Community calendar items added on 3/24/11

The West Plains EXTRA has listed the following community events that we've added to the calendar on the WA@2.4K' blog.

March 27: Friends of Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge will hold their Fourth Annual Fundraiser Auction from 1 to 4 pm at the Lincoln Center, 1316 N. Lincoln St, Spokane, Wash. Tickets are $25 for members and $30 for nonmenbers. Food will include a pasta buffet with salad, dessert and a no-host bar. A silent and live auctions will also feature a number of items to bid on. For more information, please contact Joanne Powell at 999-2090, jopowell39@aol.com or Louise O'Leary at 235-4531.

April 2 and 3: The 22nd Cooper Jones Memorial Tour of the Frozen Flatlands. Saturday April 2, Time trials on Highway 904 in front of the Cheney Free Press. Later that day, a road race will go from the same area and end at the Fairview Cemetery on Salnave Road. Sunday April 3, a road race will run on roads near Chapman Lake and Williams Lake. For more information, please visit the Baddlands Cycling Club at http://www.baddlands.org/.

April 3: St. John's Lutheran Church of Sprague will hold their 26th Annual Sausage Feed from 11 am to 3 pm at the Sprague Community Hall at 3rd and C street in Sprague, Wash. Adults $9.00, 6-12 $4.00, 5 and under are free.

April 16 and 17: Eastern Washington University's 10th Annual Spring Shootout. The Campus Rec sponsored event brags double elimination and officials on all courts. Entries must be received by Friday, April 1. http://www.ewushootout.com/ or call 359-4836 for more information.

Every Hour a Golden Hour in EWU's Math Classrooms

“Knowing I get kind of intimidated by math,” says Eastern Washington University senior Dori Simpson, “I signed up with a gal that I had met in lab—a graduate student that I knew I did well with her style of teaching.” But within the week before the start of classes, all the instructors shifted, and she lost her pick for math 115.

Simpson is a nontraditional student with red hair cascading well below her shoulders and large, round eyes. She was still optimistic that she could succeed until she asked a question in class. “‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ (the instructor said.) And all I could say was, ‘Well no, not to me it’s not obvious and thanks for making me feel stupid—by saying that, that way,’” says the French and Spanish major through pursed lips.

Simpson swallowed her pride until the first three assignments were turned in together and handed back. Out of a total of 50 questions, she missed three, but the instructor gave her a C. The professor combined the three assignments, valued them at ten points and subtracted the number missed. “Seven out of 10…became a C,” Simpson says. So normally, when you have 50 questions, you would get two points off per question because of how the math works. So I was expecting a low A.”

She is not alone. A student who asked to remain anonymous had difficulty with a math professor early this quarter. “We would ask her what she meant by something, and she would go over it a little bit and then she’d be like, ‘Okay, if you have any other questions, you need to try this problem on your own and come and see me in my office hour, and we’ll talk about it. I personally am not capable of doing it with my schedule.”

On the first two tests, the junior couldn’t figure out what the instructor was asking for, and so put too much information on the test and was unable to finish the first two tests this quarter. She says that if she didn’t use the right method to solve the problem—even if she got the correct answer—or if she placed the answer on the wrong part of the page, she wouldn’t get full credit for it. Her first two test scores were 74 and 66 percents.

Mathematics department chair Dr. Barbara Alvin speaks slowly when discussing success rates. She says students who score 90 percent on a test might not know as much as students in another section. “You can ask more insightful questions to get at student’s lack of understanding and hence you have to give them a lower grade.” She doesn’t understand students’ happiness with class averages above 3.5. “If you’re getting a 3.9 in that class, you don’t look a lot different than the rest of the students. Where if you were in a class where everyone had to learn something to get a grade, you might have some students below the 3.0. Then, when you’re applying to graduate school, you look different from your fellow students.”

