8 WDL They Do Things Differently There

So one of the job searches that didn't succeed this year was the one for my position.  Or should I say the search for two replacements for my position. 

Needless to say, at the urging of friends I now think of myself as "irreplaceable."

It's not true, of course, anymore than it was true that they needed to look for two people to replace me.  The college has needed another full time speech teacher for years and they just chose this year make the give.

As I've been remembering my own job search and looking at those happening on campus this spring I've been cast back into a decades-old memory of Mike Swan.  I became very close friends with Mike my first two years at Utah.  He was loudly out and I was out as queer as well and so circumstances threw us together and then we came to like each other.  He was five or six years younger than I -- around 26, I think and thin with a sweet face.   After I moved into the apartment right below his in the old, chopped up Salt Lake City Mansion, we would often finish out school days with a cup of cheap from-the-bin instant cocoa and episodes of Dr. Who and Monty Python on KUED.

I don't know how Mike was as a teacher.  I heard him speak at conferences a couple of times and he seemed a bit shy and hesitant.  As a student speaking in classes, however, he was super intelligent, quick witted, and funny.   He was often able to explain to me those cultural studies and critical theoretical concepts with which I struggled.  He was also a wonderful companion to the gay bars and clubs of Salt Lake, circa 1985.  We both had memberships at The Sun and other gay establishments and many Saturday nights would find us out, dancing  a lot and drinking as cheaply as possible.  (More about Gay Salt Lake at the time that I was just leaving may be found in the "Lambda Lore" column at QSaltLake.  I remember a famous leftist communication scholar, Phil Wander from San Jose State, visiting the department.  Mike and I took him down to the Sun.  We thought he enjoyed himself but it turned out that he didn't "get" it.  Years later he would remember it to me as a "dive bar" rather than a well-known and exciting gay dance club.  His memory altered my memory of him.)

Mike was a golden child of the critical studies group.    He could see the inherent self-deconstructing position of the deconstructers.  Yet he was also really silly (we would sometimes walk down the halls of the U's English Department imitating John Cleese's bureaucrat from the Ministry of Silly Walks).

Maybe he would have become a good teacher.  Maybe he would have gotten gig at an Research 1 Humanities department and written difficult and witty critical analyses of media texts.  Instead, he died of an unsafe sex practice.  Not the one killing off so many young gay men in those days -- simple unsafe sex.  He was very aware of AIDS (as all in the queer community were) and talked often about using safe sex.  But he was less safe in his pursuit of the pleasure in S&M.  And whether by his own hand or that of another he died of auto-erotic asphyxiation one August night in 1986.

He had become so important to me so fast, in a romance of friendship, that I was broken by his sudden and unexpected exit.  And now he is frozen in my memory in his bright, amusing perfection, never to grow old, never to disappoint, never to change and violate the expectations people have of him.  Or to surpass those expectations. 

To be changeless is to be dead. 

(blogpost title)

28 Answering for College Success

Early this quarter one of my students from last quarter sent me an email and said that she was working on an assignment for her College Success Course.   I cut and paste from my email not only because I'm lazy but also because today I was thinking about my time at McDonalds and how it made me want to become a teacher because teaching was just easier than running a 12/6 turn-lay on the regular grill.

