APD protests went from peaceful to just ridiculous in only one week.

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By Rene Thompson, Editor in Chief

The Tuesday, March 25 protest of APD officers’ excessive use of force had a massive turnout of more 1,000 people, and was really a very peaceful event that went as smoothly as it could have when ending at APD headquarters.

Unfortunately though, the other protest on Sunday, March 30 seemed to have an eerie and anxious feel in the crowd right from the get go.

I got the impression that there were instigators and troublemakers throughout the mass from the beginning; getting people riled up to walk the streets, and not to really show solidarity, but to wreak havoc on central and antagonize police officers, who seemed to have no other choice but to try to shut down the event that lasted from noon to 12 a.m. throughout sections of Downtown and Nob Hill areas.

The weird vibes in the crowd seemed to start when organizers tried to speak on behalf of family members who have lost loved ones, and were booed and interrupted by the crowd.

From that moment on the protest seemed unorganized and the march stopped sporadically, with people not knowing where they were going next, and eventually ended up circling Central Avenue from Downtown to Nob Hill and back again.

While doing so, entire groups stopped completely in the middle of Central, blocking traffic, provoking cops while screaming and yelling at officers on Girard, attempting to tear down the Central street sign at Yale Boulevard, and standing in the middle of the I-25 freeway, as well as attempting to block the I-25 on-ramp at Central.

Police were forced to stop protesters with an officer barricade while in riot gear, after demonstrators started getting even more out of hand when reaching Fourth Street and Roma Avenue, and again at Carlisle and Central where police had to finally tear gas protesters to get people to disperse, as well as arresting six people.

It seems that activists and protesters were intentionally provoking the police to do something and ruining what great work, effort, and results had been made from the Tuesday protest event.

People were aggressive from the beginning of this protest and seemed to intentionally want this event to get out of hand by acting out throughout the city in order to try and make people aware of the city’s issues, but it only takes a few bad apples to ruin a cause; like people prepped with weapons and gas masks, and this is exactly what happened at the protest on Sunday.

This issue has divided the community in our city, including some people who are supporting APD as well and even had a “wave or thank your local officers” event on the same day.

Some protesters acted hastily and without regard for others on Sunday, while losing much of the local support for this cause in the process of making citizens in Albuquerque look like fools.

This issue of APD violence has gotten to a boiling point that seriously needs to be addressed by city officials before anything worse occurs, because the community of Albuquerque deserves to feel somewhat safe and to have the peace of mind in knowing that ensuing chaos (like hundreds of people blocking city traffic for hours) and poor leadership will not be the city’s eventual downfall.

Letter to the Editor regarding APD protests

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What we are seeing is the chickens coming home to roost. In political science we call this a blowback. What we are seeing here is the murder of defenseless and troubled people by the APD and is what we do with our military and economic forces in countries around the world.

On the global level, the U.S. needs to step up the extraction of resources from abroad using economic sanctions, outright war and terroristic assassination with drones to bring about regime changes that will allow our corporations freedom to run the economies of the world.

Many of the APD it seems have been tools of this policy in our military service and are here carrying out the same shoot to kill methods. Like abroad, here they claim they are the victim and just had to defend themselves. Their killings are always justified in their eyes.

This is just what our national leaders have established on the larger level with the policy of pre-emptive war. We don’t see the cops shooting white collar, politicians and corporate CEO criminals up in the heights who have bankrupted the state and global economy do we? No. We are seeing state terrorism being unleaded to intimidate the poor and troubled people in the grassroots because at some point this has the potential to unite with the middle class in a large revolution. New Mexico and Albuquerque are full of military bases and research universities that live off quiet support for the principle that massive violence to support our corporations abroad is legitimate. It is no big jump for it to be accepted for domestic control too. Plus it keeps taxes low for the rich.

That is why we don’t see any institutional responses to APD terrorism. All the resistance is coming from people who are just one paycheck away from a job or in need of social services themselves that would require raising taxes on the corporations and wealthy. We are experiencing a real paradigm shift right now too. Domestically civilian policing methods are no longer able to cope with the growing unrest due to cutbacks of jobs, wages, and services.

Again, this is just like our corporations and military abroad who have not been able to meet the demands of the Arab Spring movement and the growing Asia countries for justice and equality, a fair economy. As a result there we are now involved in a large series of wars to suppress it. With the government’s recent suppression of our Occupy movement here at home there is a growing class consciousness growing.

