By KEVIN NELSON
Professor of English
Merced College Los Banos Campus
My name is Kevin Nelson, and I have been teaching English at the Merced College Los Banos Campus since 2013. I teach reading, writing, critical thinking and literature. I’d like to talk a little about why the Los Banos Campus is a good place to learn.
I attended Cal State Long Beach and Cal Poly Humboldt, and I lived and taught all over the world before coming to the Central Valley. My life experiences have been vastly different from the majority of my students and many of my peers, but somehow, we find common ground and form a community — a group of people who know each other and have common goals.
It is this little community of 15 to 35 people in my classrooms (and the people who support them every day) that makes the Los Banos Campus a great place to work and maybe, more importantly, a really great place to attend college.
My little community is diverse in and out of the classroom.
This year, we celebrate our math teacher’s 30th year of service at Los Banos Campus, and at the same time we welcome a new English instructor who was once a Merced College student!
One of my classes (a typical mix) has 16- and 17-year-olds who got to college faster than most of us, as well as returning students in their 30s and 40s and beyond. I get students who want to start a career, discover a new adventure, find a new path or embark on a second, third or fourth act.
I have students who struggled in K-12, students who excelled, students who struggle to keep up and students who zip through the work.
I have confident, shy, introverted, extroverted, older, and younger students. I have students who co-parent, students who help support their families financially, students with their own kids in college and students who are just starting families.
If you look around my classroom, you can get a glimpse of the community around the college.
My students are different from each other, but the same. Our similarity is in our goals and values. We value education, learning, collegiality — the opportunity to grow and be a stronger, more capable, more informed person. Our goals are to succeed, to learn and understand and to rise up and make life better.
For my little community, the goal is significant — every one of my students wants to be better at something. They have life and work goals, and they recognize that this is where better begins.
For me, community isn’t just about finding like-minded people, it’s about action — doing. This is why I live here and do this. I hope you will join us.
