Ever have a truly great professor?

Yes, she was 38, an English professor and a political activist.

I was 24 and a bartender.

It was a great summer.

 

Great one in JUCO who taught American Lit, was straightforward and a bit of a Southern dandy due to his Oxford roots. Some would say snobbery. I threw back whatever he dished out and we got along well.

When I took a course several years later to shore up a deficit, his was the only one I signed up for. He walked into class the first day, began calling roll and got to my name.

"Mr. Sixtoe, good to see you again."

"Likewise, p'fessor."

I was the oldest in the class and he bestowed upon me some kind of worldly "see, this guy has been around" aura. Silly, but again we had a good time discussing literature and other things. He made it fun, treated people like adults (or children, if they were assholes) and you wanted to do well.


Likewise, at university I had a journalism professor who did much of the same. Straightforward, didn't hold back, could be firm but compassionate if necessary and loved to debate things to help us think. Use your brains, he would say, instead of following the pack and getting the same. Branch out and find other things, look for the unique, veer off course in a story to find the guts of it.

He would not shy away from railing on university officials and policies. We discussed campus life, politics, religion and other issues some professors would not get near. This guy wanted us to think and keep our eyes open.


The rest were good and I got along with all my professors, with the exception of one foreign language teacher who was an absolute hateful bitch. I stayed in the course partly to make her life as much fucking hell in there as possible. She handed out the final exam, I signed my name and walked out. Waste of money but the look on her face was priceless. Her brother also taught foreign language and was very cool, though. I made a B+ in his course.

 

Sounds like a movie.

 

Didn't last long enough. More like a summer replacement show.

 

It was a John Irving novel right?

As for professors, yes I had some memorable professors in college (5 years) and law school (3). Looking back, I think for me personally the ones I think were great are a reflection of the classes where I took the class seriously and really tried in the class. Others, even if the prof was great, I do not think I would have gotten that much out of them because I slacked off. I mean this as a self-criticism, not of my professors.

Like took Sports Law (big surprise right?) and I was really into the class, learning and discussing the Curt Flood case, Rick Barry case, baseball arbitration cases. That was a blast.

Loved Constitutional Law, the very foundation of our country.

College, really enjoyed my ethnic studies classes, and they were helped by my professors really feeling committed about them and demanding respect for the class and class time.

Were they all great? Probably not but I believe that I would have thought more were great if I put in the effort.

To all my professors, thank you because you gave me one of the greatest gifts, an education. (Thanks for the topic.)

 

The guy at my Juco was the best. He had workd at the Seattle Times and PI and had written a few books about the aerospace industry here and was a great teacher. He taught me stuff that I used when I was a journalist and was the only prof that I felt I had a personal relationship with.

 

Two words: Conrad. Fink.

Others can tell the stories if they wish; maybe I'll come back later and share a few.

 

I'll agree with that, even though I never had Fink as a professor, advisor or anything else. I've spent exactly 15 minutes in the man's presence.

But he gave me the time of day when I needed it -- once, and once only -- and I'm better because of it.

 

First semester freshman year, I took an honors English class, and lucked into a professor who was the best thing ever to happen to me educationally.

He was a skinny, quietly charismatic, slightly stooped 70-something, a small-town country guy, tweed jacket, big gray beard and an ever-present (yet never-lit) pipe. He absolutely loved the language, just reveled in words. He just wanted us to write an essay a week, sometimes with direction as to the subject but usually not. When you got them back you felt like he'd really read them, thought about them. It was the first time I felt like an adult gave a shit what was in my brain -- not the knowledge but the creative and personal stuff.

I took a class from him every semester, whatever he was teaching. If there's one thing I'll never forget, it was when I had a Tuesday-Thursday class. On Tuesday he challenged us to think of the most boring subject we could agree on, and he would write a 5,000-word essay for Thursday's class. We picked Cheerios. Two days later, he read us a fascinating paper on Cheerios, his observations on how they floated and grouped, the unusual words on the box -- 5,000 interesting words on eating a bowl of Cheerios.

Even though my major was a science, I ended up with a second degree in English, almost entirely because I loved the guy's classes. And while I never took a single journalism class, the way I learned to look at observation and description and language through him are a huge part of how I've approached my career.

I also learned one other thing that served me well throughout college: Take 8 a.m. classes. Why? Because the kind of professors who teach 8 a.m. classes give a shit, and are the kind of profs you want.

 

I had a professor that I had a friend recommend to me. He taught history of the Civil War. You didn't miss a day of his class because the entire semester was like having a novel read to you. He knew every fact, every detail, every story without having PowerPoints, notes or outlines that he read to us. Amazing professor. (Horrendous tests. 12-page written exams.)

Probably the day I will always remember from that class was the day he went, into detail on how they amputated limbs back in the 1860s. I was queasy and disgusted, yet completely captivated at the same time.

Plus, he had gone to a bunch of the actual battle sites and other stuff (like the place where Robert E. Lee died) and showed us pictures of everything.

 

Yup, my mentor for this biz was a Pulitzer winner. Brilliant man. Told me not to worry if I made C's in journalism school. Just bust ass, get tons of experience and learn in the newsroom, he always said. And always read.

 

I'd love to read that Cheerios essay, AB. That actually sounds really interesting.