A war between the haves and the have-nots is brewing everywhere and the rich know it and are preparing with agencies like the APD and the military. We need to be aware and fight for justice and equality even more.

Bob Anderson

Political Science Instructor

English department offers more classes plus online degree

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By Carol Woodland, Staff Reporter

An exciting change is coming for students pursuing an Associate of Arts in English degree from CNM said Stephen Mathewson, chair of the English department.

Starting in fall of 2014 students will be able to pursue an AA in English completely online, he said.

“So you can take all of the core require­ments within English but also within CHSS ( Communication , Humanities and Social Sciences) for the AA in English online,” Mathewson said.

Online courses will offer classes that include British, English and World Literature, as well as a class on literature analysis, Mathewson said.

The AA degree in English is also undergoing a revision to make transferring to the University of New Mexico a clearer process by synchroniz­ing CNM with UNM require­ments, he said.

“If students check UNM’s degree requirements online, they will see what ours will be. It’s a much more stream­lined process especially at the sophomore level, and in the fall of 2015 our degree will match UNM’s revisions,” Mathewson said.

Currently students can choose from numerous dif­ferent literatures and writing classes that include special topics course, such as Science Fiction Literature that will be offered at the West Side campus, a script writing class offered through the Theater department, and Film as Literature class which is already offered every semester, Mathewson said.

Despite the selection of course offerings, there has been low enrollment for some of the classes, English Professor, Rebecca Aronson said.

“This semester we didn’t have a poetry class on the Main campus because there was a dip in enroll­ment,” she said.

Aronson said she thinks that there are many great reasons why students should take Poetry or Creative Writing classes ranging from practical reasons to more expressive purposes.

“I think that on the imag­ination side, it’s a chance for people to express them­selves, or sometimes just vent, follow their imaginative paths and do a freer kind of writing than academic writ­ing,” she said.

In addition, students can gain a deeper connec­tion to their lives and ideas when students write down their thoughts and aspirations, Aronson said.

Examining literature in English class can be an unex­pected way to learn about cul­ture by looking at literature from other countries or from the past, Aronson said.

“I think that poetry really is a good reflector of culture, time and place. You’re going to learn things about culture and what’s happening, and what that part of the world is like,” she said.

Reading literature from other countries can also help to get students informed about things they might not necessarily be learning from the news, Aronson said.

Mathewson said he thinks the skills students take away from English classes are essential in any professional environment.

“Not just writing emails, I think students don’t realize how much writing happens at work: proposals, grants, annual reports, revenue state­ments, those types of skills are universal,” he said.

Good writing skills, criti­cal thinking, and analysis of all types of texts are all valuable skills developed in English classes, Mathewson said.

Writing for digital media, creative non-fiction, and professional writing are some of the biggest markets for English majors to start careers in right now Mathewson said, he also said he thinks that technology has been a cata­lyst to this growth.

“There’s sort of this misconception that texting is going to destroy writing, where actually the opposite is true,” he said.

Professional writing, which most people think of as technical writing, is not neces­sarily writing technical manu­als and medical or government documents, Mathewson said.

From writing grants and proposals to critical analysis of nontraditional nonfiction, there are many interesting niches within professional writing, he said.

Though the field may be growing quickly writers still need to develop strong English skills in order to succeed in any field, Mathewson said.

“Digital media sort of exploded in a lot of ways, but within that explosion you still need to punctuate correctly and make sure subjects and verbs agree,” Mathewson said.

One way students can dig a little deeper into English is by taking 2240, a class in traditional English grammar, Mathewson said.

“In the last year or so Erin Lebacqz has revived 2240, which is a class that a lot of folks in education curriculums take but a lot of English majors take as well. It’s not really a writing improvement class, but sort of the theories behind gram­mar,” Mathewson said.

The track that students are taking to earn an English degree is evolving and chang­ing to meet the needs of today’s workforce, Mathewson said.

“I think that it’s cer­tainly changed from when I was a student. It’s become much more expansive and the traditional arrangements of English departments are no longer what they were,” Mathewson said.

For students still unsure of whether or not to pursue English as a degree, the English department has put together a video at the CNM YouTube website (youtube.com/users/ CNMonline) called “Why is Writing Important?,” and shows people from all differ­ent walks of life talking about how to use the skills students have developed in English classes, Mathewson said.

