teaching in excellence award | oakland university 2012
No one could have been more
surprised to win the Excellence in Teaching Award as I, given the arduous path
that led to my doctorate degree at age 50. More than ever, I am humbled to know
that my students and colleagues could esteem me by nomination alone, to say
nothing of the Committee who selected me for the award.
While I am mindful of the rewards of my
particular profession with every class I teach, or every encounter with a
student, whether seeing them on campus, or meeting to discuss an issue, the
Excellence in Teaching Award is a proud and humbling achievement. I have
reflected deeply on the journey that brought me to this destination.
I think that the greatest asset I possess as a teacher is
a love of learning inspired by my father and mother as a child, and sustained by
their constant encouragement throughout my life. My father was an immigrant from
a poor village in Bucovina, Romania, who did not have a formal education. Rather
he received his education from the School of Life, as he often remarked. He
remains the most intelligent, creative, accomplished and humble man I have ever
had the honor to know. My mother was the child of immigrants who loved attending
school, but often expressed the frustration of not being able to turn to her
parents for help with homework. Yet between the two of them, they offered
constant reinforcement, stressing always the importance of learning, not just
from books, but from life experience as well. I realize at every turn how right
they were when they would tell us “Learn how to do this, because you never know
what life will bring.”
Life intervened in ways I simply did not anticipate, but
I quickly found my parents’ lessons and encouragement all the preparation I
would need. That, and a bag of tools, and my accordion.
I completed my undergraduate
education at Oakland at a time when single mothers were more the exception than
the rule.
I found work assembling parts for GM in my garage so I
could keep my sons close, take care of the house (using my bag of tools), take
classes, and study. Then I became a self-employed cook, and later, an adjunct
faculty at Wayne State, and the College for Creative Studies, to name a few. I
quickly cultivated the art of solving problems by honing my critical thinking
skills, and this became my bedrock for what I would do later, as a professor. I
would put the emphasis on making knowledge valuable for enhancing critical
thinking skills. One of the greatest obstacles I continuously face as an
instructor is the perceived attitude by students that what they are learning is
useless. As someone who engaged in many years of study, while dealing with a
wide range of problems, from the irritating to the tragic, I can sympathize to a
degree. I have been at the receiving end of teachers who, though well
intentioned, simply teach a student what
to think about a particular subject, rather than teach them
how to think. For instance, I had an
accelerated English class in my senior year of high school and the teacher
insisted there was only one way to interpret a poem. I tried in vain to convince
her otherwise, until someone suggested I go to the library and find a legitimate
source that backed up my opinion. Years later at university, I had a professor
who rejected an essay because it contradicted her opinion. Recalling my
experience in high school, I consulted the philosophy department here, at
Oakland, to teach me how to defend my paper using the tools of logic. The
professor in question, acquiesced. That was as illuminating a moment of
discovery for me, as the day I first changed my spark plugs in order to start my
car.
Since I was a non-traditional student, I had the benefit
of living a harsh reality on the one hand, where my life demanded self-reliance,
and the challenges of meeting academic requirements that promised a better
future on the other. Throughout the whole experience of earning my graduate
degrees, I observed constantly the quality of instruction, and the attitudes of
my classmates—many of whom were typically younger. It became very clear to me
that the greatest service I could provide for future students was to find ways
of making instruction relevant, rather than rely solely on theory and opinion.
And this borrowed heavily on my natural tendencies towards interdisciplinary
techniques.
Because my parents encouraged me
to embrace my talents, I studied music and art without formal instruction. I
didn’t have to be enrolled in a formal class on painting to pick up a paint
brush and canvas. But while I did take accordion lessons (something I once saw
as an unforgivable exercise in madness, but later discovered was a valuable
means of mental and physical discipline), I undertook other instruments on my
own. Almost as if magically, I found a way to recognize critical intersections
between different skills, which translated into
interdisciplinarianism; ironically, it
was a concept I practiced intuitively before I learned the word that described
it. In other words, the key to learning is learning
how to think, instead of
what to think, drawing from an endless
resource of knowledge and information. By the time I was preparing my
dissertation, itself, an interdisciplinary project (hard won, I might add), I
had already developed a pedagogical strategy that continues to make my every
class as fresh and rewarding an experience for most of my students and me.
All instructors appreciate the
challenge of teaching General Education courses. Students seem to be consumed
with their compartmentalized majors, and see the gen eds as useless. But this is
a case in point for preparing students to enhance their fields of
specialization, not impede them. For example, Modern Literature is more than a
mere subject that involves what we think about the material, for indeed, many
students simply don’t like the literature instructors choose. Yet in framing the
material as an opportunity to explore how
we may think about the material, a world of useful intersections presents
itself. For Biology students, often far removed from the styles and genres of
Modern Literature, we can suggest the ways in which reactions to the great flu
pandemic contributed to a society’s reaction and response to an age that
included world war, advances in science, the Great Depression, the rise of
communism, and other subjects. For Engineering students, we can investigate the
role structural and innovative advances impact metaphysical conceits; there is
similar structure and metaphysics in a poem or short story. Modern Literature,
therefore, becomes a lens through which we can register critical thinking skills
as we read the individual and collective interpretations of the issues of that
period. As a result, we can explore ideas against the challenges of our own
current age. A simple gen ed course becomes a useful tool in our tool bag in
order to start our brains, and make our minds more efficient.
My father passed away a few
months before I received my doctorate, but my mother was my honored guest when I
received the Excellence in Teaching Award. In many ways, that moment eclipsed my
dissertation defense because it validated the most important aspect of the
greatest lesson my parents and a handful of teachers from grade school through
graduate school taught me; a lesson I practice in every class, with every
student: not what to think, but
how to think. When we learn
how to think, we know what do to. And this is wisdom we can possess long
before we graduate from university.