Composition Southeast

See you at the Cs if you please.

2007-09-12T04:34:00.000-07:00

My panel was accepted. Congratulations to us. :)

We'll be talking about academic literacy issues in the two-year college. I almost even remembered what I intended to say about it when I saw my title yesterday.

I'm sorry I've been out of touch with the blog world lately. I posted a little about that yesterday over at my Drupal place. I still intend to consolidate my various blogging efforts over at the other site eventually, but I still have some work yet to get that one up to speed. This blog is a comfortable old friend. I'll probably keep posting here for a time until I feel like I have things in place a little better on the other one.

A Drupaling I Go

2007-03-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

I'm in the process of setting up a new site that I think will become my primary academic blog now. I'm not quite ready to let go of this one. I've got a big learning curve on Drupal. Come on over and give me some tips on how things are done in the Drupaler's world, though. As soon as I get back from visiting my family and get caught up a little on grading, I'll get some discussions going...

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cs

2007-03-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

Patti and I almost missed our plane to New York because we spent about an hour sitting in traffic on the Pontchartrain bridge. They were working on the bridge, of course, given that about a year and half ago it was just a little snack for big, bad Katrina. I've been living in this reality where things happen differently now all this time, but somehow I forgot. Last year I did a much better job of planning my trip to the airport. Last year I knew things were bad and not getting better. This year I forgot. I've had so much normal life force itself upon me lately that I forgot we still can't force Katrina's aftermath into any kind of normal routine.

Then we got past the bridge and skirted the city to make our way to the airport. I knew that things were in shambles. I'd spent a lot of time looking at the shambles. Still, the plowing up of one person's shambles while someone else's still just sits there empty and irreparable is almost too hard a thing to take in. Even Walmart is abandoned. Walmart. I don't know why that bothers me so much, but you have to know that if Walmart can't bounce back the little guy doesn't stand a chance.

I had only recently returned from a conference in Biloxi where it was the absence of a beachfront Waffle House that irked me. Don't ask me why. I'm just weird that way. I've always been drawn to the things that were a little out of place to begin with, and I loved that Waffle House that looked out at the water in one direction and the antebellum homes in the other.

People like to talk about the sense of place in the South, and I can tell you that when absolutely every familiar landmark is gone or changed or damaged, it physically disrupts every fiber of your identity, every ounce of being in you that understands who you are. I no longer have an accurate map in my head of entire towns I've known my whole life. It feels like amnesia.

I was glad to meet Daisy in New York. I very much appreciated her discussion of Katrina and the New Orleans bloggers--the way the blogs filled in where the mainstream media failed, the way people have continued to blog as a means of healing and of activism.

It's so easy to forget. If you even drive a few miles away where things are better, you can forget just how far New Orleans and many other coastal towns have to go. It's far easier to forget than to remember, but we can't afford to forget. Next year CCCC will be in New Orleans, but it will be in an area that will appear to be okay, mostly. "The Isle of Denial," people are calling it. Don't let it fool you. Don't come and go from New Orleans without getting out to see the real story. It will, even a year from now, be far from over.

The Horror! The Horror!

2007-03-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

Looks like people are noticing and talking about (whining, lamenting, bemoaning) the heavy teaching loads at community colleges. Scott Jaschik's Inside Higher Ed piece is interesting to me in that I see from it I'm at the shocking edges of the shock zone of out-lying difficult-to-believe statistics. Now I know why people always gasp when I say how many sections and students I teach each semester.

Not only has the norm started to greatly exceed desirable levels, but
significant numbers of instructors are teaching well above the mean. The
survey found that more than 20 percent of writing instructors
at community colleges teach between 111 and 130 students each semester.
And 9 percent report teaching 131 to 150 students a semester.

These numbers sound just plain easy to me.

Of course this is a travesty. Of course the students are not getting the best instruction they could. Of course we need to all be fighting to bring the course loads and class sizes down.

Yet.

It's also interesting to me that the very people who teach argument are often the first to address an issue from only one perspective.

There are factors beyond the ideals of the best possible instruction. This is also an economic issue. Who/how/where do the funds come in to accomplish reducing work loads for instructors? We're not talking about chump change. Not only would my school need to hire more people to bring down class sizes, we'd also need new facilities. Lots of expensive new facilities, buildings which would in turn necessitate the aquisition of new property.

Of course that money should be invested in our community colleges. Of course it's worth it to build new buildings and hire new teachers and adopt more technologies and bring our numbers closer to ideal or even to average.

