David Michael Burrow
University of Southern Mississippi (Part 3)
Homework was the biggest problem. We had from five to thirty problems due each Thursday, each worth about ten points. Doing them was both annoying and almost fun (in a challenging sort of way). If I were someone who budgeted my time better, I would have done a problem or two each day, and never had too much to worry about at a time. Being the procrastinator I am, I did virtually everything on Monday and Tuesday--hurriedly finishing up the most difficult problems on Wednesday night. That did seem to work for me, though; I ended up with 95% on my homework, and (largely due to the professor's generous partial credit on tests) I got 98% overall. That's the grade I'm proudest of--even though there's almost nothing in that class that has much to do with anything I teach.
The best thing about Number Theory was the professor, Dr. Gary Walls. He was casual, but also strictly business. ... He also challenged us to the limit, but he always made it seem possible for us to get things. Walls is well-known in mathematics research. (I looked up some of his articles on abstract algebra later, although they're way beyond anything I've ever studied.) It's to his credit that he is also an excellent teacher.
My other math professor [whose name I probably should not mention on-line] was not nearly so gifted a teacher. Several of us took to referring to him as "Dr. Sominex"--a reference to his "thrilling" delivery. Every Tuesday and Thursday from 10-12 (in the same room as the Number Theory class), he just rambled along in a monotone, basically just reading the book aloud. I probably would have enjoyed the course (Math for Inservice Secondary Teachers ...) if I had taken it independent study. It covered a number of interesting topics that could be used to enrich my own classes. The material was interesting, but in lecture format the course as a whole was dull beyond belief.
It was interesting that "Dr. Sominex" was extremely paranoid about how we would evaluate him. My bet is that some of his previous students had given him painfully honest evaluations .. and that his tenure or a promotion may hinge on it. I do know that he had been on the staff at USM since 1959, and he's still just an associate professor. In the end the summer passed without us having any opportunity to evaluate him. ...
High School Curriculum is the other yawn-and-snore class--this time due to both the material and the professor. Those of us who teach in Iowa have dealt with curriculum in our inservice sessions for years now; this course really didn't present much that went beyond that. It was taught by ... one of those people who thinks her name is "Dr."--if you know what I mean. A woman sitting next to me described her as "the walking bibliography". Everything that came out of her mouth was attributed to someone she felt was an authority. In one session, for instance, we learned that one "expert" said there were seven advantages to being involved in student activities, while another person had a list of eight such advantages, and yet another saw only three advantages. ... Basically all three were saying the same thing, of course, but we had to suffer through everyone's most recent article. While this class was probably the easiest, it was also my least favorite.
Curriculum was a night class, as was Foundations of American Education. The "Foundations" title is misleading, though. Really that class was a seminar on current issues in education. It was interesting, but not terribly useful. Almost everything was geared to big urban schools with mostly minority students. It was hard to relate a lot of that to Garrigan.
The professor ... almost never taught anything herself. Instead she had different members of the class present various topics to the class. That appears to be a very popular method these days, but I can't say I care much for it myself. It was almost impossible to tell what the professor felt was important and what she found irrelevant. Our final test included a lot of topics that the presenters had just brushed over quickly--ones that she apparently found vital.
To my way of thinking, the best thing about the education classes was the research papers I wrote for them. I wrote one about parental loss (based both on my own experience and my dealings with my friend and student, James), another on equal opportunity and individual differences, and yet another on education for the gifted. ... Finally, I wrote an encyclopedic treatise (it was basically graded by length) on how to incorporate writing into the mathematics curriculum. ...
