November 2025 Volume 9 Issue 4

1. What makes a good teacher? 
   I think what makes a good teacher is: being approachable so students feel they can ask questions and be curious; being interested in your students; trying to understand their perspectives and where they’re coming from; and finding ways to engage them dependent on where they’re coming from. How do you think a teacher can go about understanding a student’s perspective? Communicating with them and asking questions.  When I was teaching, if I wanted to get to know my students, I would just have a conversation with them: “What else are you studying?”  “What do you like about it?”  “What are you interested in?” then I would try to find things relevant to the class that I could share that might be of interest to them.  A lot of times it wasn’t necessarily through office hours. It was through informal, “how are you?” conversations before class.
   
   
2. What’s a favorite quote?
   “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” – C. Wright Mills
   
   
3. What are some favorite books and/or movies?  
   I really like Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman.  She’s from the beat generation, and I like that kind of writing – a little bit on the fringes.  I would say my favorite movie is Almost Famous.   What’s a favorite scene or moment in that movie?  Well, I like the ending of it. It kind of leaves you hanging, and I appreciate that, that ambiguity.  Also, there’s a feeling from the movie that you get that is sort of just like this longing.  I think it speaks, this is kind of cliche, but it speaks to the human condition.   What I also like about it is the journalist kind of falls into that role.  So, he’s inexperienced, and he goes on the road, and he has to learn about this new way of living that is different and he has no idea about.  The movie shows a person getting to see another way of approaching life and learning the cultural aspects of it.  As a sociologist, I’m interested in the norms of different subcultures, and we see a great example of negotiating those norms in that movie.
   
   
4. What drew you to your field of study (Sociology)?  
   I really liked that it was relevant to what was going on in the world.  In class, maybe we’d talk about pop culture, and we’d be critiquing it. I love that it’s studying human behavior, trying to understand why people do what they do.   And it kind of goes back to the idea of wanting multiple perspectives, like in Almost Famous.  I really think there is value in having a diversity of perspectives. You know, one person thinks differently than I do. I can learn from the things that they have experienced or what they see or how they perceive the world.  And I just find that to be really exciting, to get to learn different ways that people view the world, different ideas that they have that might not coincide with mine.  So, I just really like that sociology allows you to do that, and it allows you to study the society that you’re actually living in, and think about how we take for granted a lot of the things we do in a society. And that can be as simple as our social norms in a small group setting, or it can be things that we do in a larger sense, in our institutions, like college, for example.  I love studying that, thinking about it, and wondering about it.  It piqued my curiosity then, and it continues to ignite it every day.
   
   
5. Who has been an inspiration to you in your life, and why/how? 
   I’ve had a lot of people who have been inspiring, but I’ll say one of the most recent ones was a fellow faculty member that I met at Kishwaukee College when I was teaching there.  He was a very seasoned professor; he taught history for something like 40 or 50 years.  He was formerly a high school teacher, but he was teaching community college in his retirement.  We had such great conversations about what we were doing in the classroom, and he was so inspiring.  He made connections between history and sociology. In sociology, you want to understand historical context -what has brought us to here today and how we do things, and how that’s going to shape how we do things later. So, there were the similarities we have, and having those conversations really kept me passionate about teaching and made me feel inspired pretty much every day when I went into the school.  In teaching, in anything that I’m doing, I am always wondering how I can get better, how I can do better, or how I can be better.  So, seeing him be excited still after 40 or 50 years of teaching ignited that excitement in me too.
   
   
6. What’s your favorite hobby or activity?   
   I really like reading. I probably spend most of my time reading. I also like to cook and bake, and I’m plant-based, so my cooking and baking don’t include animal products: dairy, eggs, butter, etc.  So, it’s always fun to be creative and see how I can actually create things without using those ingredients.
   
   
7. If you could go back in time and witness an historic event, what would you go back and see and why?  
   I would have liked to be part of the 1960’s civil rights protests.  With sociology, you’re interested in getting multiple perspectives and understanding why we do things that we do in our society, and it would have been a time of a lot of societal change and push for societal change.  And changing society for the better, and making sure that everyone’s experiences within that society were inclusive and equal, and that people were treated with respect.  So, I would have liked to have been a part of that.
   
   
8. If you were stranded on a desert island, assuming food and shelter were not a concern, what are the three things you need?    
   My family, which would be my fiancé, my dog, and my two cats (one is an indoor cat; the other is a community cat).  Books.  And notebooks and writing material.  And I could be entertained for forever then.
   
   
9. If you woke up tomorrow morning and found out you won 10 million dollars in the lottery, how would your life change?  
   Honestly, I don’t know that it would change that much. I’m pretty happy with how my life looks right now and how things are going.  I probably would buy better groceries, to be honest, for my cooking endeavors.
   
