LY#22: Marxist Guilt, 1988

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!"

LY #21: But today, there's Opera!

I love opera.  It's an art that combines music, acting, and the visual arts of design and decoration to express gigantic emotions.  If I'd been a character in an opera my first year here I could have sung my loneliness while wearing a gorgeous costume rather than simply writing whiny letters back to my too-busy-to-read-them friends.

So it was a real pleasure to attend the matinee of the "first night" performance by Opera Bend, a new opera "start up."  The company, with some visiting singers, put on a very enjoyable show between commercial announcements about ways to support the non-profit organization. 

They are striving to fill the gap left by Obsidian Opera after it went belly up about seven years ago.  I remember many of its performances, both good and bad.  One of my favorites was a sharp version of of the very modern Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti.  Of course, one of the reasons I enjoyed it was that it stared my friend Lilli Ann Linford-Foreman as The Mother.

 Too often, Juniper Opera's singers were middling.  That wasn't the case today, however.  There were some truly terrific voices giving pitch-perfect renditions of some old and one new warhorses (a warhorse, by the way, is a song or entire opera that is recognized as a "standard").   Among the older repertoire were numbers from Bizet's Carmen, Mozart's Magic Flute, Johann Strauss Jr. 's Die Fledermaus, Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, Verdi's Falstaff, and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.   The new warhorse was the duet Agony from Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods.  The modern master's cool vision of end of romance was a tonic against the rich, romantic food of the classics.

While all the singers acquitted themselves admirably, I want to make special note of Sarah Mattox, Trish Sewel, and Scott Carroll.  Mattox, a mezzo soprano, was the featured guest artist. She makes her living from performance and has received good reviews around the west.  She had a rich voice and some solid acting chops.  Trish Sewell is a soprano who teaches voice for COCC.  Her voice is clear and precise and she had fun playing the "chambermaid" in the scene from Die Fledermaus.  If you go to Youtube there are some echo-y recordings shot in Wille Hall with a bad in-camera microphone.  But you should listen to her riff on the Queen of Night's aria from Magic Flute in the song "The Girl in 14B."  Pretty groovy.

But my favorite performer was Scott Carroll, a tenor currently getting his Masters in Music Education at the U of O.  He was a wonderful performer, using his face and body with wit and grace.  He also has a dynamite voice and plenty of lung power.  I predict his skills will take him a long way and someday I'll be able to say, "I saw him in Pinckney Theatre, singing for a start-up back in the day."

I wasn't all that keen on the cool dude they chose as an MC.  He's a local radio personality who didn't really have the right vibe for opera - his energy wasn't big enough.  (And a joke about Bill Clinton seemed awfully old and out of place.)  Nevertheless, I'm tempted to donate.  The company is a 501(c)3 so a donation will be tax deductible.  And with luck they'll get hooked up to the Oregon Cultural Trust.

But what I'd really like to do is hire the company to do a "Flash mob" style performance of the drinking song "Libiamo" from La Traviata in the COCC Student Center.   This afternoon started with that number and it's one of my absolute favorites.  They could do it with people coming in with their regular clothes and then singing with a canned broadcast orchestra.  Or even with just a recorded piano, like this flashmob in an Amsterdam Mall.  It would be awesome!

LY: #20: Whiny, Pathetic, Narcissistic, Loneliness - 1988

A sad part of those 1988 Bendnotes is the shouting loneliness of the person writing them.  My young self had a strange idea that these long, digressive, overwritten missives were being read.  In the September 22, 1988 note she, I, write(s):

       "As I enter the second week, I shall continue to keep the old eyes peeled for interesting happenstance.  Since all but one of you have ignored my last set of notes, and that one merely commented that s/he thought it was well written (a sign more of my lack of style than of his/her perspicacity, I fear), I shall simply write what I think interesting."

In the following note, written in late October, has an opening more appropriate to someone who might be writing a weekly editorial, not a set of photocopied letters.

           "Well gentle readers.  Perhaps you have noticed the lateness of this episode.  Perhaps you wondered whether or not the woman you knew had given up her attempt to reconstruct her experience in this strange new world.  Perhaps you though I had abandoned you.

          "But never fear.  This process by which I hold back, hold off the reality of my experience by continually conceptualizing it as a construction I send to you keeps me from being truly caught up in the ineluctable substance of the moment.

       "At least it did until a short while ago. . .."  After that line, my use of metaphors and Monty Python references spirals out of control as I say that I've been watching too much television while I'm not at work.  I also refer to an old Wayne and Shuster comedy routine about television addiction which I'm sure none of my friends had even heard of by using the line, "the gal with the golden eyeball." 