“I want (students) to be challenged because they’re going to learn more…If everybody can get a 3.5 or above, then are you asking enough?…I doubt that many of the students that are failing are spending a minimum of ten hours (a week) outside class, studying.”

But Dr. Alvin knows of students’ overall academic challenges. “EWU admits students with lower SAT scores and lower high school GPAs than are admitted at other institutions. A higher percentage of our students are eligible for financial aid, and oftentimes that’s an indicator of future success in college.” Dr. Alvin explains that it’s probably related to the lack of emphasis on education at home, the lack of access to the same schooling prior to going to college and the lack of interest in their studies.

She says that legislature often looks at retention rates and graduation rates, but EWU administrators want them to remember the higher percentage of students on federal financial aid. “(Financial aid students) may be more likely to have to work in addition to studying for their courses…I’m sure there are some courses I would have gotten a higher grade on if I hadn’t had to work because I would have had more time to study.”

“People want to blame a problem on someone else. It’s easier to say it’s in someone else’s control than in my own control…I think it’s true for myself. I think it’s human nature,” says Dr. Alvin, “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t admit to mistakes or ways in which we can do things better, but we shouldn’t take away from students’ responsibility either.”

If students are unable to get additional help outside of class, then every hour with the instructor is critical. “There’s a connection between (department) budget and class size…You can have a lot more interaction with your students if you have a class of 20 than if you have a class of 40.” Dr. Alvin says this gives instructors more time to assists individual students. “In my perception…it’s easier for (students) to sit there and text and talk to their neighbor…and as soon as the students don’t feel accountable, the interactions in class aren’t as good as they would be in a situation where they do feel accountable.”

And maybe students pick up on classroom-size problems. At ratemyprofessor.com, 825 votes toward 62 EWU math instructors rated them with an average of 64.7 percent from October 2002 to the present. Hardly a scientific sampling in comparison to the estimated 2,000 math students per quarter; these numbers represent students who have found the rating website and given a positive or negative vote.

When asked for passing statistics, Dr. Alvin said that she and I would need to do an institutional review board request before any information could be released. “We don’t respect students who are writing in because they’re disgruntled. If they’re unhappy, they should come in and talk to us about why they’re unhappy…And students come to me…There are times that students have legitimate concerns. And sometimes there are just misunderstandings.”

Simpson did go in. “I…tried to get permission to switch professors because I knew it wasn’t going to work. I was told you can’t change professors. So I was frustrated because they switched all the classes the week before without any kind of notice…then regardless of the fact they did that, they tell me that I have no option.”

Simpson needed a GPA above 3.7 to keep her transfer scholarship. After speaking with three people in the department office, she dropped the class to join a language class 10 days into the quarter. The biggest problem with the math department, says Simpson, is that there is no advocate for the student. “Policies and people don’t always work in a clear and cut dry way.”

After the two uncompleted tests, the junior who didn’t have time to see her instructor during her office hour talked to her instructor after class. The professor said the junior was her best student, she needed to study more and many of her other students who took the test had walked out a half hour early. The student asked her classmates and students from the other same-level class the instructor taught and found this might not be true. No one she spoke with had finished the test early.

She spoke to Dr. Alvin about test lengths. Dr. Alvin told her that she would speak to the instructor, but that she didn’t know her tactics. The teacher might want the students to know the material well enough to zip through the test.

Now things are different. “She’s changed…to answering the questions of the students as we continue pressuring her to satisfy our question,” says the anonymous student. They had their first review the day before their third test. The instructor told them what work to show. The student thought she aced the test but achieved a passing 85 percent.

Simpson retook math 115 and earned a 3.9 in the class. Her new professor graded differently. He went over homework in class the next day without grading it. The first part of class was devoted to homework questions or concept problems. “He would take a liberal amount of time… so you could see if you were learning a concept. And you weren’t all of sudden going to have your grade suffer because the night before—when a concept was just introduced—you couldn’t figure out how to apply it to three or four different problems.”

What do you think? We would love to hear from you. Please share your comments below. Watch for more stories in this series.