   
10. What do you miss most about being a child?  
    I miss the time to be curious and adventurous, and the innocence of it.  Can I press you a little bit on the idea of the innocence of it?   Sure. You seem to have a lot more time – the perspective of time feels greater.  And you don’t have an understanding of the violence in the world, at least hopefully you don’t.  You know, this is my perspective, but there is an idealistic quality to it; you see the good things, you make friends with people very easily, and, I’m thinking pretty young here, you haven’t been ingrained with societal ideas about how you should be or who you should be.

by Harlan Pease, Associate Professor of Communication, EHCT To do, or not to do.  That is the problem

Shunryu Suzuki would argue choosing “not to do” is actually doing something, but I’m not sure that is going to be helpful for where we are going here. 

Should we not eat that tempting dessert today because it will be good for our health at some future date?  Get up this morning and exercise for the benefit of our heart at some future date?  As hard as it can be to delay gratification, I think it can be equally, if not more difficult, to do what we should do today when it seems like it is so very possible to delay doing it.  To procrastinate – not to do, in other words.  

This is just human nature, of course.  But it leads to a few interesting questions, one of which is: if it’s hard to motivate people to exercise to help ward off a painful, potentially fatal, heart attack, how do we motivate them to not put off doing schoolwork?   

Of course, when it comes to schoolwork, there is also the value question (unlike the heart, where I assume we all understand its value).  I started out as a math teacher, and one of the questions you get as a math teacher is, “when am I ever going to use this stuff?”  Fair question.   The short answer, in many cases, is, “you’re learning this stuff now so you’ll be able to do more complicated math in the future, which might be essential to you if you’re going to go into certain occupations.”  There are deeper answers underneath that:  You’re going to use it because it will help you think logically and critically.  It’s also helping you learn a language to describe the world, and learning in that way can help you think more creatively. 

But all that said, it can be really, really hard to convince people that those quadratic equations they’re solving today are going to be somehow beneficial in the future.  

It’s a problem that probably all educators face, in some way or shape or form.  For some, more than others.  For example, if you’re teaching English to a group of students who have no desire to be English majors, or who don’t see writing as an essential part of their future, or who think they’ll just use AI or Grammarly or something like that to solve all those things their English teacher is going on about, it’s really easy to understand why a student might think, “what’s the point?”   As a side note, this response can be even more amplified for certain populations who, for a variety of reasons, might not see security in their future, who might not see a lot of value in investing now for some future promise that may never come. 

Let’s add a layer of difficulty: If you don’t already do so, imagine you’re teaching a course that’s designed to help people overcome gaps in their knowledge that high school should have covered: a remediation course in reading, writing, or math – one of our corequisite courses.   You’re trying to teach people things they didn’t learn before, or, in the best-case scenario, they knew once but have forgotten.  For the first, they weren’t motivated to learn it the first time.  For the latter, they weren’t motivated to remember it.  As you can readily see, it’s an uphill climb.   It wasn’t learned the first time or was forgotten.  The student likely doesn’t see the value in what you are trying to teach them.  And our old friend procrastination is waiting in the wings for a chance to grab the spotlight at every possible opening.

So what do you do?  You might argue that these students should be motivated to learn these things because they’re here as college students, and it’s for their own good, and so forth.  But that’s not an argument we can afford to make.  Not if we want to graduate people. Not if we want to increase retention and persistence.  That’s not the reality we face as educators serving our students.

When I visited Amy’s class, the first thing that stood out to me was how much effort she had put in to finding ways to solve the question of “when am I ever going to use this stuff?”  That day’s unit was on the Annotated Bibliography, which is really hard to see the value of when you’re on the beginning side of it.  I confess that I made it to my senior year of undergrad – as an English major – before I ever really did one.  Of course, once you do one, it becomes immediately evident why it is such a valuable tool.   But I had to learn that the hard way. 

So, I was immediately struck by Amy’s approach: she put the students in groups and then had them choose a topic from a provided list.   But these weren’t stuffy or boring topics.  They were relevant, including: the loss of SNAP benefits; the cost of living in Tennessee; should college athletes get paid like pros with company/ brand endorsements; Beyonce v. Taylor Swift: who’s the better diva performer; AI-generated movies; Tiktok’s effect on teens’ attention span; and “Fast fashion.”

Students were being invited to research something they likely already had an opinion on, and they were given very clear instructions as to what to do: find a source and evaluate the source using the CRAAP test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose. 

Everything was clearly planned and laid out, and students were being ushered into the place where they were being invited to do academic work, to get into that place where opinion gives way to an informed viewpoint.  A place where many of our students fear to tread.

