Sunday, September 23, 2007

Weekly Update (9/23/07)

Its the middle of two long (full) weeks for me. Last week, I presented Adlerian Theory with my friends Matt and Candice and then went to Freshman Retreat for Friday night and Saturday. This week I am attending the Crowder Band album release party on Monday, meeting with Chaplains on Tuesday, attending the Student Organization Summit on Wednesday.

All of this while I'm going to class and trying to get homework done... not to mention transcribe an interview that took me two hours to perform (and thus will take two hours to type...). I have to have a 2-3 page summary done on Wednesday morning.... yikes.

So, in order...
Adlerian Theory - Matt agreed to the "an interview with Alfred" plan - which seemed like amazing grace by the Lord, because we didn't think that there was any chance he would agree. But it was awesome! We made a fake TV show called, "Rise and Shine! with Candice and Tiffani" and Matt dressed up in a corduroy jacket, pipe and hat. We took a few days to script out the info, worked on a powerpoint presentation and some group discussion questions and were ready to go. The final perfect part was to add an "encouragement" piece - since the central piece of Dr. Adler's theory is encouragement. The professor gave us great feedback and I think the class really enjoyed learning. I know that we enjoyed teaching it a ton!

Freshman Retreat - for the first year (it hasn't been offered in a number of years), it went really well, and I think the students enjoyed their time, and hopefully they learned a lot, too. My favorite part was the "worship experience" on Friday night. Taylor Dodgen played music for an hour, and we had a few men and women read scriptures periodically. There were 10 prayer stations ranging from intercessory prayer to pray for the earth to drawing picture of yourself in Christ, etc. We grabbed the lamps from our hotel-style rooms (the staff all slept in the camp's motel) and put them out around the stations so that we could have the overhead lights off. It was perfect and I loved being able to pray for students as I worshiped around the room. I taught a breakout session on Saturday about Going Greek and I think it went OK. There were a lot of crickets in the room, if you know what I mean... (and what I mean is that I would ask questions of the group and there were no answers.........). Hopefully it was really OK. I'm excited to assess this year's experience so that next year's can be great.

That's probably it for now, except that a friend of mine (sarah gail) wanted my book list for my spiritual and moral development course, so I'm posting it here because there are some great books we're reading this Fall!

* Chickering, et. al.: Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education
* Colby, et. al.: Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility
* Fowler, J.W.: Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development...
* Fowler, J.W.: Faith Changes: The Personal and Public Challenges of Postmodern Life
* Hoppe, S.L.: Spirituality in Higher Education, New Directions in Teaching
* Jablonski, M.A.: The Implications of Student Spirituality for Student Affairs Practice
* Lewis, C.S.: Mere Christianity
* Newman, L.L.: College Student Affairs Journal
* Parks, S.D.: Big Questions, Worthy Dreams
* Riley, N.S.: God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges.....

Enjoy... and happy reading!

2 comments:

Sarah Gail said...

Thank you!

Sarah Gail said...

BTW- what was the name of that book from this summer about history and protestant higher ed? i seem to remember wanting to read that one as well.