Blizzard Blankets West Plains.

South Hill--Spokane, View from Cheney

Northeastern Hill, Cheney-- to the right as you head to the freeway on 904.

Betz Elementary and middle of Cheney



Condensation from my breath froze to my hair. It was 10 degrees with wind gusts up to 25. During my trek, two motorists stopped to ask if I needed a ride. They must have figured that only crazy people would be out
taking pictures.
 
Protection
Geoff Meyer ties a bandana to his face to protect against the blizzard conditions while snow blowing.
Adding to the Blizzard
Geoff Meyer blows snow in 10 degrees.

Jenny Hyde: Virtual Virtuoso

Jenny Hyde is an art and design professor on the farthest reaches of campus. In a round cinder brick of a building, Jenny shuffles in her clogs through the Digitial Arts Lab, calling over the seventeen monitors and seventeen scanners. Over lightly freckled cheeks, her hazel eyes flit about the room. At the end of the lecture, she tours the room, giving praise and instruction to her digital art students.

The Digital Arts Lab is far from the drawing and painting studios where she began. In 1998 she earned a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Her exhibition was in drawing and painting.

Maintaining a studio in New York City exhausted Jenny. She worked multiple jobs to support her artwork, but the fulfillment wasn’t there. She was tired. Her ideas weren’t working. Painting wasn’t answering the questions she was asking.

She had been exploring “cultural geography” and human control on physical spaces. She explains, “When I say the words, “American West’ or ‘The West,’ immediately there’s images that will come to one’s mind that are sort of stereotypes of what the American West is. Stereotypes such as… cows, horses—all these things that…depict the American West, but in reality these things were only there because of human habitation… the European invasion…So these icons were manmade in a sense. So we actually made these landscapes through our influence and what we were doing.”

Influenced by recent art shows she had attended, Jenny had been experimenting with different media, drawing with Sharpies on different materials. In addition to cultural geography concepts, Jenny was trying to recall a certain physical experience or feeling of what happens to someone physically but had difficulty putting this on canvas.

A visiting friend examined her work. He told her that she should be making videos and recommended the Electronic Integrated Arts program at Alfred University, where he was attending.

She applied and started the program in the fall of 2004. A year after she finished graduate school, she moved back to New York. Freelancing, she created web pages and assisted another artist by transferring her slides to j-pegs until Eastern Washington University hired her as a visiting assistant professor, which lead to her current position.

Her work has shifted to the body itself and how it shows evidence of life, thoughts and anxieties. She is “looking at the body like a thing we need to survive…physical things that we depend upon about our bodies.”

In her short movie, Potential Problems, she uses scans of chewed fingernails in different layers and sizes, moving them across the screen and rendering them into something other than fingernails. She takes the digital image and is able to render it into something beautiful in a different and new way.

“My work…focuses on these weird little physical things that our bodies do that are evidences of our inner selves...This recent body of art I’ve done with fingernails…I’ve been scanning and collecting all my chewed off fingernails, which is totally gross. But it’s a gross activity…Sometimes I’ll be sitting in the classroom…and I’ll see fingernails from other fingernail chewers…and there’s like these little pieces of body all over the place…So that to me is fascinating…not only act and the weird grossness of it,” Jenny pauses to laugh, “but that they’re doing it because they’re either nervous or bored. It involves some psychological need or comfort.”

In her current project, Zooming In, Jenny uses video to compare the sleeping body of a child in diapers to that of an adult in the same position. She utilizes two channels of video playing simultaneously. One view is the zoomed in view only inches away from the baby while a scroll bar hovers over the correlating spot on the adult’s body.

