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This book is about a Russian count, Alexander Rostov, whom a A Gentleman in Moscow is an excellent read for the times we live in. It serves as a reminder to make the most of one's circumstances, |
Like most patients at the time of diagnosis, panic sets in and you do the thing you should not do: Google. Seriously, I should know better. But down the rabbit hole I went, and everything I encountered caused me serious anxiety. But after that brief lapse of judgment, being a research-oriented academic greatly impacted my approach to fighting breast cancer. That, and my husband is a cell molecular biologist who is basically a walking encyclopedia. There are years of research that have advanced our understanding of the disease and how to most effectively treat it, so information-gathering became a daily ritual. Researching brought me great comfort. I felt empowered and it helped me stay positive and centered.
During treatment, you become a bit of a shell of yourself, bare and a little heartbroken. I told myself when this started that I was going to be as positive as possible, to be vulnerable, and authentic. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I tried to just focus on each little step because thinking about the full path to healing overwhelmed me. And I didn’t want to miss the gift of growth and evolution by wishing the cancer away or feeling negative and angry all the time. Thus, I wanted to continue working during treatment to keep my mind occupied. In a weird and unexpected way, I was secretly thankful for our Covid bubble because it kept me cocooned from the scary outside and normalized teaching online. I also learned to let go – at least partially - of perfectionism, something I’ve struggled with all my life. Cancer puts things into perspective. I just couldn’t create the perfect Canvas site or recorded lecture because I didn’t have the physical or mental capacity to dedicate all that energy to a single thing. Now that I’m cancer-free and back in the classroom, I am enjoying myself more because I have less stress and burnout. I truly feel closer to my authentic self than ever before, both as a human and an educator. That’s a gift for which I am very grateful.
Jody Quitadamo Quote.
My journey was more of a path with unexpected turns. And it was very much tied to my passion for teaching, which was also a winding road of discovery. I was largely indifferent to history growing up. It seemed to consist of memorizing “one damned thing after another,” as the saying goes. Like most young people, I was too focused on the future so the past mattered little to me. When I enrolled in college as a single mother with a two-year-old daughter, I would not have considered majoring in history for a second! But one day, in a British literature course, my professor walked in with a Kodak carousel projector to display images set in Victorian England and provide us with historical context for assigned readings. And it dawned on me: what I found more interesting was the historical context in which the books were set more than the fictional stories themselves. The next quarter I enrolled in my first college history course, 20th century China of all things. My professor was amazing. He made history relevant to my life and taught me that historical knowledge is a powerful currency. We’ve now been good friends for 20 years.
From that point on, my intention was to pursue a doctorate in Chinese history. I participated in the McNair Scholars program as a first-generation college student, traveled abroad for research purposes, and participated in whatever experience would help me reach my goals. But I was also a single parent and concluded that pursuing such a lofty degree was a selfish endeavor. I pivoted and chose, albeit reluctantly, to go into high school education. I spent the next year working on my secondary social studies teaching certification, only half excited about my career choice. That all changed on my first day of student teaching. It was like magic! I discovered that I loved teaching and that I was pretty good at it. I poured a lot of love and energy into those 10 years in the high school classroom. That was a very special time for me. But after a decade, it was time to move on. Now that I’m at the community college level, I find I have the best of both worlds. I get to continue teaching and building relationships with students while diving deeper into history in a more scholarly way.
I consider myself a history educator first, historian second, so most of the groups and sources I rely on focus on pedagogy and outreach in my discipline. I’m a member of the OPSI Social Studies Cadre, made up of about 35 K-12 and post-secondary educators who serve as a social studies teaching and advisory team for the state. We strive to improve social studies and civics education through curriculum development and outreach. It’s very exciting work. I also volunteer annually as a judge for National History Day. For me, it’s an opportunity to support middle- and high-school students who spend months conducting original research on historical topics. It’s a very formal but supportive competition and the students produce truly remarkable research projects. I really love the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which includes its own journal, History Now, and provides high-quality educational programs and resources that have been a game-changer in my classroom. I also subscribe to Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, which has become an invaluable resource for the newest ideas in social studies pedagogy. In terms of my disciplinary knowledge, I subscribe to a few journals, like The Journal of American History. But I mostly rely on monographs and well-researched historical accounts with large scope. I’m currently reading the book Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America ( Online and Find at Library: GENERAL HQ 1418 K47 1980), an older publication but a groundbreaking work on American women’s history.
There have been so many, and currently Brene Brown is my superhero. As a teenager, I remember reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale ( Find at Libary PR 9199.3 A8 H3 1998) It was my first encounter with a dystopian novel and themes like misogyny and oppression. I found the story extremely terrifying yet prophetic. It awakened an early awareness of the power of a woman’s voice as a social justice weapon. Perhaps without realizing it, that book planted a seed for my future as an educator.
Jody Quitadamo with daughter Lark.
In science, observing is an integral part of the research process. When we look closely at anything, we often notice qualities or characteristics that we had overlooked or just never paid attention to. A few years ago when I taught Field Botany each spring, I would take students out to different sites throughout the Columbia Basin to collect native plants. On these Friday field trips, we tried to be good stewards of the native habitats that we visited. Students would collect plants that were plentiful in each habitat as they were instructed. On Monday the students would bring a sample of each plant they collected to the lab.
