Saturday, December 8, 2012

Every good thing starts with a burden....

Been traveling a lot and listening to fiction books on cd....no brainer ones like the Sookie Stackhouse vampire novels.  Just like Tayler almost missing the imminent arrival of Sandy because of listening to music streamed on her phone versus the radio, I have been missing out on much of the news due to listening to audio stories.

So I think it no accident as I was taking one cd out and putting another in that I heard the short clip on a minister's personal dilemma on assisting with a funeral where a young man died from AIDs found here: Story Corp. My daugher's godfather, Michael Callahan, died from AIDS and it always feels like a punch in the gut when I hear about more death associated with this disease. But, this quote, "You know, everything good that I've been able to accomplish has started with some kind of a burden," Williams says. "And AIDS burdened me. So reluctantly, I did the funeral...." drove through all the sadness, and confusion of my Peoria decision and sat right in front of me as I drove up the large hill near Printer's Alley downtown Nashville, TN.

His story, cut and paste here, is truly motivating. I hope mine can be for someone someday as well.


A Life's Ministry Springs From A Dilemma Over AIDS
 
The Rev. Eric Williams and his colleague Jannette Berkley-Patton visited StoryCorps in Kansas City, Mo., where they discussed a funeral that shaped Williams' future.
The Rev. Eric Williams and his colleague Jannette Berkley-Patton visited StoryCorps in Kansas City, Mo., where they discussed a funeral that shaped Williams' future.
StoryCorps
The Rev. Eric Williams and his colleague Jannette Berkley-Patton visited StoryCorps in Kansas City, Mo., where they discussed a funeral that shaped Williams' future.
text size AAA
November 30, 2012
For more than 20 years, the Rev. Eric Williams has educated people about AIDS and helped those who suffer from the disease. But the focus of Williams' ministry isn't something he could have predicted back in 1991.
In those days, Williams was a young pastor who had only recently taken charge of his own church — Calvary Temple Baptist Church in Kansas City, Mo. He had been ordained in 1988.
"I got a call from a local funeral home," says Williams, 56. The woman on the other end of the line told him, "I've got a really big favor that I want to ask."
The favor had to do with a young man who had just died.
"He'd been a member of the church all his life," Williams recalls. "His parents were very active in church. Mom sang in the choir. At any rate, he's 25 years old, and he died of AIDS. And he just happened to be gay."
The woman from the funeral home told Williams that when the man's "pastor found out how he died, he said, 'Well you know, I am not going to do the funeral. And it can't happen in our church.' "
Williams was asked to perform the service. And as he tells his colleague Jannette Berkley-Patton at StoryCorps, "I didn't want to do it."
"It's not appropriate for one pastor to go against what another pastor has said" in his own church, Williams recalls thinking at the time.
"And I was perfectly all right with that — until I went home and started thinking about this family.
"You know, everything good that I've been able to accomplish has started with some kind of a burden," Williams says. "And AIDS burdened me. So reluctantly, I did the funeral.
"I met the parents of this kid," he recalls. "And you know, I was used to black dads disowning their gay sons. That was the thing to do: 'My son can't be gay.'
"But not this family. This father and this mother, they celebrated his life. They embraced all of his friends."
In the years that followed, Williams became an advocate for those with HIV/AIDS, organizing prayer and information sessions. He's also urged other pastors to take up the cause and spread awareness. And it all started with that "favor," and the funeral that followed.
"You know, they taught me more about unconditional love in that little experience than any of the Sunday school books and any of the courses in seminary, or any of it," Williams says. "And that was the event that kind of rearranged my life."

Power of One

I recently helped 14 Northeast Tennessee school districts apply for a District- Race to the Top United States Department of Education grant competition for $31,000,000.00. 14 districts. 14 boards of education. 32 elected mayors.......agreed upon the following plan-

Power of One Logic Model- M. Ungurait 10.12

And, yet the federal government didn't agree.......however, my good friend Amy Holcombe was able to write a convincing plan for Guilford County Schools.

Our plan would have significantly changed lives for all of the region's middle school students through creating a personalized learning environment based upon a data driven culture through a   collaborative data delivery process and benchmarking software as well as a 1:1 handheld device per student tailor made instructional delivery. 

So many good things came out of the collaboration of 14 separate school districts:
a combined vision for education reform
the importance of using ACT Explore Information
the heightened awareness of middle school education as crucial
the agreement that handheld devices can significantly alter traditional education settings, and
the need for a balanced assessment system
the hope to include external agencies to help with public education- Epic Program

Although the group did not get funding, I am so very hopeful that these ideas will find a source to help fund the ambitious change proposed.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

This is water.

