Category: Stories In Focus

Many pairs of siblings attend Houghton, but one aspect of their college experience heightens through their relationship at teammates. Brothers Jared and Jesse Toth and Sisters Lindsay and Hattie Burgher have experienced life at Houghton as both fellow students and teammates.

Sophomore Jesse Toth’s decision to attend Houghton last year came almost completely from the fact that his older brother, now a fifth year senior, Jared attended Houghton. Jesse and Jared had the opportunity to play on their high school’s soccer team together for one year, while Jared was a senior and Jesse a first year. Because of an injury during Jared’s sophomore year playing for Houghton, he gained an extra season of eligibility. He was able to play for an additional season and this was “surprisingly a blessing” to Jesse. He said, “Playing with my brother in high school was one of the best experiences I ever had and I wasn’t about to pass up playing two years with him here at Houghton.”

The brothers shared nothing but positive experiences and benefits of attending the same college and playing on the same team. They said the biggest benefit they bring to their team is their chemistry and understanding of each other on the field. While playing together, Jesse says “we constantly know what the other person is thinking” which is what makes being on the field together fun and exciting. Jared describes their experience as “unexplainable” because there is nothing like being able to “battle everyday on the soccer field with your brother.”

When asked to share a memorable experience they’ve had while being at the same college, both Jesse and Jared described hard-fought soccer victories. Both games were ones they were not expected to win, but they both credited their victories to their brother’s hard work. This year being Jared’s last season, he shares he was glad he got to play his college soccer career with his “own blood” and is proud of what his brother has brought to the team.

Lindsay and Hattie Burgher bring a slightly different relationship to the aspect of sibling teammates because their relationship broadens to one of a player and coach. Junior Hattie Burgher’s decision to attend Houghton came with a bonus, having her sister already on campus. Her sister, now assistant volleyball coach, Lindsay Burgher, was a senior when Hattie started at Houghton so they only played one year on Houghton’s volleyball team together. Hattie said, “I wish I had more than one year of playing with her… but I’m so grateful for that one year.”

Both sisters commented on the reward they’ve received in watching their sister grow and develop as a player, and for Hattie, seeing Lindsay as a coach. Lindsay and Hattie played two years of volleyball together in high school, but Lindsay said “I valued playing with her a lot more than in high school, because I wanted to make the most of (what I thought was) our time playing together for the one season we had.” When thinking of her transition from player to coach, Lindsay shared how “natural” it was to have Hattie at her school and as a teammate, but the struggles it brought transitioning into a leadership role. Lindsay had to learn to balance her relationship as a sister, friend and now a coach.

Hattie’s most memorable experience with her sister at college was hearing about her recent engagement. Hattie shared her excitement in being able to “revel in that monumental moment with her and to see the ring and give her a hug” which is something she would not have been able to do if Lindsay wasn’t still at Houghton. However, Lindsay’s presence on campus brought some struggles, as Hattie stated “we are sisters.” She said of her sisters coaching position, “she legitimately has the right to boss me around” but said that their relationship would experience some arguments which is natural and expected.

Lindsay’s greatest experience has been watching her younger sister “transform before her eyes” on the court and work to earn her position as a leader on the team. Lindsay is grateful for the opportunities she’s been given while at Houghton with her sister and said, “Whether coaching or playing, I am proud and thankful we can continue to be a part of the Houghton volleyball program together.”

Tucked away in a cozy box-stall, nuzzled in dry hay, and munching on crispy treats from his extensive fan-base, lays Houghton Equestrian Center’s most prized possession—the 2014 Certified Horsemanship Association (CHA) School Horse of the Year, Pumpkin.

The CHA’s Horse of the Year Program is meant to “honor the animals that spend countless hours being patient with new and experienced riders.” Pumpkin has honored this requirement–exceeding expectations and performing with unique personality.

Pumpkin is a 22-year-old Haflinger horse, small in stature and mighty in spirit.  He has served as a faithful member of the Houghton College lesson herd since he was donated to the college at the age of  five. His chestnut base coat blends him with the autumn landscape and is complimented by a pure white strip that rests down the center of his face. What Pumpkin lacks in height, he makes up for with a sturdy physique built to comfortably hold each rider he meets.

It is Pumpkin’s glowing demeanor that really draws in his fans. “As an instructor in a barn full of horses he is always my first choice,” said equestrian program director, Jo-Anne Young. “Five CHA conference attendees sidled up to me to say that they had purchased an extra plane ticket home so they could take Pumpkin with them!  Obviously they were joking, but it is an indication of how quickly that special Haflinger builds his fan club with his sweet personality!”

