,000.00
Other Supplies (Estimate): 3,000.00
Pinyon: 1,500.00
---------------------
37,212.00
Total Difference (Estimate): 1,752.00
Mass Communications
Travel Money: 1,800.00
(That’s an average of 600.00 for each tenured/tenure track faculty member, to be distributed on a competitive basis. More on that later.)
Budget for Mass
Communications (OCE and Student Fees):
OCE 7,002.00
Student Fees: 10,355.00
_________
17,357.00
Mandatory Expenses:
Phones (Estimate 5 phones): 3,248.00
Long Distance Calls (Estimate): 60.00
Postage (Estimate): 200.00
Copier: 4,000.00
Misc. Supplies: 3,000.00
MacLab Maintenance and
Professional Services (Estimate): 4,200.00
Equipment Repair: 1,000.00
_________
15,708.00
Total Difference (Estimate): 1,649.00
General Business:
Syllabi: Please submit a copy of your syllabi to the Administrative Assistant, Syd Smith.
MLA Bibliography: Think about ways to design assignments that encourage your students to utilize the MLA Bibliography. If we keep hitting it, then we can maybe keep it. If it looks like nobody’s using it, then they’ll probably eliminate it.
January Term: The administration wants to offer several 1-2 credit courses during January. Some ideas you might consider that might make are the following:
1. Study Abroad Opportunities
2. In-Service for Teachers – Content courses in English to help the teachers fulfill the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act
3. Skill Enrichment – For example, a course to remediate students who failed 111 or 112, so they could move on.
4. Any special interest you might have been researching that would draw people.
5. Here’s a list of ideas people submitted last spring. January term ideas.
Pay will be about the same as summer school – a percentage of your salary – rather than overload pay. But remember the courses are 1-2 hours; your pay will be calculated accordingly.
If you’re interested in a January term course, please send me a brief description by e-mail before Sept. 15th.
CAPP: Curriculum, Advising and Program Planning – Is still in the testing phase, but much more clean than it was last year. If you’d like training, let me know and I’ll either provide information or set you up with Holly Teal for a session.
Faculty to Faculty
Meeting:
Travel: You will not be reimbursed for travel if you don’t follow the newly established procedures explained in full detail on the following site:
http://www.mesastate.edu/finadmin/purchasing/travel/statetravel.htm.
Especially useful to all of you will be the step by step travel guide found on the site cited above.
Computers, personal
and lab: All computer issues are out
of my hands. I have no money for
replacing, fixing, or upgrading computers. Informational Technology is
developing a campus wide plan to address all of our computer needs. Contact
them directly if you have problems, or let me know what your needs are and I
will contact them for you. There is no
money in our current budget for computer maintenance or purchases.
John Sluder, at ex. 1403, is the new head of Information Technology. If you have problems, contact him or Jerry Nolan at ext. 1747. Bugbusters, on the e-mail list, still works, too.
They’re going to be asking us for help cataloging the computers we do have and assessing our needs. Expect some surveys or some folks coming around asking questions.
Copying: Due to the rather tight budget figures I’ve indicated above, it seems wise to find ways to widen the reserve to deal with emergencies that may develop. So, if at all possible, please use the computer instead of the copy machine.
Post hand outs to the K: or H: drives and let your students print them off, for example. I’ll be happy to train you, or you can contact Mike Means for training. If you have hand outs that need to be scanned before they can be posted to either of these drives, Cathy in Social Sciences
If you must copy, please consolidate text/information and use the double sided option. Try to eliminate black or dark marks from pages before you copy to save toner, order a workbook rather than make copies of activities for all of your students, take advantage of on-line sources for in-class samples or examples, make your syllabus brief and use a web page for extraneous course instructions and details.
Overhead materials are extremely expensive. Please try to use the computer equipment in your classroom to project or display information rather than make overheads.
If we run out of money, we will have no supplies and we won’t be able to copy anything, purchase anything, fix anything. There is no other source of income we can tap into to supplement our budget. So, just take a moment to consider if there are alternative ways to accomplish your task before you hit “COPY”.
Committees:
Travel Committee
Travel Money: 600.00 per tenured/tenure track faculty member has been allotted to all departments. But, we’ve been asked to distribute the cash on a competitive basis. Hence, the committee I’m forming to determine how the money should be allocated. We need to establish guidelines or criteria for distributing the money. We need to figure out how we’ll submit applications to the committee, establish deadlines for application and approval, etc. We should do this soon, because people are looking for money for trips they’ve already planned. After you return from your travels, you’ll need to submit a short report detailing what you’ve accomplished. These reports are requested by the Vice President of Academic Affairs, but should funnel to her through me. We actually need two committee’s here – one from Mass Comm. and one from Languages and Literature.
Library Acquisition
Committee
The way we’ve gone about building our library has been sort of haphazard. The librarians have volunteered to work with a committee to help us understand how acquisition works, assess our current collection and determine what would be the most organized and useful way to build our collection. (Moe Brown has volunteered already to serve on this committee. I need two more members, at least, one from English and one from Foreign Languages.)
Library Skills
Committee
The Librarians are anxious to help us establish a more uniform base of knowledge about library resources across the student body. They would like to work with us to figure out what we all agree our students should know about the library and to find ways to help us distribute that knowledge across the campus, in all of our sections of ENGL 090, 111 and 112, FLAS 111 and 112, and the General Education Survey courses.
Evaluation Committee
Evaluation Criteria: See the new handbook online at http://www.mesastate.edu/faculty/handbook/handbook.htm
In particular, we need to discuss how, as a department, we feel about distributing the “floating” points (60% teaching, 5% each scholarship, service and advising, and 25% floating), the quality and quantity of appropriate “work” for each category, and the tools we’ll use to evaluate that “work.” Check out Item 6 a,b, c and d. This is the part of the document the committee will be charged to articulate for our particular disciplines. We need to submit a document articulating our criteria/amendments/additions by September 15th. (Randy has agreed to Chair this committee.)
English General
Education Curriculum Committee:
090, 111, 112, 150, Surveys: In what ways are these/should these courses be different from each other? How do we determine that all teachers in all sections are addressing the basic issues we feel are important to that course? Where have we articulated these issues? How do we share them with each other and with new hires? This committee is not focused on assessment, but rather on curriculum. We’re not interested in standardizing presentation or pacing, but in making sure that students are given the opportunity to develop certain basic skills and acquire the knowledge they need to succeed. Next year will work on how we assess the criteria we establish this year. (Reenie has agreed to Chair this committee.)
Tenure Promotion Committee: This year, there will be one school-wide committee and we need to elect two people to serve on that committee. I’ll be circulating a ballot very soon, as those results must be submitted to Academic Affairs by September 15th or so.