Teaching Today: Frontiers or Frontlines?<\/p>\n
An Address to Faculty at the UW Colleges Colloquium<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t expect to tell you anything new about teaching because you experience it face-to-face routinely whereas the people I inform are mostly unseen, are free to come and go without my knowledge, and get bits and pieces of information instead of connecting the dots and building systematically day on top of day. From me they might learn that Grieg went to great lengths to compose in solitude and didn\u2019t have a lot of luck with doing so. From you on Tuesday they may learn that slavery was the prime cause of the Civil War and on Wednesday they\u2019ll learn how slavery was part of the greater economic disparities that led the South the fight for states\u2019 rights.<\/p>\n
And I can\u2019t address the issues that most concern you, but if I evaluate my own college education and then take you behind the scenes at Wisconsin Public Radio and the way we disseminate information, maybe I can at least divert you from those concerns for a while.<\/p>\n
From the standpoint of someone who spent eight or nine years getting two undergraduate and one graduate degree, I have some, maybe too much, experience of college as a student. [P-2] <\/strong>I often think that a lot of that time was wasted, but then the pendulum always swings back to the side of learning for its own sake or for some yet-to-be determined purpose. The fact of the matter is, I was a student in the root sense of the word, the Latin studio <\/em>meaning I am eager, <\/em>eager to learn. And to educate, of course, means to lead out, <\/em>to lead out of darkness, to enlighten.<\/em><\/p>\n But let me step back even further for a moment, to that most fundamental of processes\u2014teaching. <\/em>It\u2019s so basic that it\u2019s fundamental to all mammals. [P-3 Whales]<\/strong><\/p>\n At its most basic, I suppose, the passing of knowledge or knowhow from one generation to the next is what safeguards the survival of any species. Some of it is instinct, of course, but an individual of most species, I would think, would have a difficult time growing to maturity without the example of an experienced role model.<\/p>\n For humans, that communication, that teaching, has developed into more than just maintaining the species, it has led to progress from one generation to the next, and we do it with language. When I was a graduate assistant teaching English I was going to spend an hour getting the students to come up with a definition for language, and about five minutes into the process one of the students said, \u201clanguage is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols through which members of a community interact,\u201d or something very close to the standard definition. What we did for the rest of the hour, I don\u2019t recall, but for a while there we humans felt pretty cocky about our use of language and all the technological advances it made possible, and then about the time we got the first pictures of earth from space, we started to realize that our technology has messed it up pretty thoroughly.<\/p>\n Have you wondered why there\u2019s suddenly all this interest in going to Mars? As e.e. cummings said, \u201cListen, there\u2019s a hell of a good universe next door, let\u2019s go.\u201d<\/p>\n But if we\u2019re in a pickle, it\u2019s language that will get us out of it, language and teaching.<\/p>\n But more than just teaching. And that gets me to the question of college and what it\u2019s for.<\/p>\n In my opinion, college isn\u2019t just for passing on information. It\u2019s for teaching students how to evaluate information, to question it and test it. And even more fundamentally, college is to stimulate intellectual curiosity. Back in the \u201860s and \u201870s a student mantra as \u201cI can\u2019t relate to that.\u201d Whether it was a Shakespearian sonnet or the onset of the Reformation or the Ptolemaic concept of the cosmos, the thinking of some was that these things were not worth knowing about because they didn\u2019t have any apparent bearing on the war in Vietnam or getting a job. Whereas a student, <\/em>one eager for learning, was interested in those and many other things for their own sake and sometimes could see the big picture, the pattern that links a lot more things than we realize at first glance. The poetry of the Elizabethan poet John Donne is a prime examples of linking seemingly disparate things. In \u201cThe Good-Morrow\u201d he writes that he is the whole world to his beloved and she is the whole world to him, not only that they are the two better hemispheres who make up the whole world, but \u201cwhere can we finde two better hemispheres without sharpe North, without declining West?\u201d In an age of exploration, the lovers are like two halves of a map, but better because they lack the extremes of the real thing. [map]<\/p>\n Well, poets do that kind of thing all the time. It\u2019s their job to see the similarities between two apparently dissimilar things, to connect dots that may be very far from each other.<\/p>\n You can be sure that scientists do it too. In big ways, the ultimate being Einstein\u2019s Unified Field Theory, and attempt to tie together all known phenomena to explain the nature and behavior of all matter and energy in existence.<\/p>\n So that was one of the things I got out of my college education, and I apply it all the time, finding the connection between things.