A wonderful part of growing up near a college or university are the many traditions that surround the institution. Kenyon is known for their commencement speakers and I think that is where my love for them started. My daughter's commencement speaker was Mayor Bloomberg-humorous and insightful Bloomberg UNC clip, my undergraduate was a president of another college- disappointing but my doctoral commencement speaker was Coach Conradt- great female leader. But this little college in rural Ohio with weathly patrons pulls in seriously fantastic speakers- Jonathan Franzen, Bill Patterson, and David Foster Wallace...and it is his 2007 speech that resonates still today. The other day, I imagined my younger self passing him on the path at the same time but in reality twenty two years later- what would I say? Please, don't leave the water.....

David Foster Wallace Kenyon College Commencement:

 (If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE in his own words As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
Audio of David Foster Wallace Kenyon Commencement

Saturday, October 20, 2012

First Generation...stuck in it

..ok, am in the middle of writing a $25 million dollar grant for NE TN schools and the issue of exposure to a different kind of life keeps coming up. My brain is a bit stuck on what that looks like to students- for me it is the cold and often snowy path to the Kenyon College Library and dusty stacks, and reading, reading, reading, reading things often that I didn't understand.

Which is why the following documentary looks very interesting: First Generation: A documentary Narrated by Golden Globe nominee Blair Underwood, FIRST GENERATION tells the story of four high school students - an inner city athlete, a small town waitress, a Samoan warrior dancer, and the daughter of migrant field workers - who set out to break the cycle of poverty and bring hope to their families and communities by pursuing a college education.
Shot over the course of three years and featuring some of our nation's top educational experts (Richard Kahlenberg, The Century Foundation; J.B. Schramm, College Summit; Dr. Bill Tierney, University of Southern California), this 95 minute documentary explores the problem of college access faced by first generation and low-income students and how their success has major implications for the future of our nation.

I am fortunate I stuck it out in college (a few times...) but, more than anything I feel one of my life accomplishments is that I could provide support to helping my daughter finish.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Sometimes the right thing is the right thing....

Austin City Limits via Youtube
My wonderful boss at Sumner County Schools Dr. Del Phillips would say to me- when I was nervous about the political implications of our work- Michelle, sometimes the right thing is the right thing....and he certainly has lived that statement since. http://article.wn.com/view/2012/08/14/Large_budget_gap_remains_in_Sumner_County_schools_stalemate/
Updating and streamlining the district’s technology infrastructure will be at the forefront of goals this upcoming budget cycle. Director of Schools Del Phillips plans to ask the County Commission to fund about $2.1 million out of capital outlay that will go toward building technology infrastructure within the school system.
The first part of the plan is already underway, with the district working to create a centralized database of all the users in the system, and implementing antivirus programs and an automatic file backup and recovery system through Microsoft Active Directory. The plan also increases bandwidth from 10MB to 100MB at all of Sumner County’s 45 schools, said Michelle Ungurait, chief administrative officer for the district.
Ungurait and Phillips, who both came from separate school districts in other states almost one year ago, said fully grasping how much Sumner lacks in school technology infrastructure has been “eye-opening.”
“We don’t even have basic organization in place,” Ungurait said. “What we’re doing is starting from nothing; building a backbone so more focus can be on (classroom technology).”
Ungurait and school staffs for months have been assessing the district’s technology needs, strengths and weaknesses and gathering feedback from parents through Listen and Learn community meetings and surveys held last fall.
At a school board workshop April 21, Ungurait presented members with comparative budget analysis for 2011-12 showing what surrounding school districts similar in size to Sumner spend on technology. According to Ungurait’s report, Sumner County Schools spent $918,272 on technology last year – less than 0.5 percent of its operating budget, while Clarksville Montgomery County School System spent $9.6 million, Williamson County Schools $3.7 million and Rutherford County Schools $2.2 million.

Lessons from Kenyon College-Resiliency Training





College Street- Jonesborough- Tennessee
A walking at risk factor- first generation college bound- is what I thought to myself as I passed this somewhat symbolic metaphor symbol- lucky are the first generation college bound, like myself, where the stop sign is turned backwards. For me, growing up near Kenyon College and the encouragement of my high school to take college courses while still in high school introduced me to a world of using my mind.

Part of accepting the job in Peoria was to try to help students like myself- smart enough to attend, poor enough not be able to pay for it, and gritty enough to hang in there. As Magnet Director of Guilford County Schools, students for the middle college program were selected because of at risk factors- and first gen ranked high on the list. Urban areas with higher eduction sites, like Peoria, need successful model partnerships like the Early College at Bennett College which aim to help students complete high school and earn college credit. I so much wanted to start one at Bradley University!
http://schoolcenter.gcsnc.com/education/school/school.php?sectionid=25