In a final addition to the September Bendnotes (dated September 27) I sign off with this paragraph:
"EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA
Stay tuned next time when you'll hear about Kake and the politics of the PhD. How she found herself to be one of the elite who bought her position through an ideological construct over the long time experience of more polished teachers who do not have terminal degrees. Watch Kake battle her Marxist guilt!!! Thrill as she fights the demons of leftist conscience."
When I got my name sign on my office door in Deschutes, the blue rectangle wasn't wide enough to cover the screw-holes on either side of it. These holes marked the the name of my predecessor, a teacher with a longer name. Someone let me know that this teacher had created two of the classes I was teaching and had applied for the position but that I had been hired instead because I had the PhD.
I wasn't yet "the Man" in those days, so this discovery bothered me. In fact, it pretty much bothered me until about nine years ago when this same teacher came back to teach for COCC again and wound up walking away from the school in the middle of a quarter, leaving myself and Dr. Jon Bouknight to step into the three un-personed classes. The information I got from the students when I conducted a "talking stick" debriefing settled what was left of my itchy conscience.
I remember telling my fresh new colleague Sean Rule that the experience had changed my mind about teaching speech.
"I used to think any idiot could teach public speaking," I told him, hollering across the lawn near the Metolius Building.
And he, dear young fellow, hollered back, "No, it takes a special kind of idiot!"
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