From the Caucus

The Iowa caucus is now history, and we did our part for Barack Obama in the Ankeny 6 Democratic caucus on Thursday night.

Most notable is that we had 210 participants and a handful of observers at the event, and when the fur finished flying, Obama had 81 supporters — enough to earn 3 of the 7 precinct's delegates to the county convention in March. For the record, John Edwards won 2 delegates, Hillary Clinton got 1 and Joe Biden earned 1. 

Here's a photo from the caucus, with Sam Graham as our chairman for the caucus.

It was an exhilarating night. My wife, Sharon, switched from an Edwards supporter to an Obama backer and quite a few other people came over to our side as well. As precinct captain for Obama, I spent a lot of my time running around the Crocker Elementary cafeteria trying to pick up supporters here and there as the Biden campaign teetered on unviability and the Bill Richardson camp fell apart. Rather than go to the Obama victory party at HyVee Hall later in the evening, all I wanted was a shower.

So it was a big victory, an organizational victory, for Obama. Democrats are energized. Of course, Clinton may be the victor in the New Hampsire primary election this coming week, so we can't read too much into the Obama victory. But I have a better feeling than I have in a long time that the American public is about to repudiate the lawlessness and corruption of the illegitimately elected George W. Bush, the man I've never gotten used to calling "president".

It's Caucus Day

For those of us in Iowa, it's a bittersweet day — the Iowa party caucuses are tonight, which means that the crush of media attention has reached its crescendo and that we finally get to stand up for our candidates tonight. But it also means that Iowa will revert to its Is-it-Idaho-or-Iowa-or-Ohio status after tonight. A quarter million Iowans will show up tonight, after which we'll revert to a state of pigs and corn to be largely ignored until around 2010.

I went out this morning downtown and found the place crawling with network uplink trucks. The Polk County Convention center looks more like St. Elsewhere this morning, and the East Village has several streets shut down so that the nightly newscasts can get a nice backdrop of the Iowa state capitol.

I'll be doing my bit as Ankeny 6 precinct captain for Obama tonight, then be pretty happy when it's all over. 

Caucus Frenzy

We're in the final push for the 2008 Iowa presidential party caucuses, and I've been spending much of the Christmas break campaigning for Barack Obama. Here's a photo from a recent Obama campaign event I attended in Des Moines.

With less than two days to go before the caucuses, it appears that Obama could capture more convention delegates than any other candidate in the race. That's based on today's Des Moines Register story showing Obama with 32 percent support in the state, opening a clear lead over Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

I'd love to say it's been because of my dogged work on behalf of the candidate, but it's really due to a great group of campaign workers who've flooded the state in the past several months. It was amazing to me during my volunteer shift on Sunday afternoon that I was one of the few people there who actually live in Ankeny. Many of the volunteers had come to the area without pay from California, New York, Colorado, Ohio and Florida.

End of the Term

After the weather troubles of the past day or so, Simpson got back on track with final exam week today. And it was a little bittersweet, as it was the last meeting of my first-year Liberal Arts Seminar. A great group to work with, and I took advantage of our last class to snap this photo. 

In the front are Abby Grover, Liz McKee, Robin Whitford, Brandon Herbert and Morgan Olson. In the middle are Sarah Keller, Nathan Frederick, Megan Cook and Macy Koch. And semi-circled around the back are Tim Ellwanger, Mallory Tandy, Ashley Katch, Brittney Jepson, Bruce Dahlhauser, Curt Tennison, Lexie Hagerty, Colleen Johnson, Erin Floro and Catie Ellingson. A couple of our group were gone the last day: Danielle Caswell, who was taking a Spanish final, and Manuel Gomez, who was winging his way spend the holidays with his mother in El Paso, Texas. Thanks for a great term, and we'll see you in the spring!

A (Very Rare) Snow Day!

If you're not in the Midwest, thank your lucky stars today. We're having a heck of an ice storm, and it's resulted in Simpson College calling off final examinations for the day. The driving is very difficult, the walking even tougher, and the trees are bending due to a heavy coating of ice.

