Teachers Have More Impact than they Know

Since I announced my retirement, I have heard from people, particularly former students, who I haven't had contact with for years.  It has caused me to think more generally about the impact teachers have on their students' lives.

Some things I'm thinking about:

1. Years ago, when I was a development officer for the USD Foundation, we had a prominent alum retire.  I won't name him, but he was the chief financial officer for a major corporation that you would all realize. In reflecting on his retirement for the USD alumni newsletter, he named a business faculty member who he said had a profound impact on his career. When the teacher was asked, he didn't recall his former student at all, i.e. the guy hadn't been much of a standout in class, but he had been influenced anyway.

2. I am also reminded of a movie few people will remember from 1980 called The Competition.  In it,  a character played by Lee Remick lists her pedigree as a piano teacher:

"Ludwig Von Beethoven taught Carl Czerny, who taught Leschetizky, who taught Schnabel, who taught Renaldi, who taught me."

What I taught was the product of things that my previous teachers taught to me, as well as meaning I made on my own.  Some of what I learned on my own was after I started teaching, so I could better explain things to students. And there are things nobody could have taught me years ago, because they were brand new. Some of what my own teachers taught me was what their teachers had taught them, and their own teachers before them.  

In the last couple of weeks, since I announced my retirement, I have heard from hundreds of people, many of them former students, many of them saying remarkably nice things.  Some are crystal clear in my memory from their time as students and some are more of a "what class were they in?" kind of memory. I see some often on Facebook, and some I haven't hardly heard from since they graduated.  

It leaves me pondering what people really learned from me, what they have taken farther based on the foundation I helped them develop, and how they are using this ability and knowledge today.  How are they, formally or informally, teaching others? Do they even remember which ideas and skills they first came to understand in my courses, but that they are using today?

Teachers don't pour knowledge into people's heard.  They create environments in which students can connect the dots and create new knowledge for themselves.

Often teachers don't know the true impact we have had on our students.

All Good Things 2: Accomplishments

On the occasion of my retirement, I have been thinking back over the past 16 years.

I have been the radio station advisor and Radio Workshop teacher for almost a third of the lifetime of KWSC-FM, which begins its 50th year this fall. When I inherited the station, it had a transmitter that was past its design lifetime, aging studio equipment, no AP service, bootlegged software on its production computers, and a programming automation system that somehow kept playing outdated things we tried time after time to remove. The station was also facing a $10,000 fine for FCC violations, committed before my time.  One of the main things I was charged with when hired was to "get things under control."

Today, the station has a new tower and transmitter site, audio consoles with years left in their lifetimes, a constantly updated production music library, a constantly updated on-air music service, and an automation system that works effectively (except for occasional glitch caused by human learning curves). We have recently-purchased BluTooth sports remote equipment, recently-purchased standardized studio microphones, and we are using a podcasting platform that I researched and brought to the table. My partner in all of these technology updates was our engineer, Tom Schmitz.

I have also been a leader for many curriculum updates.  What we now call "Electronic Media" was "Broadcasting' but the industry had moved beyond that "silo."  Collaborating with Maureen Carrigg and Max McElwain, we updated the name of the major and began the ongoing process of converging the student media to make them multi-platform, as the industry expects.  I also like to think that I helped find critical resources and the curriculum structure for the very popular digital film coursework of the "Hot Attic Film School", which is probably leading Mass Communication to a record enrollment, possibly as soon as this fall.

I have had multiple service roles at the school, including serving on the vital Academic Policies committee, the Institutional Review Board, chairing multiple hiring committees (they were all good hires), and some years ago chairing the Technology for Learning and Teaching (TLTC) committee as we revitalized it.  I also served on the WSC Centennial Committee.

There was a time recently, due to unexpected faculty changes, in which I was the ONLY full-time faculty member in mass communication. I do believe that I was an important part of holding things together during that challenging time.

For the record, there are things at WSC that only I know how to do, particularly involving the radio station, and I say that literally.  In anticipation of having Emeritus status, I am fully intending to assist and mentor whoever comes next teaching the classes that have been mine and in operating KWSC-FM.

Pandemic Pursuits

I haven't blogged for a while, because a lot has been going on. My school suspended face-to-face classes in March and required all teachers to pivot to distance learning, with little more than a week's notice, which made for a busy time.  Now the school year is over and I am transitioning to summer mode, a time in which I mostly stay home anyway and work on academic writing and other home projects.

One of my fun activities has been home-mare sourdough bread.  I haven't baked much for some time (and really surprised my wife when I started).  And, of course, yeast is almost impossible to find in the stores, so like many people I have established my own sourdough started.  It turns out to not be hard at all, and the resulting bread tastes much better than commercial bread from the stores.

In scholarly writing, colleagues and I have a manuscript we are about to submit that has to do with the experiences of college teachers in the pandemic transition.

And I am constantly amazed by the politicization of the pandemic.  We truly do live in "the dumbest timeline."