<\/p>\n I\u2019d say that college is also for broadening the student\u2019s knowledge of the world, getting to know people from other cultures, and you don\u2019t have to cast your net very far to find people with very different experiences and points of view from your own. Madison is sometimes called 77 square miles surrounded by reality, which is a stretch, but in an election year, when you drive out of Madison, you\u2019ll find that suddenly all the yard signs have changed! Those people have different experiences, different concerns, and different politics from most of the people in Madison, and if there were more intermingling in one place or another, we might be less polarized than we are today. It would be presumptuous to say that those people out there need the enlightenment that comes with a college degree or even living in a college town, but the coming together that college offers can help us all to be better informed, whether we\u2019re voting or making business decisions.<\/p>\n Extend that awareness to an international scale and apply the idea that we\u2019re all connected and, at the very least, you have some great recipes. When I was in grad school I had a roommate who had spent time in India and Pakistan, where he learned to make curries that would bring you to tears. A couple of years later, I had a Bengali roommate who had never had to cook for himself, and so I taught him how to make curries. I still make them occasionally, but with a decidedly Midwestern moderation in the spice department.<\/p>\n Is college for job training? After all, what kind of job can you get without that degree? You can answer that question better than I can, but in some fields, no doubt, it is, but it seems to me there\u2019s a purpose for that general curriculum that precedes the college major, which precedes graduate school or medical school or law school, and that\u2019s to provide the solid basis for critical, creative, informed thinking before the student becomes a doctor or an attorney or a composer.<\/p>\n So college is for learning how to communicate, how to think creatively and critically, and to experience other cultures and points of view.\u00a0 Let\u2019s put my college experience to the test and, after half a century, see what I got out of it. Not a very big statistical sample, I grant you, but it\u2019s what we have to work with for now, so let\u2019s see what we can do with it.<\/p>\n I want to start with what I brought to college.<\/p>\n I grew up in a university town, Gainesville, Florida, but I was only dimly aware of what went on at the University of Florida. About forty percent of waking hours were spent running around outdoors, twenty percent doing school work and\u2014this is awkward to admit\u2014forty percent watching television. <\/em>Also awkward to admit: Radio in those years was hardly more than songs in the background.<\/p>\n There was a lot of junk on TV! It was all in black-and-white, of course, and the reception was often lousy, fraught with snow and rollover that had you thumping the side of the set or dinking with the antenna. But, of course, my friends and I would watch it endlessly, sitcoms and westerns and cop shows that blended together into a kind of a bland stew. There were newscasts like you\u2019d never see today, though. Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite and Eric Severeid and Mike Wallace, who were great writers and dramatic deliverers of the events of the day, but at age eight or ten, I had little use for the news of the day.<\/p>\n And yet, for some reason, when those same voices\u2014yes, their voices were what drew you to them, the image was almost incidental\u2014when those same voices spoke of historical events, I was fascinated. I sat for hours absorbing The Twentieth Century <\/em>narrated by Cronkite and Biography <\/em>voiced by Mike Wallace and Victory at Sea. <\/em>Why that old history attracted me more than the history that was unfolding every day, I can\u2019t say. Maybe because it was neater, had a beginning, a middle, and an end. But there was something about the past that I found compelling, even when it trooped by at a brisk 24 frames per second instead of the intended 18.<\/p>\n For a time, there was a golden age of dramatic shows on TV\u2014live drama included\u2014from the Armstrong Circle Theater, Climax, Playhouse 90, and Omnibus. To digress for a moment. The original thinking in the TV industry was that the TV sets were so expensive that only the wealthy would be able to buy them, and so the programming should reflect their tastes, which would include a healthy dose of New York theatrical productions. In his book Same Time, Same Station, t<\/em>he late UW-Madison professor Jim Baughman points out that cost notwithstanding, everybody in American wanted a TV set, and lot of them were willing to pay for one in installments, and that big change in the composition of the audience affected both the sponsorship and the content of the programming.<\/p>\n I haven\u2019t mentioned public television yet because it wasn\u2019t available in my town until fairly late in the game and then, well, not very interesting. Its production techniques couldn\u2019t compete with the razzle-dazzle of commercial television. There was one public TV show I caught, though. It was called The Friendly Giant, <\/em>and not till many years later did I learn that it was produced at Wisconsin Public Television and that one of its principles was none other than my distinguished colleague at WPR, Ken Ohst.<\/p>\n History and a sense of serious drama. That\u2019s what I got out of all that TV viewing. There were other things on there to be sure, like the science series Watch Mr. Wizard <\/em>on NBC. I enjoyed it greatly but for some reason couldn\u2019t remember a thing about it afterward. So, intellectual curiosity aside, I guess there\u2019s also such a thing as aptitude, <\/em>and mine was apparently for literature and history.