Mick McGrath

Background

About Mick McGrath

While I have spent most of my career teaching First-Year Composition, for the past eighteen months I have been teaching a student success course called College Management at South College in Knoxville, TN. I have become especially interested in supporting first-year students as they complete their general education requirements, since students who do well in their introductory English and Math courses are more likely to stay in higher education long term. As the Course Lead for College Management, responsible for refining the course from one semester to the next, I try to make changes to the course that will lay the groundwork for my students' introductory English and Math classes at South College. In College Management, we also administer metacognition surveys in an effort to determine why students disengage from their coursework. That way, we can brainstorm effective intervention strategies. We have found that most students report stress and anxiety as their primary reason for task avoidance. In the classroom, then, I promote self-care, more specifically exercise, free counseling services, and gratitude journals, anything that will improve students' subjective wellbeing. I also encourage students to develop a positive self-concept and a growth mindset, pointing to the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, among others. Futhermore, I teach students about things like goal setting and self-authoring, which can be very powerful for students, especially young men, who are, according to everything I've read recently, withdrawing from colleges in greater numbers these days. Recently, I started writing cultural criticism and art analysis for a magazine called Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA & L). I am concerned, as many reputable scholars are, about the current state of academia and publishing. More specifically, I believe that DEI efforts, well-intended though they may be, have compromised these institutions. I've been writing since I was a kid, and my work has appeared in O:JA & L, Terror House Magazine, the Thieving Magpie, and many other publications.