The Northward Contrail

Things I wish students knew

A few days ago I stumbled across this article aimed at new college students, and I couldn't figure out what to make of it.  Part of it is good information, and part of it is snark meant to make college students feel a little better.  Now, I know about snark.  It wasn't that long ago that I was a college student, and I know the kind of snark students engage in, and that others play off.  Heck, I even engaged in some of it back then.  Everybody does.  (I still do.)  It's a new environment, and you're trying to figure out how to survive in it.  Some folks take to it readily and understand it. Some folks never get it.  And some folks, though they're basically good, get frustrated by it.

When I got into academia, it took me a few years to find my style as a teacher.  In the back of my mind the whole time, though, were the lessons I've learned from the great teachers I've had and the lessons from the bad teachers I've had.  I will never forget, for example, the high school geometry teacher who never missed a chance to tell us all how stupid we were (in words not far from that, believe it or not), or my miserable two weeks of college-level French with an instructor whose in-class haughtiness put me off ever trying to learn the language, or the professor I had in graduate school who just outright did not like me, never missed a chance to ridicule me, and was the only teacher I've ever had who made me cry.  At the same time, though, I'll never forget the gentle geometry teacher into whose class I was transferred mid-year, or the very kind philosophy teacher I had in college; I may have made a C in his class, but the lessons I learned in that course have lasted ever since. Every teacher I've ever had has been an influence, and I've tried to take from the best of them and learn from the worst.

That said, I never knew just how much of teaching was really hard work.  Not the grading, not the creation of assignments, not the record-keeping.  Nope, I'm talking about the performance end of it.  People in other jobs, who don't have to give presentations for a living, sometimes underestimate this.  Imagine you're in front of 20 to 30 people you've never met.  Now imagine they're half your age.  Throw in that they're a captive audience, and most of them don't want to be there and are bored.  Just for giggles, let's imagine that you're teaching a course that deals in proper use of language, and that the course doesn't lend itself well to the use of fancy gadgets in class.  Add that they have little interest in what you're saying, and some of them think what you're telling them is pointless and they wish you'd shut up and go away.  (Oh, and just for kicks, imagine that at your core, you're a very shy person whose idea of bliss is being left alone with a good book in a quiet room on a rainy afternoon.)  That, dear reader, is why on certain days I leave the classroom feeling like I've been through the wringer.  And that's after years of doing this, too.  Early on, it would flatten me.  Now I can get through an entire week before being wiped out, but back in the day...oy.

So that's why the snark that students throw our way -- through the online articles, through the rating websites, and all the other stuff -- doesn't sit well with me.  To an extent, I understand the value of it, but sometimes it gets ridiculous.  It's like passengers saying that an airline pilot's no good because the landing was bumpy, but those passengers have no way of understanding what it's like to land a 757 in a 20-knot crosswind.

There's so much emphasis on making sure we understand what our students need.  But I wish students could understand a few things in return:

How you treat us has a direct influence on what you get from us.  Many of you play on sports teams.  Can you imagine what it would be like if you were out on the field giving your all, but the people in the stands were sitting there bored, constantly looking at their watches, yawning and generally acting like they didn't want to be there?  How would that make you feel?  Now imagine you're doing my job, and even when I'm trying my best to be lively and interesting, you're still sitting there bored.  Whether you realize it, you get from me what you give to me.  You can sit there and be bored and impatient, and drag me down with you, or you can cooperate and give back, and thus encourage me.  It's like the line from "The Loadout" by Jackson Browne: you've got the power over what we do -- you can sit there and wait, or you can pull us through. 

This ain't as easy as it looks.  It took me years to get to this level, and it took me years to cram all this information into my head.  It also took me years to get my teaching to this point.  You can sit back there and wisecrack all you want, but five will get you ten that if I put you up here and had you lecture to the class about this very topic, you'd freeze.  So let's not shoot the piano player, okay?  I'm doing the best I can.

You may consider my class an inconvenience, but I'm just trying to do my job.  This is what I do for a living.  To do my job, and to fulfill the expectations my supervisors have, I need your cooperation. 

