Okay, first thing’s first. I have to point out that in last week’s issue, our election coverage made an error. In it, we claimed that the percentage of students whodunnits’d chosen to abstain was the highest of any percentage. This claim was based on the report provided by SimplyVoting, which showed a handy percentage after every vote. In it, the 16.1% of voters they showed abstained was higher than the 12.1% that they put behind the votes of the leading candidate, Colleen Doucette. However, in the rush to get the article put together and the issue out, we failed to note that those percentages were measuring different things.
As it turns out, the abstention percentage was the number of voters. But the vote percentage was of the total number of votes, and since each voter had up to six votes they could cast, the lower percentage was not an accurate total of the voters. This means that even the candidate with the fewest votes received the support of approximately 26% of the voters, which is obviously higher than the 16% who voted to abstain. This just goes to show you what rushing will do, as the article passed through me and the new Executive Director for approval and we both missed it. Unfortunately, nobody has contacted The Voice Magazine yet to tell their story of why they decided it was worth the time to go the voting site and choose to abstain, so perhaps we’ll never know.
But getting back to this issue, this week, we have the second, and likely more important, part of Cara Doane’s “Living my Learning” piece, as well as the second part of our interview with Associate Professor Mark McCutcheon, where, among other things, he gives us a look behind the curtain of the teaching process. Once again, I can’t decide between these two, so I’m featuring them both.
We also have a piece by Deanna Roney, who was inspired by the first part of “Living my Learning”, which, if you remember, was inspired by Bethany Tyne’s “Course Exam” article. I’m waiting to see just how far we can draw out this chain of inspiration, so hopefully someone else out there will be inspired by Deanna’s article and feel the need to submit an article to voice@voicemagazine.org. If that person is you, I’d love to see it!
Beyond that, we also have Barbara Lehtiniemi, who, as September rolls around and summer passes by, uses the opportunity to remind herself and us of the various resources that AU and AUSU make available for students. It’s a good little refresher of the support That’s available for students, both new and old, at AU.
As always, we don’t stop there and have music and film reviews, an interview with director Erik Poppe, Dear Barb look at the difficulties of sending a child to boarding school, and Hazel Anaka’s “From Where I Sit” contemplates how to keep her Babas and Borscht from becoming all-consuming while still growing. And That’s just some of the content in this week’s issue!
Enjoy the read!