This is pretty rare at Simpson: We're a residential college, and 90 percent of our students live within walking distance of their classes. We've called off classes only 3-4 times in the 18 years I've been at Simpson, and I understand that the college has called off classes so rarely in its 150 years that you could count the number of snow days on two hands. Joe Walt, the college's historian, probably could give me the exact number.

We'll be back at final exams tomorrow, pushing the schedule back a day for everyone. But the forecast is looking better, and it looks like we'll be able to get through to the end by the end of this week.

It's Final Exam Week

The semester comes to a halt this coming week with final exams at Simpson. Everyone talks about how stressful the week is for students, and it is. It can be stressful for faculty as well.

How so, you ask? After all, the students are taking the exam. You're writing them, deciding what they need to know. (Feel the power!) It's all a little more complicated than that.

The first stress is finding the time to write the exam. Many textbook publishers will give faculty exams that they can either give as is or adapt to their needs. These are called test banks. I've never been a fan of them. For one thing, my lecturing and discussion style inevitably leads us far afield of the text (not off topic, mind you — let's just say that I try to add value to the textbook presentation). The other thing is that I'm pretty sure that textbook publishers don't know the first thing about writing exams.

For me, much of this weekend's been taking up with writing and editing exams. My final exams are multiple-choice affairs, with much of the previous assessment of the course based on students' writing and critical-thinking activities in the course. And I cranked out 3 exams of 50 questions each yesterday. It took about 8 hours of my day, which was OK, given the crappy weather here in Iowa.

The second stress is editing the exam. To make for as fair an exam as possible, I start with an exam from an earlier semester and go over every question carefully (inevitably finding editing errors from the previous semester — ugh!). I never teach a course in an identical manner two semesters in a row, so that means a lot of questions from the old exam get thrown out and thus must be replaced with new questions. Those usually aren't too hard to write; I never seem to lack for material.

But then there's the detailed line-by-line editing. I teach copy editing at Simpson, so I'm a bit of a stickler for this. You're looking for the obvious typos, bad punctuation, etc., but you're also reading for clarity and the existence of (in my mind, at least) one clear answer to each item. There's nothing that bugs a faculty member more than a student claim that a question was a "trick" question — not because we want students to sit down, shut up and take the exam, but more because we feel that we've failed them in giving them a fair assessment of their knowledge. So I go over each question carefully, changing the order of questions if needed, making sure references to other questions in the exam are accurate, taking extra care to make sure there aren't two or more correct answers to an item.

How long does this all take? For each exam, it's 3-4 hours of work that goes through three or more drafts of an exam before a final copy is printed out.

In other words, anyone who says that faculty give multiple-choice exams because they're lazy and just want the semester over typically have never written one themselves.

Oh yeah, there's also 10 internship portfolios to grade this week, along with 20 papers from my Liberal Arts Seminar class. So it's going to be a busy and stressful week.

But I'll make it.

On The Road Again — This Time With Students

More than a month since I last posted — OK, I've been a bad blogger, but the excuse is that I've been deep in advising and registration and helping students at Simpson reach their goals.

I have been out of town again a couple of times: First, in late October to the annual POD faculty development conference in Pittsburgh, my first trip to the City of Steel. I'm in no hurry to go back. Never been a Steelers or Pirates fan, and the weather was cold, rainy and blustery pretty much the whole time.

More intriguing was an 18-hour (each way) road trip Nov. 16-18 to Fort Benning, Ga., with four Simpson students on one alumna to join a 25,000-strong rally against the U.S.-run Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation — better known as the School of the Americas. The Simpson crew is in the photo here: From left to right: Liz, Tom and Caitlyn Finn of Des Moines (Caitlyn graduated from Simpson this past May); Tracy Robson, the pride of Scranton, Iowa; and Courtney Lezanic of Omaha.

Lots of important folks were at the rally: Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich; Cynthia McKinney, a congresswoman from Georgia and Green Party presidential candidate; Father Roy Bourgeois, who is founder of the School of the Americas Watch and who visited Simpson a couple of years back. And there was a musical performance from the Indigo Girls, the video of which is here.