At the age of 22 (69 in human years), he shows no signs of retirement, continuing his service to riders with cheerful willingness. He shows his riders patience, allowing them to build confidence in their abilities. Like a grandfather ushering a child to his lap to read a story, Pumpkin has an inviting way of putting riders at ease, welcoming any skill level or saddle to his back.

“He’s a favorite because he is so predictable and consistent,” said junior equestrian minor Hannah Henry, “he always seems to be aware of the rider’s safety.”

This semester Henry is working with horsemanship student, Christina Moore, and Pumpkin—brushing him, tacking him for riding, and running/walking beside them to give direction. Because Moore has impaired eyesight it is important that she can trust the animals she is working with. “Pumpkin is so sweet with her and always does what she asks and would never try anything dirty to throw her off or trick her,” said Henry.

Pumpkin is also willing to collaborate with advanced riders, showing western styled riders how to do sophisticated maneuvers like soaring over course jumps. He performs with patience while riders practice a new move–allowing them to try, and try again, but also has the sophistication and experience to execute a maneuver with ease once his rider gets it. He can gallop 400 meters per minute on a cross-country course, light on his feet, and thoughtfully navigating through rocky terrain.

Among his favorite activities of being a lesson horse are pulling the meadowbrook cart, being pampered with love and affection, and being rewarded with treats to which he responds with an approving exhale or delighted whinny. “I’ve been working with horses all my life and I’ve never met a horse who loves his job as much as Pumpkin,” said, senior, Jalene Amling.

“You could truthfully say he is worth his weight in gold to us! It was an honor and a great pleasure to have him recognized as the 2014 CHA School Horse of the Year,” said Young.

Students have the opportunity to serve the community, develop work experience, and earn money through various work study jobs offered.

Whether it is cleaning up the bathrooms in Shenawana, working at the welcome desk, or being a teaching assistant (TA), there are a lot of student work study jobs available on campus. Some jobs are more popular than others, but given the vast variety of jobs available on campus, you never really know what kind of work you’re going to be doing.

There are a variety of reasons students choose to get a job on campus. Some get jobs because it gives them something to do, while others feel a greater need to serve the college community. However, most students get work study jobs for one simple reason. Money. While for most students the money is the main selling point of a job, there are many other rewards and benefits to work study jobs.

Having a work study job does provide students with a small income, but also provides work experience and helps develop transferable work skills for students’ future careers. Senior, Chad Muise, works at the welcome desk in the campus center. His job entails a lot of direct communication with a variety of people including students, faculty, and community members. Muise said that working at the welcome desk may not help him directly in his career path, but he has learned a few valuable skills in his time at the welcome desk. He said, “Communication and organizational skills are always an asset to build on, and working at the welcome desk has definitely helped me improve those skills.”

A lot of work study jobs provide students with an enjoyable overall work experience. Junior, Chase Rangel, does the statistics book at volleyball games and he enjoys this work study job. Rangel said, “I like watching sports and it’s a front row seat to all the home games. Plus it’s easy work for the amount of hours you get.” Junior, Brett Rapan, has three jobs on campus. “I like the proctor job the most because I get to sit down and do my homework while I’m at work,” said Rapan, the true definition of “work study.”

Not only do work study jobs offer money and an enjoyable experience, they can also offer a sense of leadership and an opportunity to help fellow students. Senior, Kyle Flemington, is a TA in the physics department. He grades homework sets for two classes, General Physics One and Mechanics One. He too, admits that the income is nice, but the job does have other benefits. Flemington said, “This job is a good experience because it is considered a leadership role in the physics department. You get to help other students with their homework and help them better understand the concepts.”

While work study jobs may not be physically demanding labor, students do struggle to find a balance between their personal life and work. Muise said, “The hardest part of the job is working around my personal schedule. I have taken on a lot of different tasks this year in the classroom and on campus in the form of jobs and clubs, so my schedule does not always match up with the available shifts.”

Not all work studies are as enjoyable for students. Rapan also cleans the bathrooms and showers in Shenawana, a job that he described as “dirty and gross.” He dislikes this job because it takes an hour out of his day five days a week. He recounted a particularly gross day on the job in which “someone left a giant hairball in one of the stalls. It was the grossest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Imagine a room where light speaks, shadows whisper, and introspection reigns supreme. For artist Charles Ritchie, this atmosphere creates an inspirational context for his life and for his artwork. Ritchie arrived on campus last Friday to present his show in the Ortlip gallery. The characteristically colorful room filled with large pieces of art was stripped down to its core displaying small, detailed prints, drawings, and journals. They primarily depict scenes from inside and around his home in Silver Springs, Maryland. Senior Amanda Irwin, a gallery assistant, commented, “There is something very personal about the work that I find to be intimate in size and subject matter.” Ritchie invites the viewer to step into his world through visual art. Professor of art, John Rhett commented, “The respect for the individual response is paramount in a show like this. It’s quiet, and it rewards meditative, introspective thinking.”