<\/p>\n On the eve of my high school graduation, I assessed my education and concluded that the most valuable thing I\u2019d gotten out of it was the study of literature, and so that\u2019s what I pursued when I entered the University of Florida. Of course, there were other things we all had to take for those first two years\u2014phys ed\u2014where I learned to stand on my head three different ways\u2014ROTC– where I learned to march and got just a whiff of the life of military discipline, biology\u2014which I got through, and then, thanks to a bum advisor, calculus\u2014which would probably have been incomprehensible to me in English, but was taught by a Frenchman who mumbled in an accent so thick that I decided I might as well just take Russian, and so I did, eight courses worth.<\/p>\n About Russian. Like a lot of people my age, I grew up reading comic books, and I actually learned a few things from them. But then when I was 15 a girl at a party talked about Anna Karenina<\/em> and I read that and War and Peace<\/em> back to back, and for some reason I never looked at a comic book again.<\/p>\n What did I learn from that four years\u2014or let\u2019s call if five since I tacked on a master\u2019s degree? Except for the languages and the literature\u2014things I could build on\u2014bits and pieces. The full moon rises at sunset. A giraffe has the same number of cervical vertebrae as a human. Flight evolved three different times\u2014in insects, mammals, and reptiles. Far from disparaging those bits and pieces, I think about them often. I just wish I could remember more of them.<\/p>\n I had two particularly memorable and influential teachers in college.<\/p>\n One was Ants Oras, an Estonian who had fled with his wife to Sweden and then to England during World War II, and you can be sure that he had considerable grounding in \u201creality\u201d beyond his studies of John Milton and literary criticism. He could tell you, for example, what it was like being in a building that was being bombed. Dr. Oras, as we all called him, was 72 and on the brink of retiring when I took my first classes with him. One on something called prosody, which sounds really boring in retrospect, but intrigued me at the time, and two in the history of literary criticism, about 2500 years\u2019 worth, which I enjoyed. William Florescu, executive director of Milwaukee\u2019s Florentine Opera, recently wondered out loud why all of a 17th<\/sup> century playwright\u2019s dramas took place in 24 hours, and I said, \u201cHe was observing the Aristotelian unities, which prescribe 24 hours as the timeframe for a play.\u201d One of those bits and pieces. Granted, it isn\u2019t very good for breaking the ice at parties.<\/p>\n My seminars with Dr. Oras took place in the garret of one of the older buildings on campus. His lectures were occasionally interrupted by pigeons coming through the window and getting in fights. Dr. Oras read <\/em>his lectures, which even in 1972 was old fashioned, and in between paragraphs would strike a match and light his pipe, which would immediately go out. Some of the students would make a game of seeing how many matches he would go through in an hour. I think the record was 24.<\/p>\n It sounds deadly dull, but Dr. Oras was so steeped in his subject and so good at talking about it during Q and A that during his talks I felt as if I were warming my hands over a cozy fire, and he was not without his dry wit. He once remarked that reading all our papers was the equivalent of reading War and Peace, but without the cohesiveness.<\/p>\n Several years after I had finished all of my university work, I got to know Dr. Oras better when I took him to buy groceries each week. He didn\u2019t drive and his wife was agoraphobic, so I\u2019d drive him to the drycleaner and to the grocery store and occasionally stand in his living room while he got ready to go. It was like a repository of Western literature, from Homer\u2019s Odyssey in Greek to the latest novel by John Updike, all of it bound together with the patina of pipe smoke.<\/p>\n And his intellectual curiosity never wavered. He would ask me questions about music or the fashions of the day, and he liked to be prodded, too. I took him to the emergency room one time for something that turned out to be minor, and as we sat waiting, he said, \u201cNow you are to ask me questions.\u201d It was a way to take his mind off the worries at hand, of course, but it came from a wellspring of knowledge and the love of teaching.<\/p>\n My second memorable professor was a generation younger than Dr. Oras. His name was Paul Thurston, and he\u2019d come to academia in an unexpected way. At the age of 21 or so, he\u2019d been drafted during the final months of World War II and had spent time in Vienna as part of a UN contingent restoring a semblance of order in a city that was divided between the Russians and the other allied powers. Somehow, rather quickly, via ways mysterious to me, he became a tenor in the Vienna Opera, sang everything, even Carmen<\/em>, in German. Got 15 curtain calls as Siegfried. And then he got polio. When I first encountered him in 1968, he was teaching Logic at the University of Florida. It was an honors course, which freed him to teach the book\u2014which he had co-authored\u2014in a fairly short time and spend the rest of the ten-week term coming up with his own curriculum.<\/p>\n We should all take a refresher course in logic from time to time. It would affect the way we vote. Take a logical phenomenon called \u201cthe fallacy of the undistributed middle\u201d for example. During the 2012 election I think it was, Joe Biden was asked if one of President Obama\u2019s ideas wasn\u2019t socialist. He could\u2019ve said, \u201cThe fact that it was a socialist idea and<\/em> one of Obama\u2019s ideas does not logically make Obama\u2019s idea socialist. In syllogistic terms, if all x is B and all y is B, it does not follow that all y is x.\u201d\u00a0 Instead, Biden said, perhaps wisely, \u201cIs that some kind of joke?