Jonathan "Jack" Davis

DACC and I

1) I am finishing my second year as a tenure-track assistant professor of biology at Doña Ana Community College (DACC). I teach at two of our five campuses: Las Cruces and Gadsden Center.

2) Like our parent institution, NMSU (also located in Las Cruces), our student body is about 60% Hispanic (URM).

3) Like most community colleges, we serve two distinct populations: students who are planning to study for a two-year degree in a technical field as well as students who plan to transfer and complete a four-year degree.

4) I am a member of the Health Occupations program within the Division of Health and Public Services. My regular courses include Health Occupations Microbiology and Human Biology (for non-science majors). I teach one section of Human Biology at Las Cruces (the majority of students are English-only or English-dominant) and one section at Gadsden (the majority of the students are Spanish-English bilingual or Spanish-dominant).

My Priors: For five years, I was assistant freshman lab coordinator and undergraduate advisor for the NMSU Biology Dept. As lab coordinator, I learned about inquiry-based teaching methods from Ralph Preszler and began to write exercises for the lab courses. As the supervisor of 10-20 graduate teaching assistants and several hundred students per semester, I quickly became sold on Web CT as a way to keep students and instructors on the same page (we change to Black Board this fall). All my courses have an online component.

I have also taught at El Paso Community College (TX), NMSU-Alamogordo and at Kenai Peninsula College, a unit of the University of Alaska-Anchorage. After finishing my postdoctoral research fellowship in systems ecology in 1990, I decided to to dedicate my career to teaching at the freshman level rather than pursuing a career in research and teaching.

My family: My wife Silvia Marinas is an art conservator with a masters-level degree from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain and an MA in anthropology from NMSU. Silvia is an experiencenced field archaeologist ("Pueblo Indian" sites of northern Mexico and the southwestern US as well as Paleo-Indian sites). She is currently the director and lead instructor of the Museum Conservation degree program within the NMSU Art Dept.. The program seeks to prepares its undergraduates for work as art conversators (a masters-level degree that can only be obtained at a small number of universities) and to work with conservators and collections in museums. NSMU graduates have already been admitted into prestigious conservation programs in Italy and New York.

We live in a 100+-year-old adobe house in Mesilla, a small predominantly Mexican-American farming incorporated community with about 2,000 residents. We bought a "fixer-upper" and have been fixing it up ever since. The weather's usally great here (but very hot in summer), and we're only three miles from NMSU, so I bike to work more days.

We have a son, Francisco Javier, from Silvia's first marriage. Javier is 21 years old and came with his mother to the US when he was six. Javier is completely bilingual in English and Spanish because at home we spoke only Spanish. Javier is a junior in special education at NMSU. I have to admit that it does feel really good to have a child who is finally pretty much grown up and doing okay; I definitely remember the hard work, the struggles and the sacrifices. Although we visit Silvia and Javier's family in Spain twice each year for three weeks each time, this summer will be the first time that Javier will spend the entire summer in Madrid living with his grandmother.

Finally: We don't really have much in the way of college or professional sports here in New Mexico (actually we have nothing), so we watched and were blown away by Mine That Bird's victory in the 135th Kentucky Derby on Saturday. Afterward we watched the video about ten times at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540...38025#30539276 . We don't gamble, but gambling is a major source of revenue in New Mexico, Stan Fulton (owner of Sunland Park Race Track and Casino where Mine That Bird trains) is a major benefactor of NMSU, and DACC has a campus in Sunland Park about a mile from the race track.