REFERENCE LETTERS: 

 

 

History Resources Department

History

Housationic CC

900 Lafayette Boulevard

Bridgeport, CT 06604

July 26, 2005

To Whom It May Concern:

Jon Saul has asked me to write this letter of recommendation for him and I gladly do so.  I have known Professor Saul since he began to teach history for us in the Fall 2003 trimester and have twice conducted his classroom observation.  Since his first course with us, he has also successfully taught ethics, introduction to humanities, and composition courses.  His versatility and ability to “ramp up” to a new challenge quickly have been great assets.

We have found that his broad experience and education help students make connections between and across subjects.  The history course he taught, for instance, is contemporary American history in a global context and considers technological and social as well as political history.  In this particular course, Professor Saul made the creative choice of having the students engage with the text in a reverse order, starting with times and issues with which they were familiar and connected, and moving further into the unknown to find out why their world is the way it is.  The decision not only helped the students connect to the material, but also required that they engage with the text in a challenging way.

The Technology and Ethics course (HUMN205) is only taken by our associate’s program students, so the population there would be quite similar to that in a community college classroom.  Actually, our bachelor’s student population also resembles community college enrollees or graduates in terms of diversity of age, skill, prior knowledge, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.  I have seen Professor Saul take a class of students that was somewhat polarized in terms of maturity and engage them all at once in a discussion that emphasized critical thinking.  He has a way of taking a complicated subject, a white board, and a dry erase marker and getting the students involved in the complexities before they know it.  This is even more impressive because he works exclusively with students who have no intention of majoring in any of the topics he teaches, for they have declared technology and/or business majors as they enter our institution.

Sincerely,

Susan Charles T. Groth, PhD

Chair, Social Sciences and Humanities

Department of General Education

 

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