1.      When did you decide you wanted to be a college professor? After I realized that I had very few marketable skills.   I couldn’t work in an office (poor speller, worse at math) and food service was just too hard.  I was capable of going to school and talking a lot so I became a college teacher. 2.      Did you have support and enthusiasm from family or did they want you to do something else? My spouse was a college teacher so he supported me.  Through marriage, I got my master’s degree for free. 3.   Did you begin your college-level education directly out of high school or did you have a break; and if you had a break, what did you do during that time? Started right out of high school but then was busted for trying to carry pot onto an airplane so I had a “gap year” as I paid all my tuition money for my sophomore year to the lawyer who got me off.  After that I married and got three years of my B.A. for free. 3.      What was your hardest class in college and why? In my undergraduate years I found my required science course, Biology, very difficult.  The lecture class was 200 people and the teacher was boring.  I’m very poor at math so measurement and problem solving in science was difficult for me. In my masters work I had a very boring theatre history class – I loved the material but the terrible teacher made it difficult. In my doctoral work it seemed like every class was difficult.  I occasionally had teachers who clearly didn’t like me or my style and would sometimes “cut me off at the knees” in class.  Because my master’s program didn’t prepare me very well for the doctoral work, I felt like Alice in Wonderland, running as fast as I could just to stay in one place.  I worked very hard to get my doctorate completed. 4.      What was your easiest and why? Every English and literature class I took as an undergraduate was easy because I’m smart, I read well, and I enjoyed the material.  Also, I went to a minor state school in Idaho and the teachers were not very demanding (except my spouse). 5.      What do you think the qualities are of a good student? I don’t believe in “good” students and “bad” students.   I believe that there are “good” performances and “bad” performances.  People change.  A person is not the same in one situation as she is in another. 6.      What is your teaching style? Goofy and annoying.  If it’s not fun for me I don’t do it.  I like a combo of lecture and activities. 7.      What do you feel are the biggest roadblocks to students' success? Do you mean what do I think?  (I don’t have any feelings about roadblocks.)  If a student has refused to be born into an upper middle class family, the statistics show that it’s not very likely he or she will be entering the upper middle class.  There is very little social mobility in the U.S. (see http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america-no-less-socially-mobile-it-was-generation-ago-mobility-measured )  So the largest roadblock to success tends to be being born into a situation where there are few successful behaviors being performed and little money or opportunity to change one’s situation. I suppose “inner drive” is also important but that’s also influenced by cultural values. 8.      If you had it to do over, would you do the same thing?​ While I believe in reincarnation, I don’t believe that I have much to do with any do-overs.  I guess if I could CHOOSE a do-over, I’d choose to be a cat in a good home with plenty to eat, nice cat toys, and a high wall walkway.  So, no, I wouldn’t do the same thing because cats don’t need to have jobs anymore except being pretty and fluffy.  And that’s what I’d like to be – pretty and fluffy, well fed and sitting in the sun.

41 COCC Teaching Support

Andria

Over the past few years support for new teachers has grown at COCC.  Today Stacey Donohue posted a link in our "Commlines" bulletin board to a blog post by Dr. Andria Woodell.  Andria writes about her work with Philip Zimbardo's Heroic Imagination Project.  She explains the project thusly:  "The main premise is if social psychologists can educate people about topicssuch as apathetic bystanders, obedience and conformity or situationalblindness, then individuals will be more aware of these circumstances and stand against them when necessary.  "

So the students in the HIP enter into teaching teams.  Over the past couple of years I've been among the observers that these students practice in front of before going off into the world to do their presentations to other audiences.  One peculiar aspect of these practice sessions is that Andria wants us practice audience members to be kinda wicked -- rude, looking at cell phones, arguing with the speakers, etc.  It's very hard for me, after years of teaching public speaking, to not give positive nonverbal feedback (smiles and head nods) to student speakers.

In her post Andria says "The last two years, working with the HIP projects and the COPE club has ranked among some of the most rewarding moments in my career."  I enjoy hearing about teaching and mentoring experiences that bring such pleasure to a friend.  It reminded me of the great experiences I used to have with the Phi Theta Kappa students back in the early 90s when I advised the honor society.

This blog post was part of a new site called The Teaching Commons.  I think this is an absolutely wonderful addition to college teaching support.   When I started out at COCC, learning new methods for teaching was a matter of visiting other people's classes or having special departmental meetings where people discussed what was working for them in the classroom.  Often I was too scared to ask for help because I didn't want to look incompetent or weak.  Thus it's great to see all that the college offers now in the way of support for teaching.

