OK, it is about time...

OK, so I know it has been a while since I have written. Bad Jason!!! I am bad at this, but to make a point, I am not as bad as my friend Steve. Steve is the slacker supreme for not blogging, not that I would ever tag him for not sharing much of his incredibly interesting life.

I think that one reason that I have not written is that I have so little to say...life here has been pretty uneventful, with work and life being pretty normal, almost boring. I have been busy with work as the start of school speeds towards us. I know that I teased my "Eastern" friends who started school almost a month ago. I laughed at them, and said, wow, we don't start until Sept. 22, months and months away. Or at least weeks and weeks away. Well, "weeks and weeks away" is now here, and my life is incredibly busy. I am in more and more meetings, and while I am learning in every meeting, I also get more and more behind as my a** continues its migration to Kansas size because I am sitting on it for 7 hours a day.

At our cabinet meeting this week, the president asked me what my impressions were of Whatcom after a month. Talk about putting me on the spot. I said that I was amazed at the College's collegiality. People are almost always simply nice to each other, and we talk to each other. How nice is that? And how different is that? It is so weird. In three years at Owens, I spoke to the president twice by phone, met with her in a smaller group of 5 or so once. Here we meet once a week with her, and I have been with her and the rest of the cabinet socially three times. It is a different world. I am pretty sure that Whatcom faces many of the same problems that any place has, and it has all of them, but I do think that we are better poised to solve them because I honestly think that we think of each other, care about each other, and mostly always like and trust each other. That is a pretty good premise for making progress.

I laugh some times, though. We are fighting the same fight....what do we do about load or overload for faculty? How do we get good people to teach our classes? How do we handle all of the paper that we generate? How do we measure student learning? The list goes on and on, and what makes me laugh is that most of the questions are ones that Owens faced. Or, that almost every college faces. At the very least, all of this is made more tolerable because when we walk outside, we can still see the mountains and the ocean. In fact, it makes it more than tolerable.

Keep in touch, eh?