On Thursday, Nov. 8, critically acclaimed poet Adam Clay spoke at Belmont University about his most recent publication, A Hotel Lobby at the End of the World, as part of a new annual reader series put on by the Department of English. The series is the brainchild of Dr. Gary McDowell, a poetry and creative writing professor who attended the same graduate program as Clay.
Titled “The Deep Song Reading Series,” the goal of the series is to bring working writers onto Belmont’s campus. “We forget that poetry is still be written today, and people don’t get to hear [it],” said McDowell. McDowell himself has published several poems, and he hopes to encourage students who have an interest in all forms of writing.
Homework Hotline at Belmont Director Sammy Swor works on the third floor of the library to help grade-school students through free tutoring by phone.
Courtney Covert’s first phone call was a tough one: 29 minutes working through three long-division problems with a fifth grade student whose first language is Spanish; but the junior from Cumming, Ga. said she learned just as much as she taught.
“She taught me a memory trick to remember the order of long division. She remembered ‘dad, mother, sister, brother, rose’ from class, and I helped her understand it meant ‘divide, multiply, subtract, bring down, remainder’ and how to apply it,” Covert said. “She felt accomplished in the end, and it made me so proud because it is like a Good Samaritan gesture since we don’t use names.”
Dozens of calls just like Covert’s ring the third floor of the Lila D. Bunch Library on weeknights. Students in kindergarten through 12th grade call the Homework Hotline at Belmont at (615) 298-6636 between 4 and 8 p.m. for free tutoring on any academic subject.
The Homework Hotline at Belmont ribbon cutting ceremony was Nov. 14.
A ribbon cutting ceremony was held Wednesday, marking the one-month anniversary of the satellite hotline, which is funded by the Frist Foundation and Joe C. Davis Foundation. Mayor Karl Dean, State Rep. Gary Odom, Joe C. Davis Foundation Trustee Bill DeLoache, Frist Foundation President Pete Bird and Metro Nashville Public Schools Chief Operating Officer Fred Carr cut the blue ribbon alongside Belmont Provost Thomas Burns.
The hotline is averaging 85 calls a week. Three in every four calls are about middle-school math, and one out of three calls is from parents or grandparents, said Homework Hotline at Belmont Director Sammy Swor.
“It is very unique for a university to be involved in this. There are only three partnerships like this in the country,” Swor said. “I see the students getting more and more involved because it is already very popular with Metro and Belmont students, and I am worried that our four phone lines may not be enough.”
For half of the class in Inman Health Science Building room 341, it is their ninth hour of school. Restless students thumb through their 640-page Cracking the ACT manual.
“Do not be afraid. Do not get discouraged,” said Adjunct Professor Rene Rochester. “This is a practice test, and we need it as a diagnostic to know where we should focus for you.”
Belmont is sponsoring an ACT prep class for high school juniors and seniors, many of whom hope to enroll at the University in the next two years. Rochester leads the two-hour class, and high school students work one-on-one with Belmont students. They meet three times a week until Dec. 8, the day students take the ACT.
“I wanted to be a mentor because I remember when I was applying to go to college and preparing to take the ACT. I just want to share lessons from my situation and extend resources to help these students achieve their greatest potential and all that they want to achieve,” said Robert Wallace, a senior from Nashville majoring in business administration.
Chosen from more than 30 applicants, 22 high school students have enrolled in Belmont’s free ACT prep program. Most of them attend Hillsboro, Big Picture and Martin Luther King Jr. high schools.
The man who pursued the biggest Ponzi scheme in history recounted the story and shared advice with Belmont student Wednesday during a convocation hosted by the Edward C. Kennedy Center for Business Ethics.
Harry Markopolos said his study of Bernie Madoff’s phony investment strategy was his first experience with “pure evil.”
“He was a horrible case to be part of, and I don’t have fond memories of it,” he said.
Markopolos, a portfolio manager and chief investment officer for a multi-billion dollar derivatives asset management firm in Boston, Mass., led a four-person team through an eight-and-a-half-year investigation that spanned two continents to understand Madoff’s investment strategy.
“His numbers were too good to be true. He never had a loss and took clients from every good firm,” he said. Markopolos said he realized within five minutes of looking at documents that Madoff was operating a fraud, but it took longer to convince the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Of the $65 billion that funneled through Madoff’s hands, most went to old investors receiving an average 12 percent annual return, 4 percent went to luring new victims through feed funds and private client banks and the remaining 1 percent Madoff kept. Among the red flags Markopolos found were undecipherable accounting statements and similar account numbers at different banks in different countries.
The Center for Executive Education at Belmont University hosted New York Times best-selling author Keith Ferrazzi as the keynote speaker during its Fall Leadership Breakfast Thursday morning in the Curb Event Center. Presented in partnership with the Nashville Chamber of Commerce and EO Nashville, the event explored the relational and collaborative sciences and their impact on business success as described by Ferrazzi’s two best-selling books, Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back.
The founder and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a marketing and sales consulting company, Keith Ferrazzi believes that what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships. However, more often than not, relational competencies suffer from an innate “fight or flight” approach. In fact, Ferrazzi and his colleagues discovered that an individual’s relational style is established prior to the age of 3 years old. “We were depressed when we found that out,” Ferrazzi explained, “because we run an institute for human behavior change.”
Thankfully, Ferrazzi added an anthropologist to his team. “She taught me that independent of our psychology and sociology, we are all hard-wired in a common way as tribal humans… the instinct of nature is to bond and connect.”
Clancy Smith, of Philosophy, recently published a chapter entitled “Hippies, Jews, and the Philosophy of Memory” in the edited book The Big Lebowski and Philosophy. Smith’s work was also included in the book Tattoos and Philosophy with the chapter “Not Fade Away.” Both were recently published by Wiley-Blackwell.
Smith also presented a paper entitled “A More Critical Pragmatism: A Reexamination of C.S. Peirce Through the Eyes of Herbert Marcuse” at the 20th Annual Critical Theory Roundtable, University of Toronto, on Sept. 28 through 30.
The Mathematical Association of America, Association for Computing Machinery and Belmont Actuarial Student Society (BASS) joined together for Game Day on Oct. 26. Students, faculty and a stray physicist shared food, games and fun for six hours.
Particularly noteworthy was the presence of BASS, the newest student group, who supplied mocktails and a poker table to celebrate their actuarial skills.
Mike Pinter, of Mathematics, served as an onsite external reviewer for the Department of Mathematics and Physics at Carson Newman College on Oct. 8 through 10. In addition to visiting with faculty and students from the department, Pinter met with the provost and president. At the conclusion of the onsite review, Pinter jointly prepared with an internal reviewer a report that offered suggestions and recommendations for strengthening the department’s offerings and programs.
Chemistry Professor Kim Daus has had a chapter accepted for inclusion in an American Chemical Society Symposium Series volume tentatively titled Using Food to Stimulate Interest in the Chemistry Classroom. The submission was an invited chapter based on Daus’ presentation this summer at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education. Daus’ chapter is titled “Better Eating through Chemistry: Using Chemistry to Explore and Improve Local Cuisine.”
Bonnie Riechert, associate professor and chair of the department of public relations, participated in the Public Relations Society of America Southeast District Leadership Rally on Nov. 4 in Charlotte, N.C. The event drew officers and committee chairs from 11 PRSA chapters from Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Riechert, a district officer in 2011 and 2012, led the training session for chapter secretaries and treasurers, ethics officers and accreditation chairs. PRSA is the largest professional organization devoted to public relations, with more than 21,000 members including 2,400 members in the Southeast District.