When I started teaching at Idaho State, I was just thrown into a classroom with the assumption, I suppose, that I would swim or sink.  It was pretty much the same at the University of Utah.  Most research institutions don't offer a lot of training in teaching for their graduate students and of course it's the undergraduates who suffer.  The Chronicle of Higher Ed. reported on a recent study by Wabash College’s Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts which claimed that many first year students report that they rarely experienced clear and organized teaching.  Fortunately, however, my favorite professional organization, WSCA, always had superb yearly panels on Great Ideas for Teaching Speech.

I also spent quite a lot of my early years professional improvement plan money on teacher training, including a chunk on a week-long course from Sivasailam "Thiagi" Thiagarajan on using games in the classroom.

I've heard that there have been some wonderful campus wide teaching academies but since I'm short timer saying goodbye to the profession, I have not attended.

LY #111 In my end is my beginning, in my beginning . . .

Nothing like a little T. S. Eliot to sound the gong of literary snobbery, which is just the note I shouldn't be sounding for tonight's post.

John Berger in Ways of Seeing (BBC)

Today we started talking about Ways of Seeing in my visual rhetoric class.   The first time I refereed discussions between this book and a class of freshmen and sophomores was in the first new prep of my teaching assistantship at Utah.  Now I'll be teaching it as part of my last new prep in my last year of teaching.

Some of those students who actually read chapter one for today were not that happy about it.  The pictures are badly reproduced, the language uses the old sexist "he" and "man" and the writing is a mix of academic clot and Marxist rhetoric.  Nevertheless, I believe that Berger, et al, make some terrific points about the way we look at pictures and how "fine art" gets managed in this age that is now WAY past "mechanical" reproduction.  He notes that our human, class-based responses to what is actually represented in works of "fine art" is mystified by the engines of art history as it pays more attention to the provenance and cost of certain works than it does to what they actually show us of the way the artist saw the world.

I remember a Humanities department picnic here in Bend during my first year when I was attempting to argue Berger's points about art history with the woman who taught it, the wife of a high level administrator of the time.  She disagreed with me but chose not to back up her argument so she just said, "Kake, shut up!"  And I did.

My students and I didn't get that far this afternoon because we took some time work-shopping ways to help the folks who got really low grades on the midterm earn back some points.  Part of the reason for the low grades was the fuzziness of the new questions I created.  Part of the reason was that they just didn't study.  I think they all came up with some good plans which I'll get into practice on my return from the Western States Communication Association convention where I'll be presenting on a G.I.F.T.S. panel.

The next post will be written from Anaheim, California.

LY #108 Impact of Reality on Discursive Practice

So what was the impact of The Family Tragedy and The Rape on my life as a teacher?

This is a difficult question to answer.  By the time each event occurred, I was already pretty troubled due to a variety of other childhood experiences.  Thus, it's difficult to point to some of my experiences and attitudes as a teacher and say, "Oh, I am this way because of these two events."

I suppose that I am both softer and harder because of this past trauma.  I have empathy rather than merely sympathy for others who have had experiences of family tragedy and violence.  I understand the compulsion to speak these stories and am not frightened of them.  I can hear pretty much any story without turning away.  On the other hand, I'm also harder because I know that tragedy is everywhere, that it's a normal aspect of human life, and I am not seduced to lower my expectations by stories of victimage.

It's also "useful" to have PTSD and to understand the experience of hypervigilance, especially with so many others in our classrooms experiencing that disorder.  I remember the first time I realized that I wasn't "over" the rape in spite of so many years passing.  It was my first year teaching here at COCC.  My friend Lilli Ann Linford had directed and staged the play Extremities in Hitchcock Auditorium.  The play begins with a rape scene.  As I watched I became light headed and nauseous, putting my head between my knees and gasping for air as quietly as possible.  It was all I could do to stay in my seat. In the 25 years since then, I've gotten much better, though there are still scenes in plays, films and television shows I find difficult to tolerate.

Probably the most obvious impact of having my world exploded twice in that year of February 1971 - February, 1972, is that I came to value safety, stability, and predictability far more than I thought an "artistic" person should.  I am deeply risk averse.  But not about every risk.  Experiences with violence can teach us that discursive failings aren't all that important.   As a Bend police detective said in one of my classes years ago, "I used to be afraid of public speaking until I got into a firefight with a bad guy.  At least when you're giving a speech, no one is shooting at you."

