Out of My Element and Into My Alma Mater

It's been more than 30 years since I headed toward Sterling on bad roads and worried about whether I would arrive before class started.  I made it today.  The prof, though, was late.

Unlike my earlier days, today my only responsibility was to sit quietly in a corner and soak up whatever I could that might help me be a better composition teacher.  We've never done an in-service activity quite like this, but, in our debriefing afterward, everyone on staff at the high school agreed that it was a very worthwhile day.  Wesley and Norma observed at Buhler High School.

I sat through two freshman comp classes.  Dr. Watney taught one class, and Gentry Sutton taught the other.  (Do you wonder, as I did, if bowing is the appropriate greeting for a man named Gentry?)  Each class was quite unlike the other.  In both of them, I saw real professionals at work, doing a great job with a challenging task.

I learned that in second-semester Comp 1 classes, the classes are often largely made up of students who failed Comp 1 the first semester, or who were in a remedial composition class during the first semester.  I could see why Comp 1 is often a grit-your-teeth-and-do-your-share task.  Yet these men were courteous and encouraging, and used what seemed to me to be very effective teaching strategies.

One huge difference since my earlier Sterling days is the constant use of technology.  When the teacher walks into the classroom, his first task is to hook up his laptop to the classroom's system so that what is on his computer screen can be beamed onto a screen along the wall.  Instead of handing out content-filled sheets of paper, he might ask them to print out their own papers from "My Sterling" and directs them there to find instructions, source material, etc.

I learned things I didn't know about summaries in Dr. Watney's class.  He teaches in a clearly discernible British accent, acquired in his native South Africa, no doubt.  He used the phrase "author tag," which referred to the word "said," or more interesting approximations--used in referring to an author's ideas or words.  Like this:  XXXXXXXX said, in his article XXXXXXXXX, that . . . He asked students to include author, title, and author tag in the first sentence of their summary.  He required one quotation and two examples.  All the students read aloud the summaries they had written on an article about not taking sports seriously enough.  I should have asked for a copy of the article, or a link to it.

The next assignment in Dr. Watney's class is to write a response to the article.  That is a distinctly different task than a summary.  Part of the class time consisted of discussion on the main idea of the article.  I was smiling inside as I listened to students who were there on athletic scholarships (football) expressing their opinions.  It's probably a good thing they hadn't read my last blog post.  Then again, we might have had a really fun discussion if they had (more on that later).

In Mr. Sutton's class, I saw useful elaborations on the basic essay format, specifically about inserting a "Plan of Development" following the thesis statement.  Outside of class, I also learned from Mr. Sutton that he wrote a book on the use of the comma, due to be published this fall.  He also relies on ideas from the book, Everything's an Argument, as an organizing feature of the Comp 1 class.

I learned that the Suttons and the Watneys each have three sons, just as Hiromi and I do.  The "ayes" [I s]  have it in the Sutton household:  Isaac, Ian, and Ireland.

Benji, my nephew, emerged from the shadows in the student union to speak to Dr. Watney and me.  I learned then that he and Dr. Watney's son, Caleb, are good friends.  They have business classes together.

During lunch, I said hi to my friend, Linda Stubbs, who, with her husband and daughter, man the cafeteria from before breakfast through lunch.  While I was in the food line, Terry came up to talk.  Grant worked for him for several years.  He has a landscaping contract with the college and gets to eat for $3.00 a meal, and takes advantage of that opportunity.  Shout out to any local young men who want a chance at Grant's old job;  Terry is hoping to hire someone, starting early this spring.  Grant learned a lot from Terry, and could easily have started his own landscaping business with Terry's help if he had chosen to do so.  I sometimes wish he had.

Dr. Felicia Squires, the head of the English department, paid my lunch, and generally helped my time on campus go smoothly.  Her specialty is American Literature.  I think I'd like her classes, but I didn't have a chance to sit in on any of them.

Back to the academic side of Sterling.  I'm feeling a wee bit cheated that Sterling did not yet offer their Writing and Editing major when I was there.  Mr. Sutton tells me it's one of the few such majors offered in the country.  The passion for this offering grew out of what many English majors have discovered:  it's not always easy to market your skills in that field.  Mr. Sutton believes that honing the emphasis helps to address that problem.

All in all, I felt affirmed in what Pilgrim tries to teach its students.  I will also be glad to put in a good word for Sterling's Writing and Editing major to anyone who loves words and is considering how they might put that love to good use in earning a living or serving others.

******************

The article the students read in Dr. Watney's class apparently promoted the idea that sports has too often become the wrong things to people--either a vehicle for becoming insanely rich, or a ho-hum, all-in-a-day's-work kind of activity.  The author (Mark Calls?????--I didn't see the name in print) believes that sports should be fun.  He likened enjoyment of sports to the Sabbath rest instituted by God, in that sports should be rest from ordinary labor.  Making it restful (rejuvenating) should be the focus of sports.

After hearing repeatedly that the author's thesis was that people don't take sports seriously enough, and hearing also that the author thought sports should be fun, I wasn't sure at all that he had used the words I would have chosen to convey that message.  I would have said something like this:  Sports are too often pursued for the wrong reasons.  Instead of light-hearted, fun-filled play, sports have become too deadly serious.  Instead of providing an occasional respite, they are often all-consuming and exhausting.

 I would NOT have said "Sports are often not taken seriously enough."  (Granted, not having read the article, I can't be positive that I'm analyzing it accurately.)

The funny thing is that I'm not convinced that people in the class really got what the author was saying.  What I heard them say in the discussion is that football should be taken seriously in that players need to be really committed to winning.  One way to help insure that is to work out faithfully.  Another is to work as a team.  Red-shirted players shouldn't feel slighted, but should see it as an opportunity to get better at the sport.  None of this seemed to me to have much to do with light-hearted, fun-filled, rejuvenating, restful activity.  It had everything to do with taking sports seriously--just not in the way the author was apparently promoting.

I'm still not sure whether Calls(?) said anything at all about spectator sports.  So maybe I don't have to re-evaluate my opinions about watching the Super Bowl after all.  That's a relief.