In his artist’s statement, Ritchie describes his small-scale presentation “as an invitation to the viewer to crawl into an intimate yet immense universe.” The set up of the gallery challenges the viewer to experience the same intense introspection that Ritchie finds important in the process of creating his work. The white walls are neatly adorned with frames that invite the viewer to step in closer. He challenges the viewer to detach him or herself from the corporate world and prompts an invitation into his own simple, yet profound existence. In response to Ritchie’s invitational objective, Rhett said, “Important artists give us visual vocabularies. We learn to see through their eyes.”

Ritchie works from a chair in his home, slowly creating a layered representation of the metaphysical world using watercolor, graphite, pen, and ink as his tools. He attributes his unique style of creating to rebellion. Rebellion against the way he was brought up. He moved a lot as a child, and he finds the stability of his home liberating. However, he does not settle for stagnancy. He described how he enjoys  “getting to know the world in a profound way through limited experience.” He compared this process to the life of a musician. A musician practices scales every day and listens to the rhythms and musicality of the notes. Ritchie described how he wants to be a receptor of the beautiful art that proceeds from his study of the observable world.

He sees his methods as a skill that takes time and patience to acquire. “Training the eye and hand has helped me isolate what is important,” he mentioned. His impeccable knowledge of color value is one of the important tools that he uses to create this isolation. Because he primarily works in black and white, Ritchie described how he must use the full range of color that these two colors offer. In a value class that Rhett taught, he used Ritchie’s work as an example of exceptional use of value. Rhett encourages his students to observe contrast between colors in their work instead of framing every section of color with lines.

Along with contrast in value, Ritchie studies time as a crucial element in his work. He finds immense importance in the stillness of time and the movement of time. Without the movement of time, he would not be able to capture the changing shadows on the wall, yet without the stability of time, he would not be able to document the reverently still environment. Both are crucial elements in his work and his observance of the world. He strives for moments that become “iconic rather than fleeting.” For example, Ritchie explained that he is currently working on a project that will take many years. He is observing the growth of an oak tree as it slowly adds layers to its core across a wide span of time, mastering the art of transitions.

Humility translates through his work because he realizes that he may not be alive to finish some of his projects as he believes, “no decision is final.” His work constantly evolves, creating an accurate representation of how his “inner voice” evolves with his work. Laurissa Widrick, a senior art major, observed this evolutionary aspect of his work and marveled at how, “his process is a lifelong commitment.”

Because his personal life connects so closely to his work, Ritchie’s own voice is the primary one that translates into his work. His inner voice, “the dream voice” as he calls it, captures the “train of consciousness” that goes through his mind during his early morning meditation times. These dedicated early morning reflection times are essential to the consistent patience that he exercises in his work, Rhett remarked. Ritchie finds solitude extremely important in the spiritual act of studying the inner voice and the psychology of self. He concluded that, “I think in a way, one’s spiritual world depends on those things.” This spiritual element permeates through his work turning small-scale pieces into scenes portraying vast universes that are easy to miss in a quick glance.

Even if you missed the gallery opening last Friday, the gallery is open during the day and welcomes students, faculty, staff, and community members. The invitational quality of Ritchie’s work, according to professor Rhett, can be attributed to the “non sequential” form of the work. Because of the open-ended nature of the show, viewers can continue coming back multiple times to glean new reflections about the work and about the self.

Michael Carpenter and friends perform in the Java Coffeehouse. Michael Carpenter, Annie Hassen, and Hunter Gregory perform a mock cover of Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars while holding ukuleles. Each song Carpenter played featured one or more of his friends.

For some people, hunting for “sport” implies frivolity—it’s killing for fun—but for participating students at Houghton College, it is a sacred experience that is widely misunderstood.

Hunters are perpetually accused of recklessly chasing adrenaline and intentionally using weaponry that brings animals cruel deaths. However, listening to some who participate in the sport reveals that it can be perceived as an art—an expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.

Beginning their day before light, hunters spend an extended period of time observing their prey’s behaviors, habits, and tracks. Sporting garb that blends them with their tree-stands, hunters sit in oneness with the woods to assure the animals that their habitat is safe and secure. Though it may take hours, applying this tact and developing strategy to outwit their game is half the enjoyment for hunters.

Additionally hunting is an investment—hobbyists pay to participate in this pastime. Each year, hunters must purchase hunting licenses and sometimes pay to hunt on the specific land they’d like to explore.

“There is much more to hunting than killing animals,” said senior Austin Groff, “Not only is it is beneficial for wildlife management, but it provides good food.” After hunting for almost 10 years, Groff described a feeling of satisfaction that came each time he worked to hunt and harvest an animal.