She was inspired by online shopping and the interactive nature of viewing objects that one can’t hold before purchasing. The child and the adult have a personal connection to her as well, which spurred her thinking further. “I’m a fairly new mother of a two year old…one of the things that really fascinates me is that he is literally a physical copy of his father. I think about this genetics versus digital code. Working digitally, you can constantly you can copy and paste, copy and paste…and it’s the same thing…Human reproduction is a little more organic than that, but the info in the DNA code reappears as a copy in my baby...His body is the same as my husband’s. Sure his face is a little bit more of a blend of us, but his body is his father’s.”

She would like to create an interactive piece with this material, where the viewer can scroll over the adult body and see the corresponding place on the baby, but she says she’ll need help with technology before she can do that. “What I love most is that what I want to use or use changes as much as the technology changes…Working with digital technology is like a double-edged sword because (every new change) happens so fast. You get the hang of something then a new program will pop up or they’ll revise it somehow. It gets exhausting.”

Beyond digital art, Jenny thinks that “what’s next will involve a complete simulated environment.” “We touched on it a little bit with virtual reality,” she says, “but there’s a problem with virtual reality because you had to wear a big thing on you. Now we can interact…between environment and virtual environment…like the Wii game…Your physical movements are involved in the actual process…I see a lot more simulated environments that actually also use your physical environment… so that it’s not all simulated. That actually involves the physical self as well.”

New Portable at Betz Elementary.

View from Ash street.

10:15 a.m., 2/10/11

Due to population growth on the West Plains, Betz Elementary is anticipating overflow students from Sunset and Windsor elementary schools. This overflow will continue over the next two years until the new elementary school is built on the corner of Holly and Hallett.

The Cheney School District projects the new elementary school will be occupied by Sept. 1, 2012.

A new portable was delivered on Feb. 9. Kent Martin, principal of Betz, expects a third portable building to bring the total of portables up to three. Each building houses two classrooms. The temporary building they've been using houses a classroom for resource room students and a district program called Student Connections.

View from alley behind Betz.

With the overflow students, Betz staff will have more difficulties scheduling the common areas such as the library, gym, cafeteria and computer lab. Martin says it will work--three portables is nothing in comparison to the seventeen portables added to the elementary school where he served as principal on the west side of the state.

Betz is the only elementary school in the district that still has room for portables. Martin says "Salnave's built out too." He explained that the city and country regulates how much water each property can have on site and how many feet the portables must stand away from other buildings.

Betz currently instructs 426 students. Projected numbers for next year's load will come this spring.

Interview with Kenny Kemper from "Welcome to Cheney."

Eastern Washington University’s recent triumph over the Blue Hens has been a great thing for Cheney resident Kenny Kemper. He starred in a Campus Crusade for Christ (“Cru”) video featuring “Welcome to Cheney,” a two-year-old song by his previous band named Jehovah’s Whiteness in parody.

The five-year resident played the song for friends until Cru music leader Joe Vidot heard it. He needed a project for his sound production class and produced Kemper’s music on campus.

This year Cru selected Spokane for the location of its winter conference and Jason Randles, Cru staff member at EWU, as the master of ceremonies. Randles decided to use Kemper’s song in a video to introduce himself and where he was from.

Kemper says his music is influenced by secular rock, The Strokes and Brand New. Currently he’s into Ace Troubleshooter, Jars of Clay, DCtalk and old Audio Adrenaline.

If you’d like to hear more of Kemper’s music, go to Multiplexer’s Facebook page, Jehovah’s Whiteness’s Myspace page, and Vessel on Myspace Music.

If you missed "Welcome to Cheney," scroll down to the bottom of this post.

Fog yesterday, more fog forcast for today.

Pictures taken 1/25/11

Don’t Feed the Animals!

WA@2.4K’ welcomes journalism major and guest blogger Desiree Clark!

Don't Feed the Animals!

By Desiree Clark

Raccoon sightings are common in my Cheney, Wash. neighborhood. I have seen a raccoon at least a half a dozen times and others have seen paw prints and small raccoons. My neighbors nearby seem to shrug off any warning I give that they have moved in.