One problem with writing these papers is the format the require at USM. Everyone here swears by the APA (American Psychological Association) method of documentation, which has to be designed so people can say their work has been cited. It features parenthetical notes with the author's initial, last name, and date of publication. (Everything I learned from the MLA format--like the pages, for instance--is irrelevant.) It also forces you to document absolutely everything, almost like a junior high research paper. According to the APA, it's wrong for a paper to include original thought. That's almost a direct quote from their style manual (W.G. Campbell, S.V. Ballou, & C. Slade, 1990), and the concept really bothered me. I have an aversion to plagiarism, even when it is properly documented. I was always taught that the point of a paper is creative analysis; it shouldn't be just a re-hash of what others have already said. I debated with myself for a long time, but in the end I decided to write things pretty much the same way I always have--a more formal style than this diary, but with the emphasis on original content. Fortunately, the professors seemed to like my work.
The fact that articles in educational psychology journals are also written in APA style led me to a rather amusing problem. At one point I needed to figure out how to cite an author who had cited himself in his article. The problem didn't appear anywhere in my $20 style manual (which I had practically read from cover to cover), although it has to come up frequently, as educators seem to be forever citing themselves. After all, otherwise they might have to publish original thoughts--and we can't have any of that now, can we?
There is one last class I must mention. It was entitled simply "Research", and it met on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 11:00am. We didn't actually do any research in the class. Instead we learned a lot about the research method, plus some terminology and statistics that are necessary to reading and understanding the research that others have done. Dull as that may sound, it was probably my favorite class. Dr. Charles Davidson was a wise-cracking good old boy who could "cut through the crap" (he'd probably say it that way himself) and make the most involved topics seem simple. He obviously loves his subject, and his enthusiasm really inspired the class. It also helped that my two best friends were in that class with me.
Friends
--Which is a wonderful place to force a transition. I had more fun this summer than I've had at any time since the last time I was in college. The biggest reason for that is probably that I made some good friends that I could enjoy just goofing around with--something I've never really had in Algona.
My two best friends by far were Roy, a good old boy from rural Arkansas (who now teaches math and sex education at a Department of Defense junior high in Germany) and Sandra, a professional artist who now teaches gifted kids in Homosassa Springs, Florida. The three of us met by default while trying to do a project, but we ended up becoming "The Three Musketeers". I was also very close friends with each of them individually. We have in common that we are all quite serious on the surface, yet very fun-loving ... underneath. We went out to plays, movies, restaurants, bars ..., the beach, and all over New Orleans. We also ate together, studied together, and seemed to spend most of our free time together. I became wonderful friends with both of them.
Our group spanned the age range. At 28, I was definitely the baby of the group. (In fact, I was one of the youngest people in the S.P.G.E.) Roy was 34, but Sandra could easily have been my mother--and could have been Roy's too, if she'd led a wicked childhood. ...
Sandra has led what might be called a soap opera life. She reminded me a lot of my mother's penpal in Australia who was forever writing unbelievable stories--all of them true. Sandra grew up as a minister's child in Indiana (the same "small town" that rock singer John Cougar Mellencamp came from), and scandalized her family by becoming a cocktail waitress in Honolulu. For years she lived in San Francisco, supporting herself by doing paintings of the Golden Gate Bridge for tourists and what she called "real" art on the side. Her marriage to an English professor ended in a messy divorce, where her husband took off for Canada with the kids. She later had a happy, but tragic, marriage to an alcoholic. ... She has children ranging from my age to a college sophomore. The youngest, Tony, came to Mississippi for a visit. We took him to New Orleans and both he and we had a wonderful time.
Roy was also an interesting character. For the first twenty years of his life he had never been more than an hour's drive from his home in a little Ozarks backwater (his description) near Fayetteville. He partied his way to a 0.5 GPA in his freshman year at college, but then proceeded to build it back up to over a 3.00 before he graduated--quite a feat .... After college he taught at an alternative school in Dallas before working for the Department of Defense. He is shy and single, and describes the kids he teaches as his family--which sounded pretty familiar to me.