Perspective.  It's a gift of the dark.

LY #91 The Semiotic Rabbit

I had fun jumping back into semiotics today, although I'm not sure my students would say the same.  We'll see how things go when we dig into Understanding Comics next week and start stirring together rhetoric, semiotics and comics.

I've been remembering a Utah semiotics class taught by Professor R. Fox.*  For several weeks Dr. Fox came to class carrying an empty box.  I don't remember now if anyone took the bait and asked what it was.  Eventually he asked us (perhaps in frustration) if anyone was curious about it.  I think that the box represented the "empty signifier."  According to Wikipedia (ah, a lovely tertiary source), an empty or "floating" signifier is one without a clear referent -- one without an agreed-upon meaning or one with so many meanings that it is highly ambiguous.  I didn't talk about empty signifiers today, though.

 Steiff bunny puppet (Nedley)

My favorite moment with Dr. Fox, however, was the night of the semiotic rabbit.  Now, don't try to Google this term.  I did this afternoon and found a very thoughtful Prezi by jojo damonkey (yes, you read that right) about Toril Moi's critique of Judith Butler's semiotic rabbit holes.  But no semiotic rabbits!

Well, one night Dr. Fox came to class wearing a classic Steiff bunny hand puppet.  He told us that all questions that night should be addressed to the "Semiotic Rabbit."  There was some hilarity and disbelief about this demand but we all then began talking about our readings with the puppet on his hand.  After awhile two other students and myself got into a rather fierce confrontation with our pointy eared instructor.  (What was the argument about?  Heck, it was 27 years ago!  Maybe someday I'll pull my journals up from the storage area.)

What I do remember are the last words of the argument.  The "discussion" had grown louder and louder and I finally said something that undercut and challenged his authority more that usual.  His face flushed.  "Fuck you!" he barked at me, paused, took a breath, smiled, and added,  "Says the Semiotic Rabbit."



-------------------------------------------------------------------
*This is a pseudonym for the character I've previously called Zephod Beeblebrox.  I've decided that, rather than violate copyright, I should instead give him the name of a trickster -- the Fox.  I would have called him Professor Coyote but a European trickster seemed more apropos.

LY# 85 So Why Do You Teach Speech?

I probably should have responded with the deep thought that "We teach what we need to learn."  

The question a student asked yesterday was, "So if you're so nervous about public speaking why do you teach it?"

PhD Apparel

Instead I was honest.  I said that I'd wanted to work as a teacher rather than a researcher and if you make that choice in the field of communication, you're pretty much choosing to teach the basic courses:  public speaking,  interpersonal communication and small group.  Kinda like folks who get PhDs in literature often wind up teaching composition if they get work in a school focused on instruction. 

Public speaking was the first communication course I ever taught during my one semester of teaching at Idaho State University.  I went on to teach it as a graduate student at the University of Utah along with a few more intellectual courses.  But I never took graduate level courses in any of the three basic courses.  I had no 500 - 700 level courses in Public Speaking, Interpersonal or Small Group Communication at either ISU or the U of U.  The focus of my graduate work was on rhetorical, media, and communication theory along with American and cultural Studies. 

In the past 25 years, the number of classes I've taught at COCC in my areas of expertise can be counted on the the digits of two hands: five or six sections of Introduction to Motion Pictures, one section of Noir Film and Fiction, and my two new classes, each taught just once:  Introduction to the Rhetoric of Film and Introduction to Visual Rhetoric.  The last one I am teaching for the first and last time this quarter.  I am very excited that I'll be able to talk about semiotics again next week!

But what does this story prove?  

I might say something about the questionable link between doctorates and undergraduate teaching or that skills training doesn't require advanced learning.  Instead I'll just say that I think it proved I was diddly darn lucky to have lived this wonderful career.

LY #82 Fired!

Ha ha.  Not now.

Kakie Hanson 1970

Then.  I was fired from my first job as  teacher.

