Dr. Anthony Thomas

When I was an undergraduate (and that wasn’t long ago!), I remember having very negative attitudes about office hours visits and working with tutors.  For one thing, I didn’t feel like visiting with a professor when I was one student out of one hundred seated in a large lecture hall. The professor didn’t know me, so the conversation would be awkward.  As for tutors, I figured that they were primarily for those students who needed significant help with a subject—and I was too proud to think that I needed that help. 

For various reasons, Finals Week is a particularly difficult time of year.  Students are stressed out amidst a barrage of tests—and believe it or not, so are faculty! Many of us worry about how you’ll perform on your tests, and we put in long hours grading the final exams and calculating final scores.  This year, Finals Week will be particularly stressful (in my opinion) because it begins on the evening of Wednesday, May 4, and runs through Wednesday, May 11.

Unfortunately, it appears that my call for student comments on the

issue of student behavior has gone unanswered. But I am undaunted. One reason that I agreed to write for the Kaleidoscope is my belief that a lot of work needs to be done to improve this College: we need a good ol’ fashioned “attitude readjustment” in the face of the changes we have seen.

In this column, however, I’m going to lighten up and change focus. I’m

Is Kishwaukee College worth participating in? In a way, I’m glad I can’t hear your response.  There is a lot of cynicism out there—and, as I noted in my first column, it doesn’t help that many of us are “transients” here.  But being here for only short periods of time should not keep you from reinvesting in Kishwaukee College.  In fact, you might be foolish in passing up the rare opportunity to make a real difference and out-compete others when applying for scholarships and jobs.  I’d like to suggest some activities that we all should invest in—whether we’re faculty or students.