For Groff and others, hunting has also served as a way to experience the beauty of God’s creation. Sophomore Aaron Eisenhardt reminisced, “Bow hunting in the fall is awesome…sitting in the tree stand with the trees resembling the colors of fall all around me.”

Situated on the site of a former Caneadea Indian Reservation amidst 1,300 acres, Houghton College has delivered an ideal environment for hunting hobbyists. Having grown up close by in Fillmore, first year Jordan Mullen was eager to stay close to the land in which he grew up hunting. “Hunting is the way I take myself out of the busy world and experience nature in its true form,” he said. For Groff, “sitting in the woods in itself, for hours, is enjoyable.”

Mullen has been enjoying hunting with his dad since the age of seven. “I have shared some of the greatest bonds with my friends and family in the woods,” he said, “the perception is that it’s a savage and brutal time, but that’s false.” For Eisenhardt and senior Jordan Sloat, hunting was also shared as a father-son activity beginning at a very young age. “I grew up around it, my whole family hunts, I was born into it,” said Sloat.

“For someone who has never hunted before,” Eisenhardt explained,  “It is hard to describe the reason why I enjoy it.”  He encourages his peers to find an opportunity to get out and try it for themselves.

Personal Connection Lost, Responsibility Gained

Houghton has always emphasized making personal connections between its faculty and students. It isn’t unusual to see a professor sitting with a student at lunch or praying with a student in between classes. So does a student taking a class online through Houghton lose that personal relationship?

Houghton Online offers an increasing amount of online classes during the summer. Among the options are Literary Voices, Math in the Liberal Arts, Introduction to Psychology, and Biblical Literature. The majority of the classes offered are Integrative Study (IS) requirements, so instead of being crammed into a student’s semester schedule, the IS credits can be fulfilled during the less academically strenuous summer months.

Taking an online course through Houghton is an ideal option if a student is behind on credits, can’t attend Mayterm, or simply can’t balance certain classes with their schedule during the fall and spring semester

Sophomore Raisa Dibble said she missed the chance to learn from a professor and that it was a “big minus” of taking an online course. “I just think professors make it a little more personal and give moral support to learning,” said Dibble of traditional classroom learning. She continued to say she missed the “wall of support” that she usually gets on campus. “At Houghton, if I’m struggling with my beliefs, I have professors I can ask and talk to and classmates to bounce ideas off of. At home, I just have Google,” said Dibble.

Despite learning less from the professor, Dibble said, “I like online learning because I learn more about the subject.” Because online learning is generally self-taught, Dibble spent a lot of time reading. “When you take a class online, you have so much more time to devote to actual work rather than having to go to class,” she said as a benefit of taking Literary Voices and Biblical Literature through Houghton. “You definitely learn the material better.” She appreciated that online courses allowed her to go more indepth into the subject material because she had more time.

Online learning differs from the traditional classroom setting because it requires much more responsibility and not as much interaction. “I enjoy listening to lectures and reinforcing the information on my own, so teaching myself and being responsible for my own learning was a different experience,” said junior Casey Mauger, who took Medical Terminology this past summer. Mauger said although it was easier to focus all of her academic attention on one class, “if something was unclear it was harder to get clarity on the subject because you were basically teaching yourself.”

Junior Maisie Pipher also agreed that taking an online course demands more responsibility. “Online learning is entirely dependent on the individual,” she said, “You are in charge of learning for yourself.”

To most students, summer means warm weather, sun, and no classes. But for students who want to get ahead on credits or need the credits, summer means something a little different. Pipher relied on self-discipline to get her through Literary Voices and Medical Terminology. “Assignments crept up on me more easily during the summer when I was working and relaxing,” said Pipher. She wished the professors were more empathetic to the fact that it was summer and that she had other work to do besides academics. “There were days where I would have a long shift at work and have to come home late and finish an assignment because it was only available for 24 hours,” said Pipher, “It was like [the professors] forgot it was summer.” Mauger too thought is was difficult to balance “the business of the summer with a class.”

Dibble also contributed to the notion that it takes a lot of discipline to get through a summer course. “It’s hard to make yourself wake up and get to work,” she said, “You have to make sure to set aside time from the day to do the class.”

Writing Professor Laurie Dashnau said the challenge of online teaching comes “in terms of gauging where students are at in terms of start or middle of instructional units.” Finding the best resources to cover instructional material is also another challenge of Dashnau’s. Still, she finds online teaching to be rewarding. “One does not take conversations of face-to-face time for granted,” said Dashnau. Professors, not just students, value in-person interaction.

Although the student may miss out on an interactive relationship with their professor, they acquire skills such as self-discipline and responsibility along the way. Meeting deadlines and overcoming the distractions of summer challenge students to become more focused and more disciplined.