Yet.

It's a poor area, a rural area in which many students struggle just for gas money to get to class.

Do we want to increase tuition? Do we want to reduce salaries? Do we want to increase taxes?

Out of which turnip do we extract the blood to make our preferred move?

Part of the mission of the community college is to bring education to the home grown, to those who might not otherwise be able to afford a college degree. We have to consider the economy of this reality even as we reach to improve the circumstances through which we teach.

Community college teachers for the most part, I believe, are very grounded in their realities, and they work very hard to give their students the best education they can in the conditions they have. Like my colleagues, I too like to vent about my lot in life, but I am constantly reminded that this is the life I chose. I serve my purpose, and I do my job, and I do the best I can where I am and with what I have to work with. It's hard work. It's often frustrating because I know I can't always do things the way I think they ought to be done, and I don't always have control over decisions that I think ought to be made one way or another.

It's also very rewarding, though, and people who don't see it that way should probably choose to do something else.

Work for change. Work to raise awareness. Work to promote proper funding for our community colleges. Just don't whine about the stupid administrators who don't understand how they ought to be staffing our classes without stopping to consider the financial difficulties involved.

The Cs

2007-03-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

I had a great time in New York. I went to lots of sessions, back-to-back, marathon style without even stopping for lunch. I hope to be blogging about them in the coming days, but for now I'm recovering, catching up on grading, and trying to find my focus for the jobs at hand again.

It was especially good to see the bloggers--Mike, Joanna, Dennis, Bradley, Clancy, Daisy, Timna, Lanette, Sharon (the other), et al. And does it count that I saw the back of Collin's head while I listened to Clancy speak?

I also got to see a little of New York. This is a pretty big deal for a woman from South Mississippi. Let me just say about this that I challenge any of you to keep up with Nell Ann Pickett. She might be 72, but those little legs keep going and going. I think we walked through all of Manhattan on Saturday. Then we went to the Metroplitan Museum and kept walking at the end of the day. A good time was had by all.

See You in New York!

2007-03-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

If I've managed to successfully set myself up with free file hosting, you should be able to click here for a pdf of my Cs handouts--or what I have as of now.

What does Amazon want you to have?

2007-02-28T18:25:00.000-08:00

Customers who bought items in your Recent History also bought:

Microphone, ME-15 by Olympus
SanDisk 2 GB SD Memory Card by SanDisk
A Guide to Composition Pedagogies by Gary Tate

Sharon Needs a New Word

2007-02-28T17:31:00.000-08:00

I'm just rolling in from two back-to-back conferences, TYCA-SE and CFTTC. Someone please remind me next proposal season that sometimes everything does get accepted, and life just isn't long enough to do everything. But what the heck. Both conferences were wonderful, and I'd fired up and ready to take on the world even if I am too tired to lift a finger.

Something kept nagging at me, though, as I listened to the fervor over podcasting in both places. Inevitably, once anyone started talking about podcasting everyone in the room wanted to know everything they could about it. It seems lots of college presidents have issued the mandate to "Go forth and podcast." People everywhere are anxious to learn. Some are anxious to share what they know. Yet somehow we've also made a kind of cool club out of the word podcasting in which the term itself is used in a spirit that shuts people out.

Over an over I heard people say, "Oh, no. If you only post audio online, that's not really podcasting. That's just making audio files."

So?

I'm well aware that technopurism defines podcasting as both episodic and available by subscription, but there are a lot of other great possibilities for digital audio in education. Many we haven't even discovered yet.

There's nothing wrong per se with limiting the term podcasting to mean only one kind of delivery for digital audio. The problem is that podcasting is the cool word, and we don't have one that sounds as savvy and impressive to bandy about for all of the other things we might do. Hence, we have people saying things like "That's not really podcasting. That's just making audio files." As if anything else is less cool and less important.

I don't mind a little technolitism here and there, but this particular variety of it was a constant at two very different conferences. I found it terribly counter-productive.

I think we can safely assume that most people who go to conferences to talk about technology genuinely want to share their knowledge in a way that is helpful to others. Saying things like "that's not really podcasting," however informative it might be, is not exactly helpful. It shuts people out. It makes people feel like the learning curve is insurmountable. It discourages them from experimenting with one little step at a time on the path to technotopia.

Therefore, Sharon needs a new word. Help me out, world. What can we call non-subscription based digital audio that will sound just as cool as podcasting?

