Brandon Clutter
Staff Writer
On the Las Positas College campus, students who need help in math, English and English as a second language can go to the Integrated Learning Center. The ILC has been open since 2005, though it has been moved around to a couple of different buildings.
Students can go to the ILC for open math lab hours, while ESL and English teachers use it as TBA hours to get specific assignments done for the class. The students can use it whenever they please during the hours that it is open. There is one faculty member there to help students if they need it.
“I get forced into doing homework, which is good because otherwise I wouldn’t do it,” LPC student Sean Vanlandingham said.
The students all go in to get their assignments and homework done, and utilize that time to also work with friends. This helps the students to work together, and help each other with the assignments.
What can be a problem though, is that students sometimes have to wait for help from faculty, because there is only one faculty member there.
“If they need help, we have a whiteboard, and they write their name on the board,” math teacher Teresa Henson said. “There’s labels that tell them what information to put, and they put their name, course and where they are, and we keep a running list.
The instructor has to keep a running record of this list, and with only one faculty member there to help, it gets hectic. The whiteboard fills up with names, and while the teacher will try to help everyone, their time is short and limited.
“Sometimes that list will fill the whole board, and it wraps around the top,” Henson said.
The students then must wait, sometimes for longer periods of time they don’t like, and will sometimes not get helped.
“That’s usually one of the complaints we get, and often that’s the issue, because we’ll have 20 people who need help, and put their names on the whiteboard, and only one person to help,” Henson said.
Some students don’t have a problem with getting help there, while others do. Also, students have these open or arranged lab hours to get assignments done, and that makes students happy.
The ILC can be very effective for students, and help them out; however, it can be the exact opposite.