The world is run by those who show up.  It's like the old story of the tortoise and the hare: the hare had all the abilities, but the wrong attitude.  The turtle kept plugging along and won.  All the knowledge and ability in the world doesn't matter if you don't show up to do the work.  That's why we have attendance policies.  That's why we have penalties if you're late.  We're trying to show you that actions have consequences.  Besides, part of being a professional means showing up on time, even when you don't particularly want to.  I can't begin to count the number of times I've come to work sad or tired or generally feeling like crap, but I've come in because I had a job to do, and because I had obligations to other people.  Besides, I can't stop what I'm doing for the other 20 students just so you can come traipsing in whenever you wish. 

You have demands on your life, but so do I.  I know you're busy with umpteen organizations and teams and all your other classes, and for that reason you want me to do X or Y.  But maybe the reason some of us can't meet with you at some weird time at your convenience may be that we have other obligations.  Maybe some of us have to be in meetings.  (You have extracurricular activities.  The word we use in the professional world for those is "committees."  The difference is that "extracurricular activities" tend to be a lot more fun than "committees.")  Others of us have to pick up our kids from school.  Some of us work second jobs because we need the extra income (that's right, we don't make as much as you think we do).  Some of us got sucker-punched by the recession and are the sole providers in our households. 

We try to cut you slack, so cut us some.  Sometimes we have bad days too, and despite our best efforts to be professional, things happen.  Did you ever think that the reason why your professor's bleary-eyed and a little grumpy is because she was up all night with a sick baby? 

Someday, you'll understand.  You may think the reason why we're teaching you something now is dumb, and that most of what you learn in college will never again be used.  But, as the saying goes, the object of karate is not learning how to chop boards in two.  College is as much about expanding your mind, and improving your ways of thinking and reasoning, as anything else. And, in my case, I'm training you to be a careful, responsible professional. You may think it's stupid for me to drill you on some of the things we do in class, but someday, when you're in a real newsroom, you will be thankful.  I can't tell you the number of times a graduate has come back, or written, and told me "Now I understand why you did what you did."  (They also realize that I'm nowhere near as demanding as a real-life news director or editor.)

Your greatest satisfactions in life won't come from the things you were given, but from the things you earned.  If I just up and give you an A in my course because you threaten a tantrum, what have you learned?  Nothing.  But if you work hard and do your best, you'll get the whole world.  And if you do get an A after all that hard work, there's nothing that can match the satisfaction of a good job done honestly -- or the lessons you take away from it.  Not only can you remember the material, but you can actually use what you've learned.  Aside from that, it's a great lesson about delayed gratification.  The things in life you work for are the things that build your character.  There's a reason people who get everything they want, when they want it, are called "spoiled."

Besides that, the idea of "spoiled" really grates on some of us.  My parents were influenced by the Great Depression because their parents had lived through it.  My parents worked like crazy to provide our family with a home, to put groceries on the table and clothes on our backs.  At one point my father worked two jobs during the week and another on weekends.  Early on, we learned about the value of hard work, of showing up and doing your job the best you can.  We learned to save up our allowances, or wait for Christmas, if we wanted something big.  Sure, it frustrated us when we were kids.  But, oh, the day we finally had enough saved up to buy want we wanted, nothing could match that.

You can think professors are tweedy people who attend wine tastings and talk for hours about topics of little general purpose.  There are enough out there to give life to the stereotype.  But a lot of us are just trying to do our jobs.  Most of us know what it's like to work for a wage, and we're not as out-of-touch as perception would have us.  And some of us know what we're doing.  So, come on, folks.  Let us do our jobs.

Somewhere, Horace Ford is laughing

Over the weekend I was doing some searching through some archived computer files, converting some of the more interesting ones into Word format so I could read them again.  Along the way, I found some stuff I'd forgotten I still had, including some old scripts a friend and I wrote, some old seminar papers, and a real piece of work: the daily journal I kept when I was a college senior. 

For whatever reason, back then I thought it would be interesting to sit down at the end of the day and write down the day's happenings.  (I think I'd been influenced by the then-recent release of The Haldeman Diaries.)  And, for whatever reason I did this, I'm glad I did.  I read through the journal yesterday, and it did a lot to knock the sepia tones off my memories of my senior year.  There were moments that made me ache with nostalgia, yes (the parts where I described working on the staff of the student paper along with some really wonderful people), and parts that reminded me of bad stuff I'd forgotten (for example, a couple of instructors I had who were real pieces of work). 