Everyone is Talking About MySpace

2007-02-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

First we banned MySpace on campus. Then we unbanned it due to large numbers of student complaints. Then we rebanned it only during the morning hours when computer lab traffic is heaviest. After 2:00 each day the block is lifted.

The controversy might be the most excitement we've had in years. Add to this that the MySpace ban also affected our campus connection to Thomson.turnitin.com, and things have been downright chaotic. My students now joke that anything that goes wrong is a result of the MySpace ban.

It might take a little while, but sooner or later whatever is troubling the rest of world makes its way to Mississippi.

There are good arguments for the ban, though I don't agree with the sheer nervousness over what the students might be up to on there. My only real concession to the ban is that our campus isn't prepared to have massive numbers of students building social lives around our school computers. They were overwhelming our labs. Immediately before the ban, I walked into one of the student labs and saw nothing but MySpace. It was something to behold--a whole sea of social networking probably among people who could have gotten up and walked across the room to speak to each other.

Still, there's a lot to be said for students feeling like they do have a social network at school. In the old days, three or four years ago, we were often told that students who got involved socially on campus were much more likely to stay in school. To our way of thinking way back then this meant clubs and organizations. Maybe it means something else today. Maybe it is time for the campus to reorganize to meet the needs of the students rather than the other way around. Maybe.

Blogger Updates

2007-02-01T03:56:00.000-08:00

I converted my own Blogger account to New Blogger, and in doing so inadvertently dumped all of my blog partners on various blogs. Evidently an Old Blogger cannot blog on a New Blogger blog. Sorry about that. Since I'm the only person who ever posted to this particular blog, and even I've been very infrequent about it lately, I'm not so worried. However, if you were once a member of this blog and would like to be again, please contact me: sharon dot gerald at gmail dot com.

New Blogger is cool. It has drag and drop template editing and other nice additions. It is also associated with Google Accounts, so presumably I could type my stuff in Google Docs and post it directly from there to my blog. I haven't tried that yet, but it's still cool to know I could.

I've also gotten my students on board with the New Blogger. This is a real work in progress, but it's been a fun, productive class, and we all feel like we've accomplished something just by getting everyone signed on to Gmail and Blogger.

So how's it going, blogosphere? I'd say I was sorry for not being more faithful to the blog lately, but I'll just wait to see if I get any better before I bother. Busy, busy days. More later...

Hello, Blog

2006-12-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

I'm a little surprised to see how long it's been since my last visit. I have been busy.

I did a Harry Potter presentation on Halloween. That was fun. The best part was that I got mentioned on a blog called The Chocolate Frog, which should be everyone's aspiration in life. I know this, of course, because I did a vanity Google.

I'm also pushing ahead with my oral history project. I've been working with The Good Dr. Sloan at USM, and I'm getting very excited about the whole thing. It looks like there might be some promising grant opportunities, and I am very much in favor of any activity that has me playing with microphones, talking to old people, and passing it off as an academic accomplishment. :)

I'm looking forward to presenting some of my project at the Cs.

I've also had students doing some oral histories, and I've been very pleased with the motivation levels. I'm even downright astounded by the degree to which the writing improved when they began to really care about the subject matter and about taking it home to show their grandmothers in the end. It was heartening enough to even make wading through six sections of essays at once a good experience.

I'm a little bit on the overbooked side for spring. If I show up for everything, I've got four presentations scheduled so far. All on different topics, of course. That might be stretching things even for someone whose entire social life consists of drinking coffee in public places while grading papers. I might have to sub-let some of my students.

That's about it. In my next incarnation, I'm going to have a blog called "The Haphazardician" because I know I'll always have periods of neglecting any blog I try to start up a relationship with.

Take care, everyone. Stay warm and caffeinated for the upcoming grading crunch.

Confessions of a User

2006-09-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to respond to some of the Turnitin debates over at Kairosnews all week. I just haven't had time. I've also been considering submitting a proposal about Turnitin best and worst practices to a local technology conference. In light of that, here are some thoughts I've jotted down this morning.

Turnitin Problems

Turnitin does not distinguish between things that have been properly quoted and documented and things that have not. The percentage matched number cannot be used to determine whether a student has cheated.

Turnitin is inconsistent. In one student's essay, he had several quotes from the Bible. Some were marked as unoriginal; others were not. We know that the entire Bible is available online in all of its various translations. Anything quoted from it should have shown up as unoriginal.

