Newsletter Editor Jane Weiss
Save the Date: English Department Meeting 6 September 2023, 1:00-2:30pm
A message from Annie:
Please add our first fall 2023 English Department Faculty Meeting date to your calendars. We’ll meet in person (with a Zoom option available for those with medical accommodations, of course) on Wednesday, September 6th from 1-2:30pm. Annie will be in touch in August with more information and with the remaining Department Meeting dates.
KCC Commencement 21 June 2023
The Kingsborough Community College Commencement Committee is pleased to announce that the 58th Commencement Exercises will be held in person on Wednesday, June 21, 2023. Please come; the ceremony is extremely meaningful to KCC students and their families. As Annie writes, “I know several of you are relatively new to the department and may not have had the opportunity to witness a KCC graduation ceremony yet. They’re wonderful, energetic, and they help us remember why we’re all here.” The students’ cheers when the faculty enter the graduation are not to be missed. Academic regalia, although festive, is not required to participate. (There usually are some extra hoods and gowns on hand if you’d like to wear it.)
The Commencement ceremony begins at 11:00 a.m. Faculty and staff do not need commencement tickets, but please have your campus ID available as usual. Faculty and staff may park on campus as usual, but should be prepared to park offsite at the Manhattan Beach parking lot if directed to do so by Public Safety in the event that campus parking is full. There will be a reception in the U-building cafeteria following the ceremony if you wish to greet and celebrate with your students. The faculty should be lined up and prepared to march by 10:45 a.m. along the eastern seawall, immediately south of the small parking lot between the Arts and Sciences building and the Marine Academic Center. Staff are also invited and encouraged to participate in the march. Please note that academic regalia is requested for all those who join the procession. Faculty and staff will follow the graduates through the lobby of the Arts & Sciences building, exit the building and continue into the tent. Regalia, although festive, is not required; there will be reserved seating for faculty and staff choosing not to robe. This area is directly behind the robed faculty and staff, and you may enter the tent following the robed faculty. Once seated, please plan to remain for the duration of the ceremony. In the event of rain, we will move the line to an indoor location in the S building. Please follow the instructions of Public Safety officers, the marshals, and the Commencement volunteers. If you feel that the weather is severe enough to cause the cancellation of the Commencement Exercises, please call (718) 368-6553 on the morning of June 21, for a recorded announcement indicating the status of the ceremony.
End of Term Reminders
A message from Annie:
I’m writing with a few important reminders regarding college-wide and department-specific policies and protocols for the end of the semester. If you are teaching a 12/12A0 assessed via CPA, or are teaching an ESL course, please read this email from me in light of the emails you’ve received from the comp coordinators or ESL directors. Those course-specific emails contain practices specific to those areas and are in addition to policies I address in this email. Some of these have changed in the past couple of years, and, even if you believe you know all of these at this point, please do take a moment to skim through this email to ensure that nothing has slipped off your radar. Also, if something has slipped off my radar and I’ve left it off this list, please let me/us know!
Faculty availability to students during finals week: Per Provost Russell’s guidance from previous semesters, all faculty are required to use two hours of our regularly-scheduled teaching time during finals week for an educationally appropriate activity. If you wish to give a final exam, this is the ideal time to do it. Of course, many of us do not give timed final exams, and there are a variety of other ways we might use this time: to give back student work and have conferences with individual students, to have students turn in final work and complete some sort of meta-cognitive reflection, etc. These meetings may take place in the classroom assigned to your course for this purpose. No finals week meetings may take place in C309, the English department office suite.
Saving student work/records: Please remember that each faculty member is required by the CUNY Records & Retention Policy to keep copies of their own students’ final exams and/or sample final coursework for one year after final course grades have been assigned. The precise form the student sample coursework takes will depend, of course, on the courses you taught this term and the final projects you assigned to your students. Please make a plan to retain student work that is appropriate to the courses you’ve taught this term.
Creating, saving, and submitting a final grade roster: The CUNY Records & Retention Policy also states that instructors must keep a copy of their “grade records, tests scores, and marking sheets” for two years after final grades have been submitted. While this is the responsibility of each individual faculty member, the department requests that you complete and submit to Shelly Benjamin (Shelly.Benjamin@kbcc.cuny.edu) a simple, grid roster for each of your courses that includes very basic information: student name and ID number, last date of class attended, final grade, and, if you assigned an “Incomplete” grade, a simple list of what the student is required to submit in order to resolve the incomplete. A Word document with a usable form has been sent to your KCC email address. If you have a different grid you’d like to send Shelly, that is fine, but please ensure that it is digital, is legible, and contains at least the information I’ve listed here. I appreciate your cooperation with this, as it makes it much easier for course coordinators/directors to help resolve minor student questions regarding final grades without having to contact you while you are on annual leave.