It's odd reading from that younger version of me.  For one, I had a sharper wit back then than I give myself credit for.  I was also a lot better journalist then than I remember, too.  And, as is usually the case when anyone looks back on their younger selves, I'm struck by how naive I was.  There are also moments when I realize just what a blockhead I was.  I read through and sometimes I wished I could holler out to the yesteryear me, "No! Stop, you idiot!  Don't do it!"  (Nope, none of it involved anything you normally associate with college kids, so if you're looking for tales of booze or sorority hi-jinks, you'd be disappointed.  I never pledged to anything, and I remain proud to have been independent.  Still, some things I did, I cringe to remember.) 

I think what comes out of it for me are two things.  First, today is a lot more like yesterday than I realize.  It's just that instead of being seated in the classroom, I'm now the one at the front.  Other than that, it's not that different.  I'm just seeing the job from a different angle.  The other thing I took away from it is not to complain about my life, or my job, now.  I look back on everything I was doing back then, and I can't imagine keeping myself going in so many different directions.  Sure, the job I have now has demands, but most of them revolve around one thing.  It's like looking back on high school and thinking, "Man, I sure am glad that's over with."  Maybe you miss your friends, the Friday nights out, but you sure don't miss the homework or the exams.  It's the same with college: I miss my friends, and I miss the fun I had working with the rest of the newspaper staff, but I sure don't miss those early-morning science labs or the math classes. 

Wherever you are now, yesteryear me, thank you for keeping that journal.  You had no idea then just what kind of service you were performing. 

Life, as we knew it

There's little for me to say today -- and you'll find out why.  Just follow this link made of awesome: the entire run of Life magazine from 1936 to 1972, in digital form. 

The calls are coming from outside the office!

Sometimes the most interesting things that happen in a day have nothing to do with your students.  They come from members of the community.  We get weird calls sometimes: people who think we can transfer their 8-millimeter movies for them (we don't have the equipment), people who want to hire our students to make films for them (though we're happy to let them, we don't do it as part of a class, and you're not going to get the same results you'll get from a professional firm), people calling to request copies of the alumni magazine (which I have nothing to do with).

And sometimes you get stuff that's just out there.  Since I'm the media contact for the student newspaper, all the letters to the editor come to me.  You can tell which ones are mass-mailed position pieces sent out by true believers to blanket the press on a given issue.  And then there are some that are written by people who are blessed.  At least once a month, I'll get a photocopied handwritten letter to the editor by a guy with some very interesting points of view on topics of current interest.  From reading his letters, he makes me think of one of those small-town eccentrics that R.E.M. used to write songs about. 

Then there are episodes that take the cake.  A few years back, someone offered us an old projector and some old movie reels.  These were the kinds of movie reels you could buy at the dime store back in the day; kids could buy a silent Donald Duck short, for instance, and watch it on Mom and Dad's movie projector.  This was offered to the guy in charge of our facility, and he checked with me to see if there was any interest.  I said "sure," and the transfer was arranged, and the projector and reels eventually went on display in our "museum" cabinet.  As a courtesy, our facility director had the films transferred to DVD for the donor. 

Some months later, the donor was back in touch with us.  Somehow, the movies on the DVD didn't match what she thought she gave us, and it led to accusations that we'd sold the movie reels on eBay and gotten a bunch of money from them.  Which didn't happen, and I could vouch for it because I saw the items when they were initially donated.  Anyhow, the complaints went up far enough that we had to investigate.  To make a long story short, nothing came of it, and I offered to have the projector and reels given back to the donor.  I think that's what ended up happening.

One Friday at lunchtime, as this whole sordid tale was playing out, I was sitting in my office, having my sandwich and doing a little reading.  The phone rang.  It turned out to be the donor.  It started with a few questions about the investigation, and after I vouched for the story the facilities director had told her, the conversation took a strange turn.  For the next 15 minutes, the caller went on with a long string of grievances about the college.  I heard about how the college president didn't respond to her letters, about how all the faculty members were Democrats and the Young Republicans were dead on campus (both of which I knew not to be true, but I knew it was pointless to argue), about how the president of another church-affiliated college in the region was an atheist and about how bad it was that church-affiliated colleges were getting more secular...you name it. 

There was nothing I could do about any of this but stay on the line and let her talk.  It struck me as the thoughts of someone who felt powerless and frustrated in the face of a changing world.  Part of me felt bad for her and wanted to give her a chance to talk, but part of me felt my temperature rising and knew my half-eaten sandwich was getting stale.  Finally, it played itself out and the call was over, much to my relief. 