This is when the real observations began. Sometimes the flowers of the plants contained very tiny parts so we would use dissecting scopes to magnify the flowers to see and count all of the little details. Sometimes the leaves were a funny shape or the stems of the plant had fine hairs that pointed in a certain way. In the process of looking at each collected plant, we would determine its name and its plant family. Students would study those plant and family names so that when they saw the plants on another field trip, they would know them. On field trip after field trip, the students continued to collect new and different plants. By the end of the seven field trips, each student had usually collected over 80 different native plants.
Every spring, students would tell me that they no longer looked at the lands around the Columbia Basin in the same way. Now as they looked over the sagebrush landscape, they saw all of the beautiful blooming shrubs and wildflowers that they had previously overlooked. It is not that the sagebrush lands had changed, but the change was fashioned in the eye and the mind of the observer. So, at the end of a lengthy research process, one of the most beautiful things that we can discover is something new about ourselves – what we have learned, how we have grown, what we would do differently the next time.
For 23 years I taught science at Big Bend Community College (BBCC). During those years I would read science magazines like The Scientist and Scientific American. I would watch nature and science-themed shows on TV like NOVA and listen to PBS Science Fridays on the Radio. I would attend NWBIO, a conference of my peers – Northwest biology teachers, and we would share ideas. I would use one of the Library’s search engines, ProQuest, to find journal articles on science topics of interest.
Making the job change from faculty to dean after so many years was a big leap for me. Now I read different books – books about leadership skills that I need to develop. Currently, I am reading Brene Brown’s books – Daring Greatly, Dare to Lead, and The Gifts of Imperfection. I have a stack of related books that gets taller and taller, my future reading. I have a goal to start listening to podcasts and have a list of those I want to follow, but I am not quite there yet.
Another resource I use to keep up with my work is talking to my colleagues and peers. When I was a faculty member, I would talk with other faculty members about their teaching. This started for me when I was a new part-time faculty member, and a group of faculty were meeting on selected Fridays to discuss active-learning strategies. Jim Hamm invited me to participate in that group. Over the years I shared office space with Brinn Harberts, one of our past Math faculty, and shared lunch times with Rie Palkovic. In the process of sharing our teaching practices, I gleaned great ideas that enhanced my teaching, and I gained dear friends that I still keep in touch with. Now as a dean, I have another set of peers and colleagues that are great resources for me; the other deans at BBCC as well as transfer program deans at other community colleges across the state can provide insights to me and answer questions that may come up.
When I was doing research for my Master’s thesis, I performed experiment after experiment, and then I would go back again and repeat the same experiment. In order for experimental data to be valid, it needs to be reproducible. This establishes accuracy in the data and allows scientists to possibly draw conclusions from the data. When I read something, I want to know about the source of that information. I love it when someone writing an article cites their sources clearly so that I have the option of reading those sources.
I have a second answer to this question. When we think of the human body, we all have a general idea of how human bodies work. We use our lungs to breathe in fresh air for oxygen and breathe out air laden with carbon dioxide. Our heart pumps blood throughout our bodies to carry that oxygen to our cells and to pick up and carry away the carbon dioxide that eventually gets expelled with each exhale. Plants move air in and out of their plant bodies, but they don’t have lungs. Plants move water and dissolved sugars throughout the plant, but they don’t have a heart to pump it around. Plants can do many of the same things that our human bodies can do for us, but they do it in a completely different way. When I am researching a solution to a problem, I may have found one solution, but there may be more than one valid approach, just like plants and humans. I often need to keep an open mind to other possible and perhaps better solutions.
When I did the research for a literature review for my master’s thesis, this was a long time ago – before the days of the personal computer and the smart phone. I had to pay my college library $50 and give them five or six keywords to feed into their big room-size computer so the computer would search the periodical indexes for me. Hopefully, the computer would provide me with enough relevant articles to look up and use for my literature review.
Now we just get on ProQuest and enter our own words; then we sift through the list of article sources that ProQuest or another search engine generates. The ease with which we can search the Internet and the vast amount of information at our fingertips can be a different type of challenge. What do you do when you have too much information? You will need to figure out a way to narrow your search or to efficiently sift through the excess information.
That was the situation I found myself in back in the spring of 2017 when I was preparing for a presentation as a candidate for the dean’s position I now hold. When a dean is hired, candidates are brought to campus for an interview and a forum. During the forum, the candidate sits at a table upfront in a big room and anyone from the college can ask the candidate any question they wish. There are two forums scheduled on a particular day and each forum lasts about an hour, so that adds up to two hours of questions. How does a person prepare for that experience? I went back to all of the resources I had – my job application, my cover letter, my resume, and the original job posting. I studied those resources and then started making notes about my experiences at the college over the previous 23 years. I made lists about what experiences I thought that I would want to share if I were asked. I could have rationalized that there was no way to prepare and resigned myself to just wing it. This forum, though, was too important so I prepared the best that I could. The research process was really no different than research for a term paper, but this time I was digging into the memories of my work at BBCC to prepare to answer those questions.
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