Fall 2023 Workload Forms
A message from Annie:
You have received an email from Shelly with your fall 2023 workload and multiple position forms. While many of you have been completing these forms for quite a long time, I want to stress the importance of completing them in an accurate and timely manner. They are the way the college accounts for your labor, and they ensure that you are paid for the work you do.
Further, some of us are, understandably, still struggling a bit to complete and esign digital PDF documents. At this point, all processing of these forms is done digitally, so please do not print the form and submit a hard copy to C309. There are many possible ways to “add text” or “edit” or “sign” PDF forms via your office or home computer. I am requesting that, when you complete your fall 2023 paperwork, you complete the forms as PDF forms (please do not convert to some other file type), and email completed and signed forms back to the Engworkload.KCC@kbcc.cuny.edu email address that we’ve used for several years to collect them. If you’re uncertain how to do this, please do not hesitate to reach out to the KCC faculty helpdesk by phone 718-368-6679; fax: 718-368-4626; email helpdesk@kbcc.cuny.edu ; or create a helpdesk ticket https://inside.kingsborough.edu/servicepro/, and they will walk you through the process.
If you believe you do not have software on your computer that can help you complete the forms as PDFs, the helpdesk can resolve that issue for you as well. All CUNY faculty have access to Adobe software that can edit and sign PDFs.and KCeL has shared this guide : https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/How%20to%20Save%20a%20PDF%20Form.pdf with us. You’ll receive a pre-filled out form, so using that is obviously best. In the future, if you need to download a blank workload or multiple position form, you can use this link to the forms page on our department website: https://kccenglishonline.commons.gc.cuny.edu/forms/ .
Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association Working-Class Studies Call for Papers: Deadline 30 June 2023
A message from Greg Bruno:
The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association will hold its annual conference in Philadelphia, PA on November 9 – 11, 2023. The Working-Class Studies Area welcomes papers/presentations that examine representations of the working-class or labor in all areas of culture, including but not limited to art, literature, film, and media. Research, critical, theoretical, or interdisciplinary approaches are equally encouraged. The Proposal Deadline is June 30, 2023. Faculty are encouraged to submit a 300 word abstract themselves or pass this Call for Papers on to their students; the Working-Class Culture area of MAPACA is open to undergraduates. Questions can be forwarded to area chair: Dr. Greg Bruno, Working Class Studies: Gregory.bruno@kbcc.cuny.edu. Or, you can submit a proposal here.
Invitation to Join the English Department on the CUNY Academic Commons
A message from Elizabeth Dill:
An invitation to join the Kingsborough English CUNY Academic Commons group should have arrived in the inbox of your KCC email account. Please accept this invitation so that you can continue to receive our excellent weekly department newsletter! Soon, the department newsletter will be sent as a blog post from this group rather than as a department email; eventually, you will stop getting department newsletters as separate emails (unless you subscribe to the Academic Commons group). So please join! If you don’t receive an invitation at all, please let Elizabeth know!
Elizabeth is currently trying to work with the helpdesk so that the blog posts are not quarantined by the Barracuda system. For the time being, you may need to check your Barracuda spam quarantine summaries to see if Academic Commons posts appear there, and manually “whitelist” them, but she hopes that the IT department will soon be able to resolve the issue for the whole group.
KCC Information Technology Services Office
You can call KCC’s ITS Help Desk at (718) 368-6679 or email helpdesk@kbcc.cuny.edu 9:00 – 5:00 on weekdays. For Blackboard support during hours when KCC’s Help Desk is not available, call 1-646-664-2024.
Good News
Neil Kernis’s daughter, Lucia Ines Kernis Hernandez, was born on June 9, 2023.
A Note about the Newsletter
This is the last Spring 2023 English Department Newsletter; the Newsletter will resume on 6 September 2023. You can send newsletter items for Fall publication to Jane Weiss at Jane.Weiss@kbcc.cuny.edu. Please keep items brief (preferably 100 or fewer words). Longer items will be abridged. Items about publications and achievements are very welcome.