My neighbor, who lives below me, and I have started to refer to our friendly neighborhood raccoon as “Al.” According to Pelotes Island Nature Preserve, the name “raccoon” may have come from the Algonquin Indian word “arukun” meaning “he who scratches with his hands.” We figured Al was easier to pronounce. I am a night owl and apparently Al is the same.

My apartment has a laundry area in the basement of the house. Unfortunately, I am the attic apartment and have to go outside around the back of the house and down a cement stairwell to access it. While coming up from the laundry around 8 p.m. a few nights ago, I rounded the corner of the house and came face-to-face with Al.

Apparently I startled him, as he sure as heck startled me. He reared up on his hind legs and stood as tall as my chest. This is not saying much as I am only five feet tall. However, for someone my size to be reared on by a wild animal that is about the same size, I was freaked out with no escape nonetheless.

Turning around meant getting trapped in the cement stairwell and he was blocking my path around the house. Doing the only thing I could, I ran for the stairwell and pounded on my neighbors’ window. Al followed of course, and doing this catlike stalking move, he crept towards to stairs. I pounded harder.

By this point I was shaking uncontrollably and my neighbor was not answering. Al slowly moved forward and the front door of my neighbor’s house finally opened up. Man to the rescue. When the door opened up and my neighbor who is twice my size came out, Al ran over our fence and off to torment someone else.

I shook for about 30 minutes before shooting off an email to my landlord about Al. Knowing I needed more information about the animal, I looked further. I found out some interesting information about the wild animal population around Cheney.

A few days after the “incident” with Al, I approached the Eastern Washington University campus police for information. Officer Tom Barber, a 6-year veteran of the EWU police said there are many different wild animals around town including “owls, raccoons, cats (larger than a house pet), coyotes, deer and fox.”

Up until this point I was unaware how humorous my terrifying experience was for those that heard the story. Kudos to Barber for his almost poker face. All I was looking for was a way to get Al to move on. “We invaded their territory,” Barber said and he added that the best way to keep them away is to clean up your yard and keep garbage cans secure.

Still not folding to everyone’s chuckles, I googled it. You would be amazed (or maybe not) at the amount of information that came up. The best site was http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Rid-of-Raccoons. They have a cartoon video to basically tell “us dummies” how to get rid of raccoons.

There are many ways to keep animals out of your neighborhood. The obvious one has been mentioned, cleaning up your yard of garbage and keeping it secure. Taking in pet food at night and cleaning up debris will also help. Purchasing metal garbage cans with secure lids, placing weights on your garbage can lid, and washing your garbage can out are also ways of keeping the animals away.

My landlord was great about looking into the situation as well. She also said many people laughed while giving her information but was told to call Fish and Wildlife if the “problem” continued.

Since this terrifying experience, Al has thankfully disappeared. I have not placed rocks on my garbage or double bagged, but I carry a Maglite to do the laundry now. One of those big four- or five- battery Maglites. I really hope that Al lives a long life in someone else’s garage or wood pile or whatever. But I promise this, he will not be missed.

Have pictures of wildlife in your yard? Send them to WashingtonAt2400Feet@gmail.com, and we'll post them!

EWU Not Free From Bullying

When EWU junior "Tara Jones" rejoined the marching band last fall, she couldn’t have foreseen the discord waiting for her.

In a rehearsal on a piece that called for crowd noise, Tara’s section leader directed his screaming point-blank at her ear, causing terrible pain. She went home to bed immediately after school and woke up hurting the next day. When the ear pain was still present a week later, she finally went to her doctor, who said that some of the muscles in the ear had been shocked into protection mode and, as a result, pressure had built up behind the drum.

When Tara confronted the offending student, he laughed, saying he didn’t know such a thing was possible. Surely, he didn’t mean to hurt her, did he? Tara assumed he didn’t. But soon after this incident, a poor interaction between the pair ended with him calling her a rather colorful gender-based epithet.