Aronson said that stu­dents sometimes avoid or fear taking English classes and should not have to feel that way because learning English is just like any other subject and that with practice people can learn to be great writers.

Suncat Chit Chat : What's your best April Fools' Day story

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By Jonathan Baca, Copy Editor

Chris Barrios, Nursing Major and Desiree Garcia, GED certificate “We’re going to tell everybody that my girlfriend here is two months pregnant. We’ll tell everyone the truth at the end of the day.”
Chris Barrios, Nursing Major and
Desiree Garcia, GED certificate
“We’re going to tell everybody that my
girlfriend here is two months pregnant.
We’ll tell everyone the truth at the end of
the day.”
that was actually meat loaf, frosted with mashed potatoes.” William Walker, Veterinary Tech major “To my friend Josh, I unscrewed the cap on the shower head and then I put blue hair dye in it, and then when he took a shower in the morning it dyed his skin blue. I turned him into a smurf.”
William Walker,
Veterinary Tech major
“To my friend Josh, I
unscrewed the cap on
the shower head and
then I put blue hair dye
in it, and then when he
took a shower in the
morning it dyed his
skin blue. I turned him
into a smurf.”
Thomas Richardson, Engineering major “In grade school my mom switched our alarm clocks to say it was the time for the bus and woke us up at 2 o’clock in the morning, and we got up frantically to catch the bus. And we stood there waiting for it until she said ‘April Fools’ Day!’”
Thomas Richardson, Engineering major
“In grade school my mom switched our
alarm clocks to say it was the time for the
bus and woke us up at 2 o’clock in the
morning, and we got up frantically to catch
the bus. And we stood there waiting for it
until she said ‘April Fools’ Day!’”
1 3/24/14 3:19 PM Michelle Abbott, Veterinary Tech major “My aunt Cathie’s doctors April Fooled her and made her think that she had two baby girls, and wrapped her newborn son into a pink blanket, and didn’t tell her until she changed him. It was a good joke.
Michelle Abbott, Veterinary Tech major
“My aunt Cathie’s doctors April Fooled her
and made her think that she had two baby
girls, and wrapped her newborn son into a
pink blanket, and didn’t tell her until she
changed him. It was a good joke.
Katie Thompson, Undecided major “We served our kids a dinner that looked like dessert and a dessert that looked like dinner. So we got some ice cream and made it look like a baked potato, with sour cream that was actually whipped cream and coconut akes that looked like chives. And then for dinner we had a cake that was actually meat loaf, frosted with mashed potatoes.”
Katie Thompson,
Undecided major
“We served our kids a
dinner that looked like
dessert and a dessert that
looked like dinner. So
we got some ice cream
and made it look like
a baked potato, with
sour cream that was
actually whipped cream
and coconut akes that
looked like chives. And
then for dinner we had
a cake that was actually
meat loaf, frosted with
mashed potatoes.”

Draw donuts and eat them too; Donut themed art benefits UNM Children’s Hospital

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By Nick Stern, Senior Reporter |Photo courtesy of Rachel Popowcer

8.3 8.2 8.1

During the month of March, a student art silent auction at Rebel Donut on 2435 Wyoming Blvd NE was all for a great cause, and Art Instructor, Rachel Popowcer said that students had noble and selfless reasons for donating all proceeds to children in need.

The auction was meant to serve as a fundraiser in which every penny earned is donated to the University of New Mexico Children’s Hospital, which is a charity that was chosen by the students in Popowcer’s Drawing II class, who also produced all the pieces on sale, she said.

“All the money goes to the UNM Children’s Hospital. I just asked them who they wanted to benefit and that is what they decided. The Children’s Hospital is always a good thing to give money to, I think,” she said.

The auction is at the Rebel Donut’s Wyoming location, and should last until the end of the first or second week of April, she said.

For more information, people can call 293-0553 or go facebook. com/RebelDonut.

Every piece of art that was hung at the auction was strictly depicting donuts, and all the donuts that were modeled for the student artists were donated by Rebel Donut and eaten by the students afterwards, she said.

Anyone who is interested in bid­ding on any of the donut art can do so for a minimum of $5, and does not have to be a part of the CNM com­munity, she said.

“It is awesome! They make really good donut art and the minimum bid for each piece is $5, so if someone needs art for their kitchen or their house it is really cool,” Popowcer said.

