When I told my friends that my wife, three kids and 90-pound dog would all be living in a two-bedroom apartment with 110 college freshmen as neighbors, the most common responses were: “That just makes sense financially” to “You are absolutely effing crazy” to “Dude, you should start a blog.” Following the advice of the latter contingent, I am introducing the Kelly Family Q Blog.
Here’s our story: Early in August we left our native Omaha, Nebraska for the bonny shores of Lake Champlain knowing 11 people total in the Eastern Time Zone. The “we” in this story is me, my wife, Jamie, our three boys (Nicky age 4, Jack age 2, and Baby Sam age 6 months) and our golden retriever Gus. I had accepted a faculty position at Champlain last March, but relentless scouring of Craigslist for housing proved fruitless until my Dean called with an opportunity.
In exchange for housing, the college offered us the chance to be the “Faculty in Residence” at Champlain’s new Quarry Hill Residential Program for the 2010-11 academic year. Officially, I am supposed to do things like “provide an academic presence in the residence by serving as an intellectual mentor” and “facilitate connections for students with the broader Champlain community.” All of this sounded doable to us so we signed on.
In our minds though, we wondered what kind of academic presence we would really have. After all, my boys are prone to donning plastic football helmets and knocking the snot out of each other in the yard for all the neighbors to see. We watch the lusty vampires on True Blood on Sunday nights. I’m guessing these kinds of things never happened at Oxford when the faculty lived amongst the students.
To some degree, the questions I’m commonly asked are not the ones I’m concerned about.
“Are you worried about the parties?”
“Are you worried about your kids being exposed to things they shouldn’t be?”
“Don’t you guys need your privacy?”
To be sure, I don’t want to hear a rave going on next door at 3am on a Tuesday and don’t want my kids exposed to pot before they’re exposed to kindergarten, but the questions I am thinking about seem bigger than that.
I’m planning on using this blog to think about what living around students says about teaching and learning. I’m thinking about what happens to “authority” when students see how the same presence I project in the classroom fails miserably when I’m disciplining my two-year old. I’m thinking about how if someone would have told my wife she’d be living with me and three kids in more or less a college dorm at 30 years old would she have even entertained the thought of marrying me. Those are the things I’m thinking about and will process through this blog.
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