I don't get many calls like that.  But when they do, oh, they're memorable.

Colleagues

One reason why The Office (both in original and American flavors) is so successful is because anyone who's in a workplace knows colleagues who are like the characters somehow.  As fortunate as I've been in drawing good people with whom to work, I've often felt The Office could just as easily be called "The Faculty."  The type of work doesn't matter, for no matter the line of work, you'll always have those same basic types: the people who are competent but unenthusiastic, those who are a little uptight, those with a chip on their shoulder, and those who are just weird. 

(One more reason why The Office makes compelling viewing for me is because I once worked with someone who was Dwight Schrute.  I'm not talking about someone who was like Dwight Schrute in a few coincidental ways.  I'm talking about, this guy was Dwight Schrute.)

On the occasions I've had colleagues, they've been more fun than difficult.  At my first big-time teaching job, though I had a boss who made my life awful and higher-ups who probably wouldn't have minded having my head on a platter, I nevertheless worked with a great group of people, very down-to-earth and supportive, always very thoughtful of one another.  I remember the times we'd get together and walk over to the cafeteria for coffee, and we'd have these great conversations about pop culture.  We shared the same sick sense of humor.  They liked me and I loved them.  I was away from home, and they were sort of my family.  It really meant a lot.  (A couple of them had me along on lunch dates after I'd been granted my release, and I learned a lot of interesting things, including how they'd wanted to keep me on and how many misgivings they had about the department's leadership.)

I've never really been that close with any colleagues since, and that's partly out of choice.  There are some colleagues I would love to become close to, but most of them have families or already have a lot of friends, or they're more social animals than am I.  Or there's always the other hazard, that you'll become close to a colleague and then they'll move elsewhere.  It's happened before.  And sometimes getting close to a colleague may bite you.  One time I got close to a colleague in another department, only to later have that colleague ask me to help intervene with a department chair on a denial of tenure decision.   When I didn't get involved, because I felt it would have been stepping over a professional boundary, I got frozen out.  (Later, when I learned more, it turned out to be good that I didn't get involved.)

The weird part becomes when former students become colleagues.  This has happened a few times, and while it takes a bit to get accustomed to it, this can be a lot of fun.  Sometimes we'll play a little "remember when" about the days in the classroom, and sometimes you're glad to take a little bit of ownership in how they turned out (though not too much, for they built their own futures).  But having them around as peers adds a nice, new page to your relationship.  That's as rewarding as anything. 

Bosses

Through my career I've occupied several positions along the pecking order.  My job title has never really changed, but my position relative to the hierarchy has.  At each point, I've had to answer to various types, some of them better than others.

Here, I think, graduate school spoiled me.  I held two assistantships, answering directly to two professors.  They were both good bosses, patient with me, willing to guide me, straightforward about things, and generally good-humored and philosophical.  I learned a lot from them.  Just as importantly, I felt appreciated.  They made me want to do my job correctly, not necessarily because I feared punishment, but because I wanted to do my best for them. 

Somehow, I expected that to carry over into my professional forays into academia.  When I was hired at my first teaching job, I had hopes that my department chair would be much like that.  At first, we got along very well, and she couldn't have been nicer.  I came to find out, however, that there were some pretty profound differences.  For one, although she had seen my vitae and knew I was young and inexperienced, there was precious little in the way of mentoring made available.  The mentoring I got was more in the way of "you shouldn't do that," spoken in kind of a patronizing manner.  I needed guidance, especially since I was young and, quite frankly, scared.  Some of my colleagues were of some help, but I needed feedback from the person to whom I reported, and I never really got it.

I believe there were some profound philosophical differences, too.  Part of it was because we came from different ends of "communication."  Remember, the department we had there encompassed both mass communication and interpersonal communication.  My boss came from the latter, with its emphasis on feelings and nonverbals and listening and all that.  I came from the former, with its deadlines and its lack of tolerance for carelessness.  We didn't understand each other's end of the discipline.  For all the talk we'd get about "listening," it seemed not much of it happened. 