The auction did not consist of any opening premiere so there was no big event held at Rebel Donut with crowds of people walking around and looking at art, but every cus­tomer who has gone for donuts since the hanging has gotten a chance to shop for donut art to go with their donut food, she said.

Popowcer said that there were between 12 and 15 students from her class who contributed to the auction gallery and between 20 and 25 dif­ferent pieces of art that were done in a variety of different mediums like graphic pencil, colored pencil, paint, and chalk pastel, she said.

Even though the auction was put on to benefit the Children’s Hospital, Popowcer said the experi­ence itself benefitted the artists and the community.

The students benefitted greatly from the experience because they got a chance to show their work in public which is a large part of being an artist and they were also given a chance to engage in the community with their art and this made the auc­tion an all-around beneficial experi­ence, she said.

“Part of being an artist can be interacting with the community and this fulfills a lot of things. They get to show their work themselves and they get to feel pride in their work but they are engaging with their community, and then they are also giving back to the community by having this be a fundraiser, so there is a lot of good things about it,” she said.

Previous auctions Popowcer has put on with her University of New Mexico class and her CNM Drawing I class have been chari­table events held at either Rebel Donuts or Cake Fetish and have gone towards the Children’s Hospital and also towards the Animal Humane Society, she said.

Any art students who may be interested in becoming great art­ists and possibly being a part of future auctions should con­sider taking Popowcer’s art studio classes and always work hard at their art, show some pride, and most impor­tantly be willing to learn, she said.

Learning and working is what Popowcer considers to be the most important part of being an artist, she said, and she believes that without the challenge that goes with the two, there is no progress within an artist, she said.

“The more you work, the better you get. As an artist I am constantly learn­ing and working because I can only get better that way. You have to challenge yourself and to challenge yourself you have to be open to failure,” she said.

Popowcer also said that anyone who decides to stop by Rebel Donut to bid on one of the pieces should also consider getting an apple frit­ter because they are her favorite, but if she ate bacon she would get the bacon bars all the time.

Rebel Donut has won the 2013 Golden Fork Award, The Alibi’s Best of Burque 2012 and 2013, and also obtained the Albuquerque Magazine’s 2012 Best of the City Award.

New campus STEMulates downtown

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By Nick Stern, Senior Reporter | Photos courtesy of CNM.edu

stem

Administration has had an innovative and different way to address the intersection of entrepreneurship, education, and economic development in Albuquerque’s down¬town community, and the STEMulus Center was found to be the solution, which is planned to be accessible by the 2014 fall semester, Chief Community and Engagement Officer, Samantha Sengel said.
CNM is currently leasing space for the new STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) center at the First Plaza Galleria building at 20 First Plaza Ctr. NW in downtown Albuquerque where it will complement the significant amount of energy being put into the revitalization of downtown Albuquerque and contribute to the constantly evolving workforce, Sengel said.
“The mayor and the leadership in our city have been very clear about the fact that downtown is going to become the hub of innovation, entrepreneur¬ship, and startup culture. We need to be responsive and proactive in bringing what we do best down¬town and making it avail¬able to the community that is there today and that will be growing in the near future,” she said.
The STEMulus center will have coding academies, cyber-security academies, accelerated learning pro-grams, boot camps, and even a prototyping lab, which will have the resources to move ideas from the sketchpad to the real world, she said.
The prototyping lab is intended to have a wood¬working station, a welding station, a machine tooling station, and even a 3D printing station, but most importantly will have technicians and courses that will help people acquire the skills needed to use each workshop, Sengel said.
“We will have the structure for credit classes, but we also have non-credit, that has to do with skill development and training. We do not just stick you in a welding station and say good luck. We are going to structure around the safety training, so that they can be at the welding station and work there and if there is one-on-one instruction that needs to occur then we are going to have that technician onsite to support them in that way,” she said.
There will probably also be practical application courses like weekend-long, non-credit, introductory welding classes where people can pay to spend the weekend learning and increasing their skills which really is what the center is meant to be all about, Sengel said.
CNM recognizes that it is still very important for more and more people to receive degrees in New Mexico, and the hope is that people will become interested in pursuing their education after learning related skills, Sengel said.
“With the introduction to something exciting and interesting we can hopefully hook them and get them interested in pursuing their education, because that is what’s good for New Mexico. More people with degrees are important in New Mexico and we want to increase degree attainment across our country, region, and state,” she said.
Sengel advises anyone who is interested in this future project to keep their ears tuned for announcements because CNM intends on doing its best to keep everybody informed as there are new developments, she said.
Anyone who is interested can also go to cnm. edu/stemulus and fill out a form with any questions or comments they might have about the STEMulus center, Sengal said.

