31 How I Got the Film Class . . .

 . . . every other year.

When I came to COCC I become friends with one of the members of my hiring committee -- Hal Gillespie.  We talked about teaching methods, COCC gossip, and movies.  Sometimes we battled at department meetings about whether or not it was permissible to leave the chairs in a circle at the end of a class period or whether rows had to rule.  I thought that circles had just as much validity as rows.  (That rebellion was short lied.)

Hal taught many of the same courses that my spouse did and I'd hoped they would become good friends, a hope that was dashed when Hal found out he had a late and fast advancing case of prostate cancer.  Hal was open about his dying process.  At one point, when we were talking about his class, he said that he thought I would be a good teacher for it.

I thought he might have told our boss, department chair Ward Tonsfeldt.  But I don't think he did.  So when Hal retired and Ward gave the class to a new hire with some interest in teaching it, I got upset.  I was very anxious to teach the Film Studies course.  I loved movies.  I'd taken all the film classes available at Idaho State and at Utah took two full semester studies in individual directors:  John Ford and Akira Kurasowa.  For four or five years and one 8 month sabbatical Will and I spent our summers in Berkeley where we saw between 8 - 12 movies a week.  I'd been a movie reviewer for our school paper.  So I really wanted to teach the course.

So I made my case to Ward and added that Hall had said I could teach the class.  We came up with a compromise.  The new guy and I would each teach the course every other year.  A true win-win would have required the department to pay us each to teach the course once a year instead of using that extra three credits for the required courses of speech and writing.

I'm glad I had a chance to teach Introduction to Motion Pictures (or Introduction to Film) every other year throughout the nineties.  I even managed to negotiate the right to teach it after Speech moved over to Fine Arts and Film stayed in Humanities.  I had to negotiate that with the Humanities and Fine Arts chairs at the time, because Humanities got credit for the students but FA&C had to pay me.  But when I, myself, became head of FA&C I had to give up the course.  I didn't want to go to the trouble of asking for it back when I left my faculstrator position and returned to teaching.  By that time even younger faculty were teaching the course and its format had been drastically changed.   When I taught the course it was structured so there were 2 - 2 1/2 hours on one day of the week to show the picture and then an hour and a quarter or so on the second day to talk about it.
I recently heard that now, instead of being able to show one film every week, teachers only have time for four or five.

Sigh.

I loved teaching the course with a "theme" -- a central concept that would be a focus for all the movies.  I then would show movies from a variety of time periods in a variety of styles by a variety of directors, all focused on that theme.  In Fall 2002 the theme was New York.  Some years before that the theme was "great characters."  To advertise that class I created a poster with the picture sheet below as its background.

Long Time No Me

Well, last week I checked into the E.R. on advice from the folks at my allergy clinic. I woke up with chest pains, see, and, well, as they said, "A woman of your age can't be too carefull...."

Turns out that I DO have a heart. I have proof now, in spite of what anybody says. And there's nothing wrong with it. My husband thought it was stress. I have been superbusy with administrative bull -- hmmm -- activities.

Fortunately, I'm not only a department chair but also a teacher and I've been having lots of fun with my classes. I had a particularly good time with the latest version of my one credit conflict management class on May 1-2. It was a great group of people. And, you know what? It was actually my two hours in the emergency room without my computer in front of me that gave me the time and the quiet to reformat the class.

I wanted to post a while back about the Communicating Love class and their wonderful discussion of the impact of childhood stories. Suprisingly enough, the story most people remembered from their childhood as a first narrative about romantic love was Disney's The Little Mermaid.

Starting Soon

So, it's about to start again. I'm entering my twentieth year at COCC and my 25th year as a speech comm. teacher. This quarter I plan to ask my students, AFTER they've received their grades back, if they mind me mentioning them by name in the blog. I also hope to deconstruct at least one commercial every couple of weeks. So far nothing's excited me like the Fritalians or Pepsi Max. But we'll see what comes up. There's so much political crap-trap right now. I find most political ads stultifying and annoying. I've been irritated by political advertising since the famous "daisy ad" which, as a fan of LBJ (when I was in, what, 6th grade?) I believed in that ad.

One of my favorite jokes. An old guy is asked, in 1966, who he voted for in the last election. He says, "People told me that if I voted for Goldwater in 1964 we'd be in a war. So I did and we are." A little historical humor. Just to remind all of us that the future is a mystery.

Or, as Criswell once said in some Ed Wood movie, "The stars do not compel, they only impel."