After another incident involving property, Tara confided in an instructor, who pointed out where she went wrong and spoke with the section leader. For Tara, this criticism hit a sour note. “I felt invalidated when (the instructor) corrected me.”

Since then, the student has retaliated with more harassment, this time with more personal discriminating statements based on Tara’s overheard conversation with a friend. When the instructor asked for specifics, Tara was too embarrassed to share. Bullying has left Tara feeling powerless and angry.

According to the EWU policy on bullying (901-04,) bullying is “intentional, targeted at an individual or group, repeated, hostile or offensive, and creates an intimidating and/or threatening environment which produces a risk of psychological and/or physical harm.” The policy includes a spectrum of behaviors that are physical, verbal or written. To sum it up, the civility learned before life at EWU should be retained and practiced.

Behaviors that are harmful to an individual or property are referred to the campus police. Detective Quincy Burns says the university takes this issue very seriously, but that harassment issues don’t make it to them unless it becomes criminal or the victim has been threatened with violence.

Criminal repercussions are straightforward, but the disciplinary actions as outlined in the bullying policy are ambiguous. The policy says, “The supervisor or other appropriate official will take action to prevent future violations and to administer appropriate sanctions.” Karen Wanjico, Violence Prevention Victim Advocate (VPVA) says that discipline is handled on a case-by-case basis. After a hearing, the sanctions could be a dismissal from the university, in extreme cases, or student education, like an interview with police or a personal reflection paper based on research.

Catching the bully before the behavior becomes criminal is doing the student a favor, says Detective Burns. Certainly, education is a priority at the university; in real-world scenarios, students could face natural consequences ranging anywhere from a human-resource referral to job loss to a civil harassment suit or worse.

Bullies can get away with their behavior if their victims are undereducated about their rights. At EWU, the weakest point of the bullying policy is student training. According to the policy, the Vice President for Student Affairs is responsible for annual training on standards and procedures pertaining to bullying. During New Student and Orientation Week, students had the option to attend a 40-minute session on discrimination, sexual harassment and reporting criteria. Other than that, where do victims learn that the behaviors they’ve been tolerating are actually red flags? Sexual harassment and assault help referrals are highly visible on campus, but for students like Tara, comparing your own experiences with that extreme is enough to dismiss the inappropriate behavior and pretend it’s no big deal.

Gary Gasseling, “the head cheese of the big red barn,” stated that students often downplay red flags, but campus police want students to come in. “When you don’t report, you are a part of the problem.” Toughing it out doesn’t make the victim stronger, it enables the bully.

So what should bullied students do? When recipients of unwanted behavior are dissatisfied with or unable to approach their instructor for help, they can visit with first responders, who are staff and faculty trained to assist in these situations. They can help students through the complaint processes. Another resource is Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) in Martin Hall.
The direct, more formal approach would be to visit the Office of the Dean of Students and file a complaint. According to Michelle Helmerick, Assistant to the Dean of Students, after a complaint, the Dean will listen and sort through the matter confidentially. She also said that students who are employees should report to their immediate supervisors, Human Resources or another official.

The Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities houses more student resources, including conflict resolution services. VPVA Wanjico’s job as advocate is to help students afraid for their safety. She helps with practical needs such as switching classes or dorm rooms to navigating the legal system with the appropriate court order.

While Tara’s case hasn’t become violent yet, she has visited Heather Robinson, a communications professor and first responder. “She listened, validated my feelings, gave me advice and a phone number.” Tara went on to say that Robinson was there to point her to resources, but wouldn’t hear about the situation again unless Tara came to her personally with the details. Confidentiality is a priority at the university.

Since then, Tara has been talking to other students and says that people are watching out for her. “The music building is a tight community.”

Wednesday Sunshine

Raccoon Tracks


Raccoon Prints


Raccoon Print Detail


Sunlight in the Tree


Trees Capture the Sunrise


Happy January Morning


Light through the Snow


Soaking in Sunshine


Tree Shadows on Hargreaves