Turnitin even marks the headings on the papers as unoriginal. We know that a certain amount of the percentage matched number can be accounted for simply in the student spelling the instructor's name correctly.

One student had several sentences marked as unoriginal in an essay about Harry Potter. The link provided by Turnitin for where the sentences had been copied took me to a message board where all of the users were posting under anonymous screen names. The “unoriginal sentences” were not all together in one place. They were scattered throughout various threads and topics on the board. For all I know, the student was only quoting herself.

If essays are submitted to Turnitin in rough draft form, revisions of those same essays cannot be submitted without showing up as entirely plagiarized. This discourages teachers from having students submit rough drafts and using the originality reports as a teaching tool.

One student wrote an essay about her senior project in high school. The portions that showed up as matched were linked to an article in an educational journal about possible assignments for senior projects. No whole sentences were matched, only phrases. It is my thinking that the student had internalized the instructions for her assignment after spending so much time working on it. It is also my suspicion that the high school teacher, on the other hand, had lifted the assignment straight from a journal without changing a thing.

Turnitin only catches one form of cheating. If a student gets another student to write a paper, Turnitin can only catch that if more than one student has submitted the same paper to Turnitin.

Turnitin Worst Practices

** Accepting Turnitin's word as law (or even as true)--anything identified as plagiarized by Turnitin should be carefully reviewed by the instructor to determine why it was marked.
**Using the percentage matched number as an indicator of how many points should be deducted from an assignment for plagiarism—even if a student has incorrectly copied some sentences from sources, a portion of that number can be accounted for by things that do not constitute plagiarism.
**Submitting student work to Turnitin without informing the student that this will happen.
**Having students submit their own work to Turnitin without explaining to them exactly what it is or how it works.
**Submitting only final drafts to Turnitin without working with the student on identifying and correcting possible instances of plagiarism first.

Turnitin Better Practices

**Submitting rough drafts only to Turnitin and using the originality reports as opportunities for student revision rather than as proof of crimes.
**Recognizing that not all forms of “unorginality” are plagiarism.
**Using the originality reports as an opportunity to revise for lack of original thinking and/or original voice in writing as well as for outright plagiarism.
**Recognizing that some sharing of information and some internalizing of information is likely to show up in these reports in ways that do not constitute cheating.
**Having students submit their own papers to Turnitin and giving them open access to their own originality reports.
**Recognizing that students have to be taught how to avoid plagiarism before they can be expected to demonstrate expertise in avoiding it.
**Recognizing that information sharing is so prevalent in our common business and educational practices that students have good reason to expect that some degree of “borrowing” is acceptable in their writing unless they are told otherwise.

Like grammar checkers, plagiarism detection services are unreliable. They should not be the only way that plagiarism is dealt with in student writing, and they should not be used as a means of creating less work for the instructor. Used correctly, plagiarism detection services do require time and attention on the part of the instructor.

It is my thinking that people trained as writing instructors are the most likely people to understand how to avoid improper use of plagiarism detection services. Like grammar checkers, however, it is the people who understand how to use them who are the least likely to need them.

Though I have been using Turnitin as part of my department's adoption of the service, I agree with Becky Howard and others who have spoken out against it. I also agree that compositionists should be educating themselves on exactly how Turnitin works and exactly how it is being used so as to be better prepared to educate others in its possible pitfalls.

Academic Fantasies

2006-09-21T05:12:00.000-07:00

There are some great discussions going on right now, but I'm too covered up with students and grading and committees to do any of them justice. Instead I'd just like to share a quick note about academic fantasies.

I finished my Ph.D. in 1996. Since then it has been my continuing dream to go back to school. There's just no life I love better than that of a grad student. Of course, anything I might want to take wouldn't actually advance my career. Often I consider ditching everything and running off to an MFA program. Hello. My Ph.D. is in creative writing. This wouldn't exactly be a move forward. Once I was going to apply for a Ph.D. program at Duke and just get a degree in another field of English. What can I say? I drove through North Carolina and thought it was pretty.

Often my fantasies actually stray toward other disciplines. I'd like MAs in history, philosophy, and graphic design.

I never fantasize about taking courses that would allow me to make more money. I'm just an arts and humanities girl through and through.

I could, however, change the particulars of my current job by getting another MA. Instead of two sections of literature and four sections of composition every semester, perhaps I could teach two lits, two comps, and two comparative religion classes. Wouldn't that be nice?

Ah, well. We all need our dreams.

