Important messages for students and faculty about registration, classes, extended tuition payment deadline, Blackboard and more

Outages and intermittent service have made it necessary to communicate these important messages to students and faculty:

•  Students should attend class, even if they are not officially registered for that class. Class registration will resume when Internet service is available.
• Faculty must pay close attention to the accuracy of their class rosters and maintain manual attendance logs as needed.
• Deadlines for payment and drop/add will be extended to accommodate students who need this assistance, as long as students have attended their classes at least once.  Access to Blackboard is available through learn.vccs.edu
•  Interactive video classes can continue as scheduled, in spite of Internet outages.
• The Germanna Testing Centers are closed temporarily. Routine service will resume when the technical services are stabilized.
• Access to library resources will be severely limited during periods of internet outages.
• · E-2 messages will be sent with updates as they become available.

2013 Spring Commencement keynote speaker Virginia Van Valzah: From learning disabilities to an "addiction to learning"

Virginia Van Valzah

Virginia Van Valzah has turned a learning disability into what she calls an “addiction to learning.”

The determined 26-year-old has battled ADHD and dyslexia since she was a child. When she enrolled at Germanna Community College, she applied advice from one of her teachers at James Monroe High School to break courses down into easily digestible chunks and spend a lot of time in the Tutoring Center.

 “Class sizes at Germanna are small enough that you get that one-on-one attention you need to thrive,” she says.

After earning her associate’s degree at Germanna in 2006, she went on to a bachelor’s in administrative justice at George Mason University in 2008 and a post bachelor’s certificate and master’s in criminal justice at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011. Using flash cards to study, she compiled a 3.7 grade point average at VCU.

She’s now a court security deputy for the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office and a training officer.  This summer, she will begin teaching criminology at Germanna as an adjunct faculty member.

 “I’m addicted to learning and I’m trying to pass on my addiction to other people,” she says.

  As a training officer, she‘s already helped students one-on-one who might have struggled without that attention.

 “People do things differently and they learn differently,” she says. “I want to be the person who understands a learning disability. They could be the best at the job. They don’t know how to do it unless you help them, but they could be the best.”

 She grew up in Spotsylvania, Stafford and Fredericksburg. She currently lives in downtown Fredericksburg.

 Her mother, Cathy Van Valzah, has been a history teacher for over 25 years at Brooke Point High School in Stafford. Her father, Stuart Van Valzah, is an accountant who owns his own business. 

She said she has known she wanted to work in law enforcement since she was 7 years old. “When other girls were playing with dolls, I was playing cops and robbers,” she said. “I’ve always been kind of a tomboy.”

The distinction between creation and birth: Did Jefferson's calculated choice of words first aid revolution, then emancipation?

Thomas Jefferson’s calculated crafting of the Declaration of Independence brought his skills as a lawyer fully into play when he wrote that “All men are created equal,” according to Stuart Smith III, Germanna Community College assistant professor of history.

 Smith’s “The Historical Context of the Declaration of Independence,” published in the Florida Conference of Historians Annals, Volume 19, April 2012 contends that Jefferson chose his words very carefully in an attempt to balance ideals and political pragmatism.

 This month, the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Smith talked about the founders’ struggle to deal with the issue of slavery 90 years before Lincoln did.

 Smith said Jefferson made a subtle but crucial adjustment to words written months before by George Mason:

“That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural Rights… among which are the Enjoyment of Life and Liberty, with the Means of acquiring and possessing Property, and pursueing and obtaining Happiness and Safety.” -- George Mason. Virginia Declaration of Rights, May, 1776.

 Instead of writing that all men are born equal, Smith noted, Jefferson substituted created.

 Smith said that Jefferson, as a lawyer, was making an important distinction, “that God created man equally but circumstances on the Earth created the subsequent inequality.” 

 “It was not a justification of slavery, but a recognition that man had created/instituted the evil practice to which Jefferson, despite being a practitioner, abhorred,” Smith said.  “Jefferson knew that slavery was an offense against man and God; this is why he wanted it ended. Jefferson's villain in the drama would be King George III, whom he blamed for instituting the slave trade.

“But when ‘submitting the facts to a candid world’ regarding the colonies being abused by a tyrannical king, Jefferson chose to draw that distinction between ‘created’ and 'born' equal," Smith said. "I believe he did this to show the inequity of the practice and to hint at an inevitable course that would include all people in his phrase.”