I also came to realize that if I got into a corner, I was alone.  If a student mouthed off to me, my boss's sympathies, it seemed, were more on the side of the student than mine as instructor.  Once a sulking student who had failed one of my exams went straight to my boss's office to complain that my exam (which had come directly from the text's exam bank) was unfair, and my boss tried to lobby me into counting the incorrect answer as correct because of a perceived ambiguity.  It was bad enough that I had several students who made my life miserable, but on top of that, I had a boss who didn't support me.  I used to say that this boss was someone who, if my dog got stolen, would not only tell me that I shouldn't get upset that my dog was stolen but that I should feel bad that the person who stole my dog didn't have one to begin with. 

The longer my employment there went on, the funnier things got.  I don't want to get into too much detail, but no matter how I tried, it seemed I could never do anything properly.  I had a feeling that I wasn't going to be hired back on when my visiting line was up, and that ended up being correct.  (There were enough fishy things about that process that I could probably have had a lawsuit, had I the money to pursue it and had I not cared about potentially torching my entire teaching career.  But it wasn't worth the hassle.)  My relationship with that institution, and with my boss, ended badly; the last conversation I had with the department chair was not pleasant, but by then I had signed a contract for a new job, so I didn't have to really give a damn. 

I don't blame my demise at that particular institution completely on my boss there.  Much of it was self-inflicted.  But I also know that, had my boss been the sort of leader and mentor I needed, some of it could have been avoided.  (Speaking only from some circumstantial bits and pieces, though, I believe my professional demise there was pre-ordained not long after I was hired on.  I can't say it for certain, but there are enough funny little things that make me wonder if, once my contract was up, I would never be allowed to return.  Given how dysfunctional the place was, that was probably a good thing.)

A few months later, I was at my new job.  I had a department chair who, even if he was a bit of a cold fish personally, was very warm and generous as a colleague.  He provided encouragement where it was needed, gave me mentoring at important points, and helped me learn ways not to let the students get the best of me.  He gave me several things I'd not had at that previous job, and I looked forward to many years of working with him.  I hoped that having a laid-back supervisor like him would give me room to grow up as an educator.

Which meant, of course, that less than a year later he left.  And, like it or not, I was suddenly the senior academic in the department, having to supervise the hiring of a new faculty member.  And, of course, I failed rather spectacularly in my new duties.  I was too young and too inexperienced, and I was a little too trusting where I should have been vigilant.  To be honest, I'm surprised my career recovered from one or two of those mistakes, and I'm afraid that I inflicted permanent damage on a couple of professional relationships in the process.  It wasn't my proudest hour, and I'm still ashamed about some things that happened way back when.

Eventually things settled to where they are now, where I'm sort of an assistant manager within a larger department.  I'm sort of a "department chair without portfolio," which is nice; the actual department chair is across campus, and he gets the managerial headaches for our academic division.  But most of the routine stuff within our discipline can be handled in-house.  My teaching colleague is an experienced teacher with sound judgment who is easy to work with.  I mentor him as needed, using the lessons I learned the hard way as examples, but he doesn't really need that much. 

I don't really aspire to leadership.  I'm too much of a technician, or an independent contractor, to really get enjoyment out of having to lead a group of people.  I like being my own person, doing my own thing, and being spared the reports and extra meetings and all the other things chairs have to do.  But, should it happen someday (which, oh, I hope not), I've learned a lot about what to do -- and what not to do.  I can't help thinking how different my career would have been had my boss's attitude about me been different about a decade ago.  On the other hand, would I be where I am now?  That's the funny part of it: had it not happened the way it did, I wouldn't have the psychic scars I still bear, but I probably wouldn't be where I am now.  Go figure.

Thith way to thpeeth clath

When you start out at any job, you're often stuck with the housekeeping type tasks: you man the brooms, or lug boxes, or do the little thankless chores that, though they're not desirable, still keep the enterprise functioning.  After a while, if you're good (and a little lucky), you get to do bigger and better things.  Or, at least, that was my understanding.

If there's a college teaching equivalent to that kind of grunt work, I'd say it would be one of two things: a freshman composition class, or the Introduction to Public Speaking course.  Why?  For one, they're required in the curriculum, and because of that mandatory participation, the students aren't exactly enthusiastic.  In addition, they require students to deal with the composition and delivery of messages in reasonably correct language.  That's been enough of a challenge for years, but we all know what's happening to our language and its use, right?