Smoking in the rain; Welding students build new smoking shelters

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By Jonathan Baca, Copy Editor

weld

Planning and designs for the cov­ered shelters for CNM’s smoking sections have been submitted, and they will be fabricated and constructed by none other than the school’s own welding students, Welding instructor, Ron Hackney said.

The “smoking shacks” will be built by students of the Project Fabrication class, one of the final courses before Welding students test for their certificates, and they plan to build one to two shelters each semester the class is offered, Hackney said.

“These are folks who are already ready to graduate. Over three quarters of them are already certified welders, by industry standards, so they are pretty advanced students,” Hackney said.

Hackney said the proj­ect will be a great oppor­tunity for his students to get real world experience, being responsible for every aspect of a project, from planning and materials to fabrication and installation.

Executive Director of Multi-campus Operations Jennifer Cornish said that the idea for the project came from dis­cussions about the best way to create the smoking shel­ters they had promised to install after the new smok­ing policy was implemented.

“Since the inception of the new smoking policy, we knew that we needed to provide some shelter, if not all, than at least most of the smoking sections,” Cornish said.

A team was assembled to design and make the specifications for the shel­ters, and Cornish said the school’s architect had the idea to ask if the Welding department would be inter­ested in creating them.

Thomas “Hass” Saunders, Welding major and work study lab assistant, was the stu­dent who actually created the designs for the shelters as part of his class work, he said.

“It is essentially a bus stop with a couple of modifications made to it,” Saunders said.

Saunders took mea­surements of existing bus stop designs and CNM locations, designed the “smoking shack” on a CAD (computer aided drafting) program and made physi­cal blueprints, created a list of materials, and then got quotes for material costs, he said.

Saunders, who helps stu­dents with their class work as part of his work study job, said he feels the project will be a lot more valuable and fun for the students than their normal projects.

“It takes a whole dif­ferent meaning to welding. Instead of just doing differ­ent positions all day, now we can actually build some­thing, and it makes the stu­dents feel good at the same time,” Saunders said.

In addition to benches and a covered awning to protect smokers from the elements, the shel­ters will have perforated walls for ventilation, and so Security can easily see inside, Cornish said.

Another important feature will be solar panels on the roofs of each shel­ter, to power lights that will shine in the evenings, she said.

“We can’t run electric­ity out to all the shelters; that would have made it too expensive. But we want to make sure that they are safely lit,” Cornish said.

They would also like the openings of the shel­ters to be facing toward the south, so that in the summer the sun will gen­erally be at the back and the smokers will have more shade, she said.

Cornish said that the school’s Sustainability Team will be meeting with members of the Welding department sometime this week to go over the final details of the project, and to see if any of the loca­tions around the school’s many campuses will require any alterations to the original designs.

“I think it’s a really wonderful opportunity for our students to participate as a learning project, and it meets the needs of the students who want to use the smoking areas, and it is a sustainability project,” Cornish said.

Hackney said that since the plan is for the Welding program to eventually build a shelter for every smoking section on every campus, the project will likely become a major part of the curriculum for the Project Fabrication class for some time.

He said that while the instructors will act as quality control, set­ting specifications and inspecting each shelter on completion, the stu­dents will essentially be in charge of the project from start to finish.

“We have to make sure as an educational institu­tion that the students actu­ally use it as a learning out­come. It’s not like we’re trying to get free labor, we want to make sure that they can actually learn from it,” Hackney said.

In addition to the expe­rience for students, this project will also help the Welding department save some money, because the materials will be paid for out of a special budget created for the smoking sections.

Normally project costs come out of the Welding program’s budget, which is strained as it is, so Hackney said it is nice to be able to save a little money while giving his students a great project.

“It certainly helps, because every department gets billed for its metal, and it’s pretty expensive. But in the end, somebody’s got to pay for it, so we have to make sure that we don’t waste metal and things like that,” Hackney said.

Saunders said that as a student, he agrees that none of the students feel they are being taken advantage of, and that they are happy to be building something of value that will be used by people on campus for years to come.

“This is not free labor, this is essentially a great learning experience. In a nutshell, it’s kind of the students’ way of giving back to their school,” Saunders said.