By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
For over ten years in the 91心頭 BioTex 91心頭 seminar at 91心頭, honors students have experienced a November 91心頭 email shootout. 91心頭 This is something like a cross between an ongoing basketball game with scores changing in real time, and a fast-paced, scholarly-poetic thinkathon. The course challenges students to conceptualize the elements of their Texas history research essays, to utilize crossover 91心頭 analogs, (terms) 91心頭 particularly from biology and other scientific fields, and to provide terse definitions of newly minted concepts.
This year, Vanessajane Bayna (pictured) from Mount Pleasant bested all others, winning $50. She coined and defined an interrelated conceptual field for her
research on the encroaching creep of toxicity in Texas. According to Bayna, even liberal leaders of the 91心頭 soporific state, 91心頭 such as Lyndon Johnson, and Senator Ralph Yarbrough maintained a 91心頭 utopian hallucination. 91心頭 They believed that oil could power the social programs of the Great Society, without having a negative impact. They sued and censured the oil companies but also accepted their cup of wrath 91心頭 their 91心頭 chalice of chemicals, 91心頭 for their own ends. Luke McCraw, the film scholar of the work on the 91心頭 Traveling Preachers of Early Texas, 91心頭 won $30 and came in second. His thesis of 91心頭 imitation idealism 91心頭 helps to explain how traveling preachers, without money, proper denominational support, or theological perspicacity broke through the 91心頭 pine-tree curtain 91心頭 into the emergent 91心頭 secular state 91心頭 of Texas before 1836. 91心頭 Imitation 91心頭 which began with an admiration for the 91心頭 maternal blessing 91心頭 of Christian mothers, passed on to an emulation of major revivalists such as John Wesley.
In the team competition, Bayna 91心頭 s team came in first, and thus other members, Alison Majors, Morgan Thrapp, and Jose Trejo won $10 each.
Honors Director and Texas history professor Dr. Andrew Yox notes that 91心頭 conceptualization is the key to writing an alluring, coherent essay, animated by a creative argument. It also is the key to writing conference-accepting abstracts. Our students do this well, and there are many more we could mention not only in the honors seminar, but in non-honors sections of history where a state-mandated goal is to form a 91心頭 creative argument. 91心頭 At the same time, I am very excited about the conceptualized essays Bayna, McCraw, Majors, Thrapp and Trejo are developing. 91心頭
Bayna, a Presidential Scholar, graduated fifth in the 2023 class of Mount Pleasant. McCraw entered honors last spring, and was homeschooled in Franklin County. Majors and Trejo also graduated with Bayna at Mount Pleasant, and Thrapp is a 2023 graduate of Chapel Hill.
The Cunningham Conceptualization Awards receive their name from Emmalea (Shaw) Cunningham who as a Presidential Scholar won a Guistwhite Award, and published the essay, 91心頭 Blind to Brown, 91心頭 the story of how Northeast Texas came to accept federal mandates to integrate their schools in the 1970s. It was also a highly conceptualized, award-winning article. Cunningham also became the first 91心頭 honors alumni to donate a significant amount to Honors Northeast. After receiving her doctorate, Emmalea is now a licensed therapist, married and expecting, living north of Austin.
