Honors was proud to nominate, for the first time, our full quota of four students for the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program (according to the program's website at http://www.act.org/goldwater) was established by Congress in 1986 to honor Senator Barry M. Goldwater, who served his country for 56 years as a soldier and statesman, including 30 years of service in the U.S. Senate. This scholarship provides tuition, fees, room & board (up to $7,500) for 1-2 years for undergraduates studying and planning a research career in math, natural science, or engineering.

This year's nominees include:

David Hatch, junior, Physics and Math

Mark Greenwood, junior, Environmental Engineering

Danica Daly, junior, Biology

Stephanie Chambers, junior, Biology, Departmental Honors

Previous winners from USU:

Jamie Jorgensen, Physics, 2002

Lara Anderson, Physics, 2001

Jeff Jacobs, Mechanical Engineering, 1998

Teresa Eller is the proud mother of seven children--four boys and three girls. Teresa moved from North Carolina to Utah this past August and is majoring in Journalism and Broadcasting. Her passion is 'to promote awareness against domestic violence and child abuse.'

Nathon Allred returned mid-December from a job in Puerto Rico following an LDS mission to the Dominican Republic. He now joins USU and the Honors Program as a transfer student from Weber State University.

Evelyn Sardinas, a mother of three from Miami Beach, chose USU for 'its outstanding program in education and the community.' She hopes to travel to Reggio Emilia and there study Italy's world renowned, high-scope teaching method.

Helen B. Cannon, by Kelly Tucker Jeppson

The most important thing I learned as a student in Helen Cannon's English 301 class was the difference between an article and an essay. Many of us were confused on this point. The text for the class was The New Yorker magazine, and don't magazines contain articles? It turns out that some of the most interesting, insightful and timeless writing appeared every week in a magazine most of us had never picked up before--in the form of essays. And with Helen's help, we learned why analyzing the writing of essayists such as Stephen Jay Gould, Susan Orlean and Adam Gopnik could improve our own writing. A basic tenet of her teaching is that good readers make good writers.

Helen doesn't like the attention she is getting as a result of the Helen B. Cannon Award. "I want the focus on the students who will get the award as soon as possible," she told me. Personal attention to her students is a trademark of her teaching. In the years she taught at USU, thousands of students turned in essays for her classes, and Helen read each carefully (at least twice!) and filled the margins with comments, criticism, and cross-references to other writing. It was rare that an essay was returned without a copied essay or passage from another source paper-clipped to the back. How she found the time to comment on writing, prepare her extensive show-and-tell classes (when she would share books from her own library) and get any sleep at all is a mystery, but I think she must owe part of her success to Post-It notes. She uses them as a hypertext, and every book in her house is rimmed with multi-colored flags of paper.

Cannon retired from formal teaching, but her personal conversations with essay writers continue in her correspondence. She spends much of her time answering letters from former students who trust her voice. Lucky is the writer who receives a letter with a photocopy of a New Yorker essay tucked inside. But luckier still are the students who will benefit from the Helen B. Cannon Award. It is a tribute to a professor who, in the words of her son-in-law, Nate Alder, "loved students, treated them as equal partners, gave them all [she] had--physically, mentally, emotionally--and inspired them in untold ways." She still does.