Fall Fest
Next week is Fall Fest, which leads up to Halloween. There are lots of opportunities for your students to do some fun, seasonal stuff like pumpkin painting, graveyard yoga, haunted trails, and something new called Fall Friendlies:
Fall Friendlies is a brand new Fall Fest event! This semester has been a rough one for all of us, but we cannot discount all the happy times we have had just by having the chance to be together. This is your chance to write a kind note to a friend, a faculty member, or just share a positive memory from this unique semester! Your Fall Friendlies will be written on colorful leaf cut outs and placed onto Wait Chapel for our Fall Lighting of the Quad as a way to commemorate the beauty we found in this semester.
What a great idea! And since we can’t have our normal Lighting of the Quad (which usually takes place in early December), there will be a Fall Lighting of the Quad, which I believe is scheduled for October 30th; more info to come once I have it.
Was in a meeting last week and one of the topics was the acknowledgement that as it gets colder, our natural tendency is to want to be inside. We know outdoors is preferable in terms of lowering risk of COVID, so it might make for a good Christmas or Hanukkah gift to invest in a good warm jacket for your Deac (as one of my colleagues said, “there is no bad weather; there is only bad gear” 🙂 ). In the interim, for those looking for indoor options to study, the Sutton Center is open for late night study until 1:00 a.m. Sunday through Thursday evenings and 10:00 p.m. on Friday & Saturday. My source tells me there are 88 six foot tables and chairs set-up in the lower Sutton gym, and they’ve run extension cords, so most have power. As the gyms have heat/air conditioning, wifi, restrooms, and water bottle filling stations, this might be a good solution for Deacs looking for late night study space. Your Deacs can visit the Study Space website for more info.
For those keeping an eye on the dashboard, you can see our cases have crept up, which is a trend we don’t want to continue. Please continue to talk to your Deac about the importance of safe behaviors, especially keeping masks on, staying 6′ away, and avoiding large gatherings.
Also want to put in another plug for one-stop early voting. Your Deacs don’t want to have their voting plan be “I will vote on October 25th” but find themselves in quarantine on October 23rd (and thus unable to vote at all). So the sooner they can vote, they can be assured their voice will be heard in the election. The early-voting site associated with March to the Polls (which departs at noon daily from the Poteat tent) is where I voted, and they did a really nice job with social distancing and public health. One more election-related item: an email went to students, faculty, and staff today about protecting yourself electronically during the election season.
Two quick notes to end the day: I found out yesterday that one of our faculty, Yasuko Rallings, Professor of the Practice in Japanese, has been named Teacher of the Year by North Carolina’s Foreign Language Association. Congratulations! And I need to make a correction to yesterday’s blog, where I misspelled the name of our new basketball facility: it is the Shah Basketball Complex. My apologies to the Shah family.