What Amy did so well was work to remove as many barriers as possible.  The topics were there, the parameters were clear, the instructions were clear.  All the students had to do was start the train down the tracks.  All the excuses that lead to procrastination were shunted off.  And then she worked the room, encouraging, answering questions, and making sure all students were getting involved.   Throughout all of the interactions she had with her students, the message that she cares about them and their learning was apparent. 

Amy worked really hard to make sure “not to do” was not what students decided to do.  Doing is what begins to clear the path to seeing the value.  Doing is the first step to building the confidence our students need to see their goals through to the end, to complete their coursework, and to walk across the stage as a college graduate.

The 2025 NACADA Annual Conference, held October 26-29 in Las Vegas, brought together thousands of advisors passionate about student success.

For our Nashville State Community College team—Jayme Hay, Michael Sostre, Kati Murphy, and Renae Rakidzic—attending as part of the Advising Success Network (ASN) delegation offered a chance to reset during a demanding registration season. But bringing two students, our brand-new ESOL Connect peer advisors Verenice Murrieta and Luis Parra, transformed the experience entirely.

Lightbulb Moments

Seeing behind the curtain of advising sparked profound realizations for both students. The opening keynote by Dr. Cecelia Santiago-Gonzalez resonated deeply with Verenice: ” When I listened to Dr. Cecilia Santiago talk, something clicked for me. She shared her story about growing up, and I saw myself in her. When she explained that advising isn’t just giving information but helping students grow, I felt that in my chest, and it hit me that this job actually makes a difference.”

Luis gained insight during a session on academic coaching: “I realized that to truly grow as an advisor, I need to focus not only on providing information, but on showing genuine interest in each student and helping them discover answers for themselves.”

Renewed Purpose

For Verenice, the experience was personal: “It reminded me of how I felt when I was an ESOL student; confused, nervous, and unsure where I belonged. Now I want to be the person I needed back then.”

Their enthusiasm reminded our entire team why this work matters. Sometimes the best way to remember our “why” is to show others what we do. The impact goes both ways—they learn what it means to support someone’s educational journey, and we rediscover the profound difference we make every single day.

(Photo caption) L-R Verenice Murrieta – Peer Advisor, Michael Sostre – Student Success Advisor, Jayme Hay – Student Success Advisor, Kati Murphy – Institutional Research Analyst, Renae Rakidzic – Assistant Director of the Student Success Center, Luis Parra – Peer Advisor

Left to right:
Verenice Murrieta – Peer Advisor,
Michael Sostre – Student Success Advisor,
Jayme Hay – Student Success Advisor,
Kati Murphy – Institutional Research Analyst,
Renae Rakidzic – Assistant Director of the Student Success Center,
Luis Parra – Peer Advisor

Nashville State Community College’s North Davidson campus Student Success Advisor Brent Smith has been honored with the 2025 TBR Chancellor’s Commendation for Military Veterans.

Nominated by college president Dr. Shanna L. Jackson, Smith received a challenge coin during a Veterans Day celebration at the college’s White Bridge campus. An advisor since 2021, he provides academic advising, success coaching, and connects students with support resources. Previously, he served as an adjunct history professor at the college, demonstrating dedication to student learning and support. Combined, these roles have given him a well-rounded understanding of student needs both inside and outside the classroom.

Smith’s military experience continues to shape his approach to service and education. He served in the United States Marine Corps from August 1996 to August 2002, and later in the United States Army from June 2005 to May 2009, achieving the rank of Sergeant. During his Army service, he completed two tours of duty in Iraq.

Jackson wrote in her nomination letter, “Brent brings the values of discipline, humility, and a service-oriented mindset into higher education, enriching the experiences of both students and colleagues.”

Smith’s dedication reflects Nashville State’s broader commitment to supporting those who have served and those who still do. As a Veterans Education Transition Support (VETS) Certified Campus, the college provides resources for veteran and military students, who may be eligible for benefits and services. Through its Prior Learning Assessment, veterans may also receive college credit for military training and service.

NSCC Veterans 2025

Christina Bou Tayeh
Student Services Specialist I, White Bridge Campus

I am honored to nominate Christian Bou Tayeh for Employee of the Month. She has genuine care for both students and colleagues, making her an exceptional member of our team in the Welcome Center and at NSCC. She consistently goes above and beyond to assist students with their admissions questions—often taking extra time to ensure they feel supported and informed every step of the way. She is always willing to step in wherever needed. Whether it’s translation or solving unexpected challenges, she takes the initiative without hesitation. She is not only a reliable teammate but also a strong advocate for both our team and the students we serve.

Jarvis Sims
Purchasing Assistant, White Bridge Campus

Has a positive attitude, comes to work all the time, is friendly to coworkers and helps out students when in need. An all-around person who helps when needed.