Sunny Day

June 2, 2022

by Betsy Chapman

I was on campus this morning and got a look around at some of the construction I referenced yesterday. Much work is being done in the parking lot between Kitchin and Poteat Halls, which will be our new centralized shuttle stop. It was hard to see much due to the construction fencing, but I could see a backhoe digging.

Bostwick and Johnson, two of our first-year residence halls, are getting all new windows and a new addition to their front entrances, and some internal improvements as well. You can see the new facade of Johnson taking shape behind the trucks in this photo. It was a little harder to see the work on the road coming up Davis Field from my vantage point, but things appear to be progressing.

I was there early in the morning and it was already a sunny day. I half expected to see Camino Bakery packed with students getting their caffeine fix before their classes started, but it was pretty empty. I was able to grab a few photos of some of the art near Camino Bakery, as well as in the Tribble courtyard (see end of message). Hope you enjoy.

As I thought about our summer school students, I thought about the fact that college learning is a complex and interesting thing. For many of us, when there is an experiential component – working with real data, or a hands-on kind of project – that learning seems even more salient to us. I had missed a news story a couple of weeks ago about just that sort of hands-on learning and thought this might be especially fun for our grandparents in the Daily Deacdom, as it touches on ancestry and family history.

“Students in Professor of Sociology Ana-Maria Gonzalez Wahl’s ‘Sociology of Work, Conflict and Change’ class, used the demographic snapshots of people in their own family trees to better understand bigger picture societal trends.

Using the 1950 census data, students found details on grandparents or great grandparents with jobs as textile workers, schoolteachers, assembly line workers, business owners, labor union organizers and college professors. The students also had conversations with their families and delved into earlier census records and other genealogical records to trace work histories going back three generations.”

You can read the full story here. And now, the aforementioned artwork

Getting Lost in the Forest by Lauren Lukacsko (’13, MSM ’14)