The Year of the Pod

2006-09-13T07:19:00.000-07:00

I started the year off not with a bang but with a cough. I've been fighting off bronchitis and generally feeling like a drag on everything lately. I do want to want to make my new school year resolutions and plans, however.

Lots of changes around here. We have a new president, new department chair, lots of shifts in dean positions. We've lost administrators to both retirement and death.

Overall, though, there is a very positive air around here, and even through my Nyquil hangovers I can feel it. There is just a kind of attitude that everyone is ready and willing to try new things. It's a good attitude to work with and around.

My new thing will be podcasting. I've been adding audio clips to my online class. Those are just little five minute mini-lectures to help jump start their study efforts. I'm going to expand that, though, into recording actual class discussions to make available online for my day students and my online students.

This all falls in line with the oral history I've now obligated myself to follow through with by getting my CCCC proposal accepted. All along I've held back on my plans to do oral history interviews because I wanted to podcast them, and I was never quite satisfied with the quality of recordings or with my own game plan for how to work out the technical logistics of it.

Because our new president is very interested in podcasting classroom lectures, though, this has all worked together to help me find a solution for the classroom and for the oral history project.

My current podcasting plan is to use my new laptop computer and a high sensitivity microphone for recording along with the program Audacity.

I also plan to steal some ideas from Derek and from Steven who seem to have been working on some of these same issues.

I'll let you know how it goes.

The Blogging Continues!

2006-08-07T09:03:00.000-07:00

Joanna and I completed the 24-hour blogathon to raise money for Katrina victims in Pearlington, MS, but we aren't stopping there. We're going to keep going by adding at least one new thing a day to the Pearlington blog up until the Katrina anniversary on August 29. Please help us pass the word along, and if you weren't able to drop by to leave a comment during the blogathon, it's all still there. Come on over when you get a chance.

The Blogging Begins!

2006-08-05T05:13:00.000-07:00

As you may or may not have noticed, the planned blogathon for Pearlington had to be postponed because I had a funeral to go to last weekend. Joanna and I are blogging all day today and all night tonight, however, on behalf of the small town of Pearlington, MS that was just obliterated by Katrina.

Come on over and contribute what you can, whether it's money, labor, or good old-fashioned good wishes.

Have Blog. Will Type For Charity.

2006-07-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

Joanna and I are going to participate in Blogathon 2006 to raise money for rebuilding the small coastal town of Pearlington, Mississippi.

As anyone who has followed this blog knows, Pearlington was not merely devastated in Hurricane Katrina; it was decimated. I've done some volunteer work in Pearlington through University Baptist Church and The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Mississippi. I can attest first hand to how much the people of Pearlington have struggled this year and how much they are still struggling.

I will attest next Saturday, July 29 when we blog every thirty minutes for 24-hours straight for Pearlington.

Money donated through this blogathon will go to University Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It will be used to purchase building materials for people in Pearlington who lost their homes in Katrina.

Please help us spread the word, and if you are able, don't forget to click on the PayPal link at the Pearlington blog to leave a much appreciated donation.

Playing with Odeo

2006-07-15T19:22:00.000-07:00

I've just discovered Odeo Studio, and I've taken that discovery as an opportunity to jump right in and do that pod thing everybody is so crazy about.

Podcasts, Access, Quality

2006-07-15T17:20:00.000-07:00

I've been teaching online classes for the past few years that were really hybrids. They met on campus five or six times per semester, and the rest was online. Now we are converting those classes to fully online. This has all of our online instructors scrambling to make the online instruction a little more sophisticated. Currently, I'm experimenting with adding audio clips, and I have a few thoughts/questions.

(1) Should I be worried about whether I have students on dial-up who will have trouble accessing the audio files?

(2) Where can I get a better microphone than the piece of junk I got at Radio Shack without spending a whole lot of money?

(3) If I want to imbed some audio clips into PowerPoint presentations, how can I end up with a file that isn't impossibly large for posting online?

(4) Is it better for mini-lecture audio clips to be scripted and polished, or am I okay to just wing it and hope for the "natural" sound?

New Normal

2006-06-07T19:41:00.000-07:00

This house is in Pearlington, MS. This is now a typical scene in Mississippi coastal towns. Many, many houses are sitting abandoned in this condition. It is overwhelming to think how much still needs to be done just to take care of storm clean up and meet basic necessities. At the same time it is heartening to see the sheer number of volunteers still showing up.