\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Thurston also taught Chaucer, and Chaucer alone makes learning Middle English worth the effort. Actually, it\u2019s not all that hard to learn, and Chaucer\u2019s characters are so vivid, so rounded, and often so funny that nobody topped him until Shakespeare came along two hundred years later.<\/p>\n In addition to language and literature, Dr. Thurston and I had some things in common. We both had an attachment to the State of Maine and my father had delivered two or three of his wife\u2019s babies, and the two of us would meet often at a bar and grill called the Winnjammer, where we drank and he smoked away many a night talking about literature and music and departmental politics. If you\u2019ve ever heard Orson Welles on radio\u2019s Lives of Harry Lime, <\/em>you have a sense of the sort of high culture intrigue in those conversations.<\/p>\n Before and after I got married, Dr. Thurston\u2014I could never bring myself to call him Paul\u2014would have me or my wife and me over to listen to music, lots of Schubert and Schumann and hefty doses of Wagner that made the neighbors call and tell him to turn it down, and as with Dr. Oras, the teaching, the sharing, was so intrinsic that it has lasted a lifetime.<\/p>\n By the time I\u2019d spent a couple of years in grad school at Duke University, I had reached the end of my ability to sit in one place all day studying. The straw that broke the camel\u2019s back may have come when one of my professors started talking about \u201ca bibliography of bibliographies.\u201d I guess that for me that was getting too far removed from reading a poem or a novel and letting it sink in. I saw a notice in the school paper that some students were going to build a radio station from scratch and that was when my trajectory took a sharp turn.<\/p>\n Was it teaching, playing classical music and rock and roll on a ten-watt radio station, mostly in the middle of the night? Well, I was certainly teaching myself, and two o\u2019clock in the morning is a good time to get your sea legs as a broadcaster. You could make and correct your technical and content mistakes before anyone was likely to be listening. I did my first interviews there, too, the very first being with the director of the Psychical Research Foundation, which was at Duke, and maybe a handful of listeners actually did get something out of those interviews. We host-producers at radio station WDUR were pretty much left to our own devices, and so while Duke didn\u2019t provide instruction, it did provide an environment in which we could learn, and that was quite valuable.<\/p>\n My experience at Duke left me with a hankering for more radio. Like most of us, I enjoyed sharing information, telling a story, passing on a fact or a response to the events of the day. And it so happened that one of the country\u2019s great broadcast training facilities was back in my hometown. The University of Florida had\u2014very unusual for a university\u2014two commercial stations, an AM and an FM plus a public TV station that had professional management but a lot of students working at them.<\/p>\n Because you had to be a student to work at those stations, I became a Broadcasting and Film major and started doing classical music broadcasts at night with very little supervision. When the station manager decided to get rid of the students, he kept two of us, and I got to diversify, writing and producing and logging commercials, which was great fun and more interesting than any of the broadcasting courses I took. It was an old fashioned apprenticeship and it broadened my experience greatly to go from the academic world to one of dollars and cents, and the nighttime lassical music was successful according to the ratings.<\/p>\n More about measuring success later, but we knew that people were listening and presumably learning something from the programming.<\/p>\n Two years later, when I made the transition to the new NPR station, also run by the University of Florida, a new concept came into play. Something called mission. Sure, you wanted as big an audience as possible, but you wanted to provide valuable programming that wasn\u2019t otherwise available. So you\u2019d offer a jazz show or a blues show or the Metropolitan Opera, which didn\u2019t draw huge audiences, especially in Gainesville, Florida in 1982, but these were valuable things not available elsewhere and it was our mission <\/em>to make them available. So when we\u2019d see the dents in the audience ratings, we\u2019d wag our heads and say, \u201cah, but the mission.\u201d<\/p>\n What qualifies as mission and how small an audience are we willing to accept for mission-oriented programming? Well, that question comes up occasionally without getting an answer.<\/p>\n But let\u2019s plug it into what we do at Wisconsin Public Radio and Television. Bothe entities are in UW-Extension because a hundred years ago, when WPR began broadcasting as a physics experiment, the idea was that radio would be a good way to transmit weather data to farmers, provided they were up on their Morse code. By the 1930s there were plenty of other things to transmit via voice to Wisconsin\u2019s farmers and schoolrooms, and people in their homes. It was the Wisconsin Idea: Bring the knowledge gathered at the University of Wisconsin to the people of Wisconsin, and in one format or another, that\u2019s what we\u2019re still doing after a hundred years.<\/p>\n There are call-ins such as the Larry Meiller Show, which is probably the closest thing we have to the original ag extension concept of broadcasting. There\u2019s our oldest program and on of the oldest radio programs in the country, Chapter A Day, based on the simplest of concepts\u2014a voice, just a voice, telling a story, which was on the air by 1931. Not as old