It was 1970 and I was a senior at Los Gatos High School where I was the editor of El Gato, the school newspaper.  There, with the very mild direction of the late Ambrose Haggard, I directed my motley crew in the biweekly construction of a newspaper.

For some reason I also got a job that fall teaching 4th Grade CCD (Roman Catholic Catechism) at St. Mary's School.  The class met for about an hour every Monday around 4:00 pm.    I don't remember how I got the job or why I thought I wanted to do it.  Nor do I remember all that much about my experiences in the classroom or what passed for my "pedagogy."  I probably was  bossy. (My hero teachers at the time were men and women who said things like, "Who told you this classroom was a democracy?")  What I do remember is that I procrastinated terribly in preparing my lessons, usually reading the chapter in the little book an hour before class started.  I also remember one little girl who spent the class reading books that sat on her lap below the desk.  I was pulled between wanting to engage her attention especially and wanting to leave her alone (I saw myself as a 4th grader in her behaviors.)

So, how did I get fired?

Well, I got a call one weekend at this time of year.  I was told that my services would no longer be required.  I wasn't told why.  I felt terrible.  I cried and begged and said that I'd been doing my best and what had happened?

At last I found out that someone, perhaps a parent of one of the children in the class, had not liked what I'd written for my holiday "Edi-Taurial" for the El Gato.  My schtick was to write a lead up into a punchline I'd stolen -- something I'd heard somewhere else.  So, for example, I'd ended my first "Edi-taurial" with the stolen punchline, "We must grab the bull by the horns and face the situation."  Stolen from where?  I forget.  It's been 43 years!

El Gato Edi-taurial, Kakie Hanson, 12/18/70

Anyway, the punchline I stole for the December 18, 1970 El Gato, was "Keep the Satyr in Saturnalia."  I talked about myself as a pagan.  So, clearly, I could not be the same person as the high school student teaching 4th grade CCD.  One was committed Roman Catholic, one was a self-confessed "pagan."   Could they share the same room at the same time?

Well, they couldn't share the same job.  Not in 1970.  What's interesting to me now is that I was so stunned that the behavior in one life, my life at school, and my behavior in another life, my life in church, had any influence on each other.  I've learned, through very helpful therapy, that this ability to believe that the separate areas of my life, like home and church, church and work, work and home -- are truly separate from each other -- is really a sign of an un-individuated self.

So.  That's the story about my first time teaching and my first time getting fired.  Not an auspicious start to a long career that will soon be ending.

LY #77: 1988 "Kake Gets Evaluated"

COCC Bookstore 1991 in Grandview

From the October 22, 1988 Bendnotes 3

______________

      Darla ___, doctorate in psych from Berkeley, ex-radical . . . with . . . a habit of touching you when she's speaking to you, attended my 1 o'clock Fundamentals class on 9/30, and my 12:30 t th Fundamentals class on 10/13.  After the Thursday class, we met down the hill at a coffee shop called the West Side Bakery.  

      When she attended my class, I introduced her and told them who she was, saying, "Now you get to see a real live tense public speaking evaluation."  I am very up front with my students about my position in the Biz -- if asked, I tell them my contract says "probationary".  I had told my T Th class that Darla would be there -- and boy, did they perform well.  On that day I was introducing the Public Speaking in Oregon project (my own idea ....) But the evaluations.  I had them write out on a piece of paper the finish of these two sentences:  "The in class evaluations were most useful when . . ."  "The in-class evaluations were not useful when . . . "*  Oh my, but they responded wonderfully!  they talked about how the evaluations were best when they were honest and included both good and bad, and not just good.  After each comment, I paraphrased.  Ah.  What a lovely class.  Lots of dialogue, lots of concern for the students.  They seemed comfortable with me.

      During our talk, the biggest advice Darla gave me was to sit down when I lectured -- that when I stood I talked too fast.  And that I should also relax, because when I am nervous I look awfully severe.