I didn't really know any of this the morning I entered a college classroom for the first time with 20 students on one side of the room, and me, a young, very raw Ph.D. candidate, on the other.  I knew this much: it was my first big-time job, I was making more money than I ever thought possible, and I was there to teach them Fundamentals of Speech.  See, ours was a "communication" department -- no "S" -- so we taught courses in interpersonal communication as well as mass communications.  (This will come into play a bit in tomorrow's post.)  As part of my duties, I was to teach a section of Speech along with my two mass communications classes. 

I quickly came to realize that teaching Speech is one of those classes that's important, but when you teach it, you become acquainted with the word "despair."  Because it's mandatory, and because you go over a lot of material that the students think they already know because they've been communicating all their lives, they don't feel compelled to listen.  Plus, they were mostly freshmen and sophomores, and weren't taking it seriously.  I was young and nervous, and I was easy prey.  It took several years before I developed the skills and thick skin you need to stay in charge in front of a classroom.  (You can take all the courses in education you like, but nothing can prepare you for what it's really like to be in front of a classroom, having to keep things moving forward and maintaining order at the same time.)  My age didn't help things, either; at the time, I wasn't much older than they were.  I was still "older sister" old, and that didn't help me in my attempts to keep control of the classroom.

I had three types of students I dealt with there.  The first were the garden-variety slacker goofballs, to whom college was a prolonged adolescence away from parental supervision.  There were the rich kids who felt they didn't have to answer to anyone and whose favorite tactics were snotty remarks or sullen pouts.  Then there were the good students, the ones who knew why they were there, the ones who tried the best they could.  Several of these students held jobs after school to help pay their tuition.  I enjoyed these students.  The other two types drove me crazy.  I know how to handle these types now, and it's no big deal when it happens.  Back then, I didn't.

The other challenge (fun how "challenge" is a happy-face word for "problem," no?) was the nature of the course.  Anyone who's taken a Speech class will likely recognize the components: classroom work with quizzes and exams, along with delivering speeches before the class.  These speeches were an informative speech, a persuasive speech, and a "how-to" speech.  None were to be longer than about six minutes.  (I ran a clock on them and would give them a "wind it up" signal.)  At various points, visual aids were to be used. 

And, topics had to be approved in advance by me.  Veterans of Speech classes will know that students will often want to give speeches on certain hot-button political topics.  Not only did I not want my class to become a political forum (I wanted them to think "little picture" and explore new terrain), but those of us who taught Speech were given a list of guidelines.  In those guidelines, we were explicitly told that, out of respect for the College's mission as an institution of a specific religious system, not to approve topics dealing with abortion.  I told my students this, framing it as a plea for respect for the college's roots, and hoping that taking that out of play would help them find an alternate topic.  (Instead, it resulted in two freshmen complaining to the dean that I was "taking away their freedom of speech," which resulted in my boss being called on the carpet, which resulted in my having to get an earful from my boss about it, all because of a set of instructions she had given me to begin with.  Some days, I couldn't win for losing.)

Even without the hot-button issues in play, there were plenty of misfires.  (If this was a blooper reel, this would be where the whimsical bongo-and-slide-whistle music would begin.)  For example, the student giving a purportedly anti-drug informational speech that ended up being a thinly-veiled speech about the benefits of Ecstasy.  The student giving a speech about teen suicide, who for some reason believed a few minutes of a videotape of Romeo + Juliet was an effective visual aid.   (There were times I wished videotapes had never been invented.)  Then there were the conspiracy speeches: that the Moon landings were faked, that Marilyn Monroe was offed by the Kennedys, all backed by half-baked evidence.  I didn't agree with them, but I let the speeches go; still, I would retreat to my office afterward, feeling angry, deflated and defeated. 

But somehow I did it for two semesters.  During my second semester, I taught two sections of it; my second mass-media course didn't meet minimum enrollment, and I hoped that picking up another Speech section would demonstrate my willingness to serve and help my chances of staying on.  (It didn't.) 

I shouldn't make it sound like every speech, and every student, from those days made my life awful.  There were some speeches that really stood out, and a handful of students shared some very deep personal stories up at the podium.  There were students who really tried, and I was happy to have them.  I could even find nice things to say about some of the ones who gave me headaches.  They weren't bad kids.  And, in a way, I'm to blame for some of what happened: I was young, raw, inexperienced, a bit careless, more than a little scared. 