If I look at these old letters with the eye of my therapist I see an Enneagram 4 whose "basic desire" is "to find themselves and their significance, to create an identity out of their inner experience." (This is from Riso and Hudson's The Wisdom of the Enneagram).   Or I could see someone with a "narcissistic wound," (this concept also courtesy my current therapist) who is caught up in the importance of proving she's just as important as she thinks she is.  What I've also learned about myself since two decades and 1/2 ago is that I score very high in "uncertainty avoidance."  Any situation that is unstable and unknown (like a brand new job) sends me into high stress mode and I see that too in these letters.

LY#19: Public Speaking Bootcamp and Positive Student Feedback

Tonight was my last fall orientation for Public Speaking Bootcamp.  In the bootcamp I teach my entire 3 credit speech class in two weekends and an orientation evening.  I was wondering last week when I'd started teaching this course but didn't get around to reviewing my H.R. files. 

I DID, however, find the print out of an old email from back in 1999 in my files.  It was sent in January.  I no longer teach the weekend courses in the winter quarter because heavy snows can make the college inaccessible, as I learned one year when I had to cancel and get an entire class to commit to a different weekend later in the quarter.

The email, sent by a student named Susayn (a name I can no longer put a face to) wrote about some of the issues she was facing with group work as someone living in Prineville.  She ends with this paragraph:

"One more thing before I go . . . I felt great leaving the weekend workshop.  there seemed to be a real connection of people over a short period of time.  Sometimes in a class there is no connection.  Sometimes it seems like you don't even know everyone's name.  I think the way you set up the introductions had a positive impact on the mood of the class. . . I want to say thanks, and I wish all instructors would take the time to do this."

It's always nice to get positive feedback from a student, even if one must always take any kindness from someone over whom one has economic power (the power of the grade) with a grain of salt.

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.

LY #17: Student Art and Public Speaking

So last night I experienced a first.

The artwork in question next to a cowbell.

A smiling young student confessed to the entire public speaking class that the reason she had chosen  my section of the many available to her was "only" because I'd purchased a piece of her art at the student ceramics sale in the spring.  She bubbled, "I was able to eat lunch that day because of you!" Her smiles and laughter brought a lot of positive energy into the room.  I didn't want to tell her that I couldn't see any logical connection between the feeling of appreciation toward a buyer and the decision to spend 10 weeks in a class taught by that purchaser.  Having money to spend on art doesn't insure that one is a good teacher OR a good person, for that matter. 

Another student's art.

Well, I've never purchased student art so that students would like me.  And certainly not because I wanted art students in my speech classes.  (They occasionally are so focused on their art that they don't put a lot of effort into the coursework.)   I buy student art for two very different reasons.  First, because I really like the piece I purchase.  Second, because I'm an unsuccessful artist myself and know how exhilarating it is to have someone like what one does so much that they shell out some simoleons to provide proof of their positive regard.

So, not to put to fine a point on it, I buy student art for the same reason I do most things:  for pleasure and karmic correction.

And yet another piece of student art.

LY #16: My Last First Day: Part Deux

Tonight I met with one of my two, live, public speaking classes for the first time.  It meets once a week.  When I first started at COCC I taught public speaking with three different meeting schedules:  once a week at night, three times a week on MWF and twice a week TR.  It was a challenge for me as a new teacher to format the material into three different shapes.  

After making the usual wait-list decisions, I begin the academic portion of the public speaking class by having the students play a game I call "Toss."  I give them a few items -- a couple of koosh balls, a dog ball, and a stuffed cat -- and tell them the rules:  items must be tossed over the head of at least one other student, they must not touch the floor, and they should not hurt other students.  Though the game begins quietly it usually gets louder as students laugh or signal to each other.  After a few minutes I stop the game and collect the items.  I take a moment to do my "Puff" routine (see below) and then explain that I did, indeed, have a reason for having them play the game, "Besides the fact that it amuses me."  I had a pedagogical reason.

I tell them that success in "Toss" and success in giving a public presentation requires some of the same attitudes and skills.  I ask them what those attitudes and skills might be.  Tonight they listed eye contact, hand gestures, knowing the audience, control, coordination, "don't be robotic", smile, pay attention to your environment, keep everyone involved, use icebreakers.

Puff relaxing at home after a hard night in class.

The "Puff Routine."  I have a lovely stuffed cat named Puff.  I call him "my helper cat."  After the game of "Toss," I collect Puff and pet him while explaining in a soft voice that "Some days when I feel very stressed out or angry with one of my colleagues or my boss I go into my office and say . . ."  and here I suddenly raise my voice and turn and pound poor Puff against the table, " . . . BAD PUFF!  BAD!"  Then, just as suddenly, I turn the simulated anger off again and smile at the class.

This loud and startling silliness generates laughter and a bit of a startle response.  It also gets heart rates up.  These responses further my goals for the first day:  to set a tone of disciplined fun that has the power to modify
our shared anxiety.