      When I shared this story with my class, I saw Rob, a large blond fellow smiling wikedly.  "Yes Rob?" I said.  "Nothing," he replied.  "Just a short joke."  "Yes?"  "I thought you were standing up!"

      That's how my students treat me.  They tease me.  

      So.  Darla seems to think I'm Okay.

 ________________________

* By "in-class" evaluations I was talking about the oral feedback I used to have students give each other right after a round of speeches was finished.  I now have all feedback given in written form for three reasons:  1) a new speaker's quite literal inability to actually hear and process feedback given right after a performance 2)  the face-threatening nature of any honest critical practice and my need to keep the speech class a "safe" place 3) student reluctance to criticize other students.

LY #76 1988 Continued: The PhD Issue

Tonight's post continues with the happenings on October 6, 1988, as recorded in my Bendnotes 3.   Last night's post was my 1988 report on a Faculty Forum meeting.  Tonight I'm typing up a couple of discussions that occurred after the meeting.

_______________

"C. and I talked with Don after the meeting.  He gave us the story of Fred's decision to turn the school toward the PhD.   He also told us that "while I respect Ward a lot" that they don't see eye to eye -- Ward is perceived as being very close to the administration.  As we walked back to the office, C. and I shared with each other our concern about being the bad guys, the professional guns brought in to take the place of those who were good teachers but who didn't have the magic letters after their names, or who weren't committed to the PhD myth.  Although she is a Dr., she and I agree that a belief that the PhD means something about an individual's ability to teach is a belief in magic.

{By the way.  I figured out this week that little of what I learned about teaching at the U of U is useful for this job here.  The major job of a teacher here, still, is to try and teach, not to sort out the wheat from the chaff for the replication of an archaic and oppressive disciplinary society.}*

When we got back to Deschutes, we ran into Mary Monaghan, and she eased our minds by telling us that we wouldn't have been chosen if we had not been seen as potentially excellent teachers as well.  She was especially nice about me, remind me that she had supported and fought for me strongly.**

. . . So.  That's an overview of part of the political situation here.  Sometimes it's real interesting to me.  Since my depression sat in, it's mostly been really dreadful.

____________

*  To understand this comment, you need to know that at the University of Utah graduate students often taught one of the three "weed" courses.  A weed course is not one in which students smoke weed.  (Yeah, I know what you were  thinking.)  It was a course in which the teacher, usually a graduate student at the U Comm dept, was required to bring in a classwide GPA of no higher than 2.4 because these courses were designed to "weed out" those students who supposedly didn't have the smarts to do great work in the communication program.  Weeding was necessary because communication was one of the most popular humanities programs so their needed to be a gateway to entering.

The required C+ class GPA meant that almost every high grade (B and up) needed to be balanced with a lower grade.  If a graduate student like myself allowed a class average to slip upward toward 2.8 or, heaven forfend, a Stanford-like 3.3, then we would have been "spoken to" and threatened with the loss of the teaching assistantship.  Because I was at the U. only because I had the assistantship (which covered my tuition AND gave me enough to pay for rent and food as well) I did my job as required.  Of course, being who I am, I often told the students about the weeding I was required to do.  When one of the major departmental faculty heard about my honesty, she was very upset and told me that, "It's not a good idea to be too truthful with them."  And yes, she was someone who touted a left-wing, post-Marxist ideology.

One interesting aspect of this kind of grading requirement is that a student who might get an A in one class because they outshone the other folks, might have pulled a B or lower in another class where there were more high performers.  An undergraduate's grade in these classes had as much to do with the other students in the class as with his or her own abilities.  Thank all the powers that bee that I haven't been required to grade like this since I left the U.  Nowadays, I have a set criteria for an A which I really believe almost every student in my classes can reach if they do the work.

** Reading once again about Mary's comment about fighting for me leads me again to think that I was the second choice of the COCC hiring committee.  I wonder how I could find out for sure?

#70 Creating Content is HARD!

Yeah, I guess you could read that either way.  CON-tent or con-TENT. 

