Quantitative Reasoning for the Public Interest

TRANSFORMATIVE MOMENTS

Students in Quantitative Research also conducted an analysis of a single transformative moment in their own education. Some went far back into childhood. Some worked on recent and college level experiences. Some worked on moments during class, others worked on transformations that occurred outside the class.

Each student wrote a paper creating a portrait of the transformative experience and characterizing its key features. They collected and presented documentary evidence in support of the paper and summarized the experience briefly. Their brief summaries will be posted on this page as a short movie.

Here are two additional indications of their work: An explanatory phrase describing each of the papers and a class Ghazal – a contemplative poem, each line written by a different student.

PAPERS

• A public failure as a trainee teacher leads to a deep and positive chance
• Without clear teacher objectives and my work being judged to be among the best, I sink to the lowest common denominator
• The birth of my “tad autistic” son
• A formal comparison of my learning at TESC and learning Clover Park Technical College
• My first Evergreen class – we went outside to examine leaves, and I almost left.
• They called me “fingers” because I was always moving my hands. It was not a kind name.
• Is it natural? Resistance in the learning process
• College advisors who really care at Evergreen
• Explaining my racist family’s values to a class at South Puget Sound Community College
• My program presentation on Jazz in America
• Leaving a Hawai’ian childhood for school in California
• The death of my High School English Teacher, who taught me Thoreau and Walden,
• Lab work in a hospital turned me towards health care as a profession

CLASS GHAZAL

A Moment
Different lives, different places, different moments but all learning experiences
Can we agree what to include?
Survey design by consensus takes reflection and patience
Data to action
It takes collaboration to write a quality survey
Give me something to learn
For numbers and words I yearn
Continually transforming
Learning from my own mistakes
They tell us so freely of themselves, their passionate turning moments in academics
To show us themselves
How strong and determined they are to grab knowledge
The student looked up from their reading and noticed it was dawn and time for a nap.