Commenting Enabled

This is apparently significant enough that I feel the need to post about it. I’ve turned on commenting for pretty much everything, as well as the Akismet plugin for spam filtering. We’ll see how well this works (and whether it’s actually worthwhile to remove the requirement that people register before commenting).

Fire away!

Summative Evaluations

Sometimes not having anything to write about can, in and of itself, be something to write about. However, that is not the case here.

This quarter, I’m continuing in my yearlong program at Evergreen, Student Originated Software. However, I am also taking an additional four-credit program (for a total of 20 credits) called Senior Seminar, which is intended to allow graduating seniors the chance to reflect upon their education and write a summative evaluation as a capstone to their transcript. The summative evaluation is an interesting beast, intended to provide an introduction to your collegiate life for those who are reviewing your transcript.

Evergreen transcripts are ordered most recent first, and each program that you are enrolled in has a program description, a self evaluation from the student, and a faculty evaluation of the student by the faculty member. Summative evaluations, while not required, are the very first pages that anyone sees before the rest of the evaluations. For me, this means that my summative evaluation will be on top, followed by the program description and faculty evaluation for Senior Seminar and the program description, my self evaluation, and my faculty evaluation for Student Originated Software. I have a very good idea of what I want that summative evaluation to do. I am graduating with a dual BS/BA in Computer Science and Writing (try saying that five times fast), but I have an insufficient number of credits to directly support my writing work. Thus, my summative eval, for me, will be almost a thesis-based essay explaining why writing has been an integral part of my life at Evergreen.

Now, the fun of being enrolled in Senior Seminar is that it’s really an opportunity to truly think about the work we have done, which means that I’ve had to drag out all those 2-inch binders that I have sitting around from all my classes throughout the year (a 2-inch binder per quarter enrolled, roughly – some smaller classes have smaller binders). Thus, my living room right now is stacked full of binders sitting there waiting for me to review them and look at them again as part of my preparation for writing my summative self evaluation. But the most crucial binder I have is not any one of those academic ones.

It’s the little, black, half-inch binder that holds my unofficial copies of my evaluations from my entire Evergreen academic career.

I’ll be writing more soon on what I think that summative evaluation looks like, and will probably even post some of the work I’ve been doing as preparation for writing that evaluation. Expect that, as June approaches, the posts here will be very reflective.

Enjoy.