I took the Thanksgiving Holiday off from this blog, though not necessarily from my classes.  I did do some work -- made a little video to say goodbye to my online classes, graded final assignments, dealt with whiny students, you know, the usual.  But, more to the point, I enjoyed time with friends and spouse and ate a lot of pie.

Enjoying my life is a high value for me.  When I did a values analysis a few months ago I rated "pleasure" well ahead of "status."  This may be one reason that I am a community college teacher.  Tonight I want to respond briefly to an article by Rob Jenkins in the November 12 Chronicle of Higher Education.  In "It's a Viable Career Path," Jenkins rails against graduate programs which take money from suckers, oops, I mean hard-working students without informing them about one of the major career avenues, community college teaching.   He goes on to celebrate the joys of working at a community college.

He notes that many university graduate program teachers are ill-informed about community colleges and see them as just a "pit-stop" in the race toward bigger and more status-filled job opportunities.  That wasn't the problem I faced.  Some folks at Utah were actually against their students getting CC jobs.  One of my professors expressed it in words to this effect:  When we spend so much time and effort on educating you, it's our investment.  That investment doesn't pay off if you go into community college teaching.  It's like we wasted our our time when we see you take that route.

In a way this makes sense.  At that time communication programs at the research universities were sometimes ranked with an algorithm that included how many articles those who had graduated from the programs published in any one year.  So, if a student went on to get a non-publishing job it DID have the power to lower the statistics for that particular department. 

I have no data to back up my belief, but I would imagine that the prejudice against CC teaching is still alive.  That's why I had to laugh at this rather Pollyannish comment about the silliness of thinking that any job outside of the research university would be thought a failure for a PhD.  "I'd like to think that, as professionals and as human beings, we've moved beyond those kinds of petty biases, especially in the face of a deepening job crisis in academe."  

I agreed with his comment, that "based on what I hear and read, the community-college environment appears to be far less stressful." For 18 of our 42 years together, my relational partner was a university professor so I got to see close up and personal what working at a small state research institution was like and the politics, even at such a minor institution, were brutal.  Not only that, but I have friends at universities and almost everything I hear about them convinces me that they are high stress environments.  There's a quote often miss-attributed to Henry Kissinger that "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small." 

My experience at COCC has been that while we do have plenty of politics and conflicts, they are rarely vicious.  Not never.  Rarely.  Even as department chair, I faced very few really bad situations.  Of course, the ones I did face convinced me that I never wanted to do administration again.  So I didn't apply for the dean jobs that came up. 

And now, I never will. 

LY #18: The F Word and I

So a couple of days ago I ran into a student from last spring's Rhetoric of Film class and he asked how my summer had been.

"It was f***ing awesome!" I said.

And then I immediately apologized. "I'm so sorry.  I've forgotten to take off my summer mouth!"

He said, "It doesn't bother me.  And he's French," he said, pointing to his friend.

I don't use the f-word (or any other obscenities or profanities) in my classes and rarely use it during faculty meetings.  It is, however, one of my favorite adjective/noun/adverb/verbs.  (It's so versatile!)  I do, however, tell my students in public speaking that there is a certain word, not "um", that I have to remove from my vocabulary every fall and let them imagine what it is.

I learned sometime around 2002 that my ability to control my use of the word led to my first adult teaching job.    In a visit to Pocatello, I met up with a one-time fellow student,  Jackie Czerepinski, currently a senior lecturer in the Communication and Rhetoric Department (a department that didn't exist in my day).   She told me that in 1983, when I wanted to change my graduate assistantship from technical theatre to teaching, the long time chair of the department, Bruce Loebs, sat her down in private and asked a pertinent question.  And as she told me the story I could picture Dr. Loebs in his perpetual cardigan sitting and peering over his steepled fingers.

 "Jackie, tell me.  Will Karen say 'f***' in the classroom?" he asked.

She, of course, assured him that I was a professional and could choose language appropriate to my audience.  And thus, reassured, he hired me to teach my first public speaking class.  That semester at Idaho State helped get me the teaching assistantship at the U of U.

And the rest is herstory.