Could I still teach Speech today?  Absolutely, and I'd be a lot better now than I was then.  Several years and several hundred students have taught me a lot.  On the other hand, when I interviewed for the job I now have, one of the first questions I asked was if I'd have to teach Speech.  When I was told "no, another department handles that," I couldn't have been happier.  I could still teach it, but I don't miss doing it, that's for sure.

Occupational Hazards Week!

That's right.  This week, I'll be sharing (redacted) stories about various and sundry madcap goings-on that have brought varying degrees of injury to my professional life.  None of them, thankfully, have (yet) been career-ending, but they're memorable nonetheless.  Think of this week's posts as "Shark Week" set in a workplace.

The series begins tomorrow with my stories of one of the most thankless jobs in college teaching.

America

A few days ago I posted a couple brief items about the great SS United States, the big, fast passenger liner that's now in Philadelphia facing a cloudy future (okay, so the ship's been facing a cloudy future for more than four decades).  One of our devoted readers made mention of SS America in a comment the other day, and it brought a smile to my face.  Ah, the wonderful America!  What a life, worthy of a big ol' book someday.

The lovely America, which first sailed in 1940, was to be symbolic of a reborn American merchant marine.  As it happened, she was launched the day before World War II began, and though she would spend a brief period before the war as a passenger vessel she was soon requisitioned for naval service.  As the troopship USS West Point, she served with distinction in the Atlantic and Pacific theatres, got shot at many times, dodged bombs, and carried a total of more than 350,000 troops.  Returned to service as America in 1946, she plied the Atlantic and served as flagship of United States Lines until the big new United States came along six years later. 

In some ways America looked like a small-scale United States, and both ships were unmistakably the creations of William Francis Gibbs.  (Look at this picture and notice the similarities.  Perspective makes America look the same size as the Big U, but America was a considerably smaller ship.)  But they were also vastly different.  America was much smaller and slower, so the two ships could never really serve as true running mates on the trans-Atlantic run.  United States Lines tried to sell these differences as positive factors -- United States as "just a long weekend to Europe," while America provided "extra hours at sea" -- but the lack of compatible running mates hurt both ships in the long run.  Still, America had a devoted following, and even after United States made her debut, there were some who preferred the smaller ship, which had decor a little warmer and more traditional than the cool, sleek United States.

America was retired in 1964 because of a number of factors: the downturn in passenger liner travel with the advent of jetliners, labor problems, economics, and the end of the ship's 20-year "lifespan" in operating subsidy rules.  But she had lots of life left in her, and was sold to Chandris to become Australis, operating from Europe to Australia and New Zealand.  While there are many websites memorializing the ship's years as America, there's also a number of sites devoted to the ship's years as Australis, full of vivid memories of travels aboard her in those days. (Google is your friend; there are so many of these sites.)

The old ship started to run out of luck in 1977.  There was an ill-fated attempt to return her to service as a cruise ship named America, a brief stint as a cruise ship in the Mediterranean (sans dummy forward funnel), and then various plans to employ her as a prison ship or for other purposes.  For a decade she awaited whatever future was to come.  It seemed the scrapyard was the only answer, and various rumors circulated about her deteriorating condition. 

Then in the early 1990s, there came word the old ship was going to be restored and preserved as a Queen Mary-style hotel in Thailand.  There were pictures of her in drydock, looking sturdy as ever.  I remember this period when it seemed the impossible was going to happen, that the old Atlantic teammates were about to get new leases on life.  Of course, that's when it all went wrong.  During the tow to Thailand, the old ship got caught in a storm and ended up beached in the Canary Islands.  Within two days, she'd broken in half.  For years her forward section remained upright, being pounded by the surf and providing a haunting image for photographers, until it too succumbed. 

Now, she's all gone.  But we can remember her in happier times, as in this little film.  And this website is a neat memorial to the ship in all her roles, as is this one. 

:: Arrr, me hearties  It's only coincidence (really) that I'd be talking about ships this week.  For tomorrow be Talk Like a Pirate Day, me lads.

Paging Don Draper

Forwarded from a friend for today's journey through the transmundane is a link to this collection of ads that, on later review, don't seem to work so well.  You can chase it with this collection of World War II propaganda, and this collection of stuff to help you avoid the Red Menace.  Hours of fun are sure to ensue.