The Microbiologist in Room A107

This is a bulletin board I put up in one of the Writing classrooms here on campus (all the bulletin boards were all either blank or full of remnants of material from before I started at Desert Vista in 2006). It's a quote I found from a microbiologist from an article on how research should make you feel stupid.

That particular classroom is most often used for Writing 101 and Writing 102, which are research- and argument-focused classes. I thought it would be helpful for the students in that classroom to remember that scholarly, professional people don't know everything. They just press on and keep figuring things out.



Here is what happened after I put up this bulletin board. Not graffiti, but conversation.



Here's a closer look. What is this anonymous person thanking God for?



The idea of trying. The microbiologist's "it" in this case is a research problem he was having trouble with, so he asked a Noble Prize winner--who said he didn't know how to solve it.

So many people just need to know that they don't have to know, they just need to attempt, to guess, to explore, to walk out on a limb and see what happens.

That line under "things" is not a stray pen mark. It travels downward.



to the final piece of the quote.



It's my favorite part of the whole quote. I love the use of the word "muddle." I think it's important to hear "as best we can." That's all we can do. Muddle the best we can. What we do not know has no boundaries, so we can just keep pushing forward with what we can learn.



And this final anonymous note encapsulates the entire goal of the bulletin board. The microbiologist and all his scholarly research experience sounds like the community college student writing a paper and finding sources in the library database. The context is different, the scale and scope of the projects are different, but the idea stays the same: do what you can, keep moving forward, and keep learning--even if you feel stupid.

Type for Free, My Friends

Last week, a student who visits the Writing Lab often came in with an urgent problem: the trial edition of Word on her laptop expired, but she needed to type a paper.

I contacted a friend of mine who works with Ubuntu Linux (he has written technical books for them, as well as rescuing another friend's computer by installing Linux). I figured he would know if a free or inexpensive word processing program existed for this student. He did.

He pointed me to OpenOffice.org. I knew nothing of Open Office, but now I'm sad that many students do not know. It's a free batch of programs from Sun Microsystems that match up with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and more. I'm all for anything that will help students spend less, and this student got the equivalent of Word for free.

Now she can work on her papers at home when she has the time instead of trying to work all her writing time into her busy schedule and the Writing Center's summer hours.