One group I met were high school students from Syracuse, NY on a civil rights tour of the South. They came to Pearlington for a service project as part of their trip. They learned important things that day like "Never open a refrigerator that's been sitting in a destroyed house for ten months." Some of them were also very excited about getting a close up look at some alligators.

Thumbs up to the teachers who put this together and the students who poured their hearts into the job.

Waveland

2006-06-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

Monday evening I rode down the beachfront with a group of volunteers from North Carolina. I took this picture in Waveland. You can't really get the effect from the picture, but we were fascinated with this house because it was the only thing left standing for miles and because you could see from it just how high the storm surge had been. There had clearly been water in that third floor.

Also, we all agreed that we would have stopped to look at this house even before the storm.

To Pearlington I Go

2006-05-29T04:34:00.000-07:00

I'm headed to Pearlington, MS this morning where I'm going work off and on this summer as a volunteer. Pearlington was absolutely wiped out by Katrina. The only business currently open there is a bar that is operating out of a tent. It once had a gas station, a grocery store, a bank, and a post office. All of that is gone now as are most of the houses.

I have to admit I'm pretty nervous about volunarily giving up things like flushing toilets and hot showers to camp out 70 miles away from my home, but the needs are tremendous in Pearlington, and I feel very humbled when I consider how the people there have been living all year.

Still, it's only about 25 miles from Slidell, and I'm not above burning up $3.00 a gallon gas in search of a clean bathroom. :)

Have a good summer, blogland. I'll see you soon. Probably very soon. My heart wants to help my neighbors as much as possible, but my back wants to come home and sleep in its own bed as much as possible.

Yo, Clancy!

2006-05-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

Congrats!

Couldn't happen to a better blog.

Summer Reading

2006-05-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

What's on your summer reading list?

I've been out of school for a week and a half now. So far I've read all seven of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, and Walking Across Egypt by Clyde Edgerton. I'm currently reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

The Ladies Detective Agency books are just a pure delight to read. I can't think of a better way to relax, but you do need plenty of tea and cake on hand to read these books. :)

Housekeeping is incredible. I had read Gilead by the same author previously, and it is equally amazing. There is a sort of deep, philosophical grace to the writing style. If you don't read anything else this summer, my suggestion is to go with Marilynne Robinson.

Walking Across Egypt is just sort of silly. I enjoyed it, and I'd read more of the same. I even related well to many of the details of Southern culture depicted in it, especially those details of Southern Baptist culture. At times, though, the hillbilly slap-stick is just a little overboard for me.

I haven't gotten very far into The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time yet, but I'm already prepared to be impressed. A number of people recommended this book to me, and I fully expect it to live up to its reputation.

On my summer wish list are Bel Canto by Ann Pratchett, Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. These are all books I've heard good things about and have just never gotten around to.

I'm also planning to re-read Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. These are books I'm going to discuss with a summer reading group.

So what's on your list? Do you have anything good to recommend?

Hurricane Season is A-Coming

2006-05-08T04:23:00.000-07:00

The Sun-Herald reports this morning that a major relief organization is pulling out of Waveland for the duration of Hurricane season.

The Morrell Foundation, a Utah-based relief group, has announced plans to pull out by Saturday, leaving a void in the volunteer effort to rebuild this Katrina-torn county.

The Morrell Foundation built a relief village at Buccaneer State Park just after the Aug. 29 storm, and has since housed thousands of out-of-town volunteers here to help haul debris, rebuild homes and just about whatever else was needed. The group also helped repair local spirits through holiday festivals and other gatherings.

According to a press release, the group is leaving the beachfront park because of the looming hurricane season. Weather conditions earlier this month that pushed saltwater over the beachfront road made it "abundantly apparent that our facilities would be unsafe for future volunteers," the release said.

I can't really blame them, but it still makes me sick to think of it. It also underscores the level of anxiety and uncertainty we are facing with the upcoming storm season.

The people who were living in solid houses that got blown away by Katrina are now in FEMA trailers or tents or cars. Places that were once used as shelters either no longer exist or have been banned by the government for use as shelters. And even without another hurricane, there are still whole towns along the Mississippi Gulf Coast where there are few jobs and essentially nowhere to purchase basic necessities. Residents could always drive to Slidell to stock up, I suppose--if they happen to have working vehicles, gasoline, and money.

We're looking at a grim, hot summer with or without the volunteer organizations. The steady presence of volunteers at least brings psychological comfort and the reassurance that things are being done. It brings hope that there is a normal to return to.

To watch a big volunteer group leave...

I'm sure I don't have to explain the psychological effect.