I made some other friends, too. Among them Tom and Gary were science teachers from Jacksonville, Florida. I was amazed at the sort of schedules you get in big-city schools. For almost twenty years now Gary has spent his entire day teaching only Marine Biology, while Tom teaches nothing but advanced placement physics. Bobbie and Connie (both male) taught at a tiny little town in what they called the "red-neck woods" of northern Alabama. Connie was the entire science department, and Bobbie taught K-12 P.E. and was the head coach in almost every sport. Angie was a good friend of Sandra's who was originally from Iowa City and now teaches ... in the Mariana Islands of the mid-Pacific. ... Linda was a principal at a Catholic elementary school in Lake Charles, Louisiana. It intrigued me that she was a divorced lay person. It intrigued her that Iowa should have so many Catholic schools (her entire diocese has only one high school, and they are thinking of closing that) and that our tuition should be comparatively low. ...
Over the course of the summer I got to know lots of other people who came from literally all over the place. It surprised me that there were actually very few people in the summer institute from Mississippi. ... The number one state was Florida, followed by Alaska .... Several of the Alaskans actually drove all the way down; I don't know when I've seen so many Alaska license plates as I did in Hattiesburg. Louisiana, Arkansas, and North Carolina also had major delegations. There was also a bunch of Canadians here ..., who invited the rest of us to a big Canada Day celebration on July 1st. ... I also got to know people from such diverse places as the Virgin Islands and Lebanon.
There were only eight Iowans in the SPGE, plus a number of former residents of the state. As far as I could tell I was the only one (Iowan, that is) from west of I-35 or north of highway 30. ... I did meet one annoyingly happy couple (who always dressed in matching outfits) who used to live in nearby Fairmont, Minnesota, but have since moved to Arkansas. They couldnt understand how I "could stand to live in a place like Iowa". I felt like telling them that if they disliked the Midwest so much, we're better off to have them in Arkansas, but of course I was too polite for that.
* * * * *
Talking with all these people from around the country, it was fascinating to find out just how screwed up education is in various places. All over the South "accountability" is the watch-word. They live by tests, and teaching to the tests is expected. Throughout the South the states set the curriculum that every school must follow, and in many places they even prescribe the methods for teaching it. I would hate to be bound to something like that. I like having the flexibility to change when things dont turn out as planned.
Nothing made me happier to be teaching in Iowa, though, than hearing about the MITAI (the Mississippi Instrument for Teacher Advancement and Improvement), which every teacher in the state must pass annually. It involves passing a test in educational methodology and/or hundreds of hours (literally) or inservice, proving achievement among their students to the satisfaction of their supervisors, and being ovserved and found competent by an official from the state education office. Failing any one of those three areas will de-certify a teacher for life. In reality, nobody ever loses certification, but you can imagine what could happen if there were some personality conflicts with the administrators. Almost everyone from Mississippi I spoke of thought the MITAI name was appropriate; they said going through it made you want to drink a mai-tai.
I was also shocked at how few rights teachers seem to have in the South. In several of my classes we discussed what teachers can and can't get away with in the classroom and what they should and shouldn't do. Most of the Southerners take it for granted that teachers essentially should never express their own opinionespecially if those opinions might be in any way construed as controversial. They carry it as far as to say that a teacher should not give public support to a political candidate. ... Everyone in Dixie seemed to be paranoid about being sued or being fired. Most schools reserved the right to terminate people for no good reason, and I was truly astounded that almost no one seemed to think that was wrong.
For all they put up with, Southern teachers are paid next to nothing. The base salaries are fairly high, but salary schedules as we know them are basically non-existent. Whats more the concept of percentages for activities is almost unheard of in the South. Lots of people coach or direct activities out of the goodness of their hearts; others get flat rate payments, usually no more than a few hundred dollars. My friend Bobbie from Alabama is a head football and head basketball coach with fifteen years of teaching experience, yet he earns less than I do. Costs are less in the South, but that's still pretty sad.
* * * * *
A Typical School Day
Compared to the school year, I slept fairly late most days. On Tuesdays and Thursdays ... I would get up shortly before seven. Other days I would sleep until eight (or sometimes even nine), since I didn't have to get to class until 11:00. I would usually put on a pot of coffee in my room (which was a major undertaking in a room with no water), and I took a leisurely shower while it perked. I passed on the food-service breakfast, which was about as disgusting as most of the other Southern breakfasts I encountered. If I had eaten their re-fried grease every morning, I would have put on fifty pounds over the course of the summer.
I usually watched a bit of TV on the little portable set I brought down while I finished up any last-minute preparations for class. Then I got everything together and left my room.
I would go to class and then have lunch ... in the Commons, a big central cafeteria that served the entire campus. The food was relatively varied, and usually quite good. Their choices were heavy on regional cuisine (red beans with blood sausage, crawfish jambalaya, and stewed turnip greens, for example), but there was also a lot of pasta (which was invariably excellent) and Mexican food. If all else failed, they had a deli bar where I could always pick up a ham and cheese sandwich and a bowl of chili. I could also fill up on dessert. They had assorted ice cream novelties, and about twice a week they made hot cobblers that were out of this world. ... It costs $3.50 per meal, with a minimal discount for having a semester-long pass. Considering that a fast food meal can easily approach five dollars these days, that's pretty reasonable.
After lunch I would usually check on my mail. All mail at USM goes to the "Hub", an official post office (with its own private zip code) wholly operated by the university. It is also known as "Southern Station", since "Southern" (pronounced in drawl approximately like "sun") is the most common colloquial name of the college. The Hub consists of a maze of hallways that house over ten thousand lockboxes. Mine was Box 5677. After working the combination I would peer in, most often finding nothing. I did get some mail, though. ... Among other things, I got a series of cards from my brother Paul and sister Margaret who were going to summer school in Madrid. Most of these were shots of the Minneapolis skyline they had picked up at the airport before leaving and had mailed at various stop-overs. One of them had gone through a cancellation machine so many times that everything was obliterated but my name and the zip code. Somehow it got delivered anyhow.
Aside from that, about all I got was junk mail for the woman who had rented the box before me. Much of it was truly bizarre. She regularly received catalogs that would make Frederick's of Hollywood seem tame. They featured the sort of sexual aids that Dan Fielding on "Night Court" would know about, but that were in another world for me. (I won't lie, though; I did, of course, glance through them before throwing them out.) I kept trying to imagine what sort of woman "Constance Thayer" must have been. Somehow her name just didn't fit the kind of mail she got, and Mississippi is such a conservative state (the local TV station moved "Saturday Night Live" to 2:00am because of complaints that at 11:00pm it was corrupting the morals of the young) that it was hard to picture these catalogs being addressed to anyone down there.
Almost every afternoon I would take walks to various places around Hattiesburg. Most local people thought I was insane to do this; Southerners rarely leave air conditioning during the heat of the dayif ever. The heat got to me at first, but I soon learned how to deal with it. I always wore a T-shirt together with a regular shirt. The layers may sound hot, but the T-shirt absorbed sweat and actually made things more comfortable. I also learned quickly to carry a washcloth or rag with me everywhere I went. This is mandatory in the South; you use it to mop your face about every minute. Old-time Southern gentlemen would carry elegant handkerchiefs for the same purpose, but I found a terry washcloth was more absorbent. Finally, I never went outside without a baseball cap. This did two things. It kept my face (and the bald spot on top of my head) from being instantly sunburned. More importantly, it absorbed sweat, keeping it from running all over my glasses.
Once I was properly prepared, I rather enjoyed my walks. I would walk anywhere from one to six miles at a time, seeing various sights around town. Several times I went to the local zoo, which was neglected and in disrepair, but was interesting nonetheless. Other times I would walk the twenty-five blocks down Hardy Street from the college to downtown and back, observing the many different neighborhoods I passed through en route. On other occasions I would walk to either of the two nearby malls or to the enormous Wal-Mart store on the outskirts of town. Sometimes, too, I would just start out with no particular destination and end up wandering through the neighborhoods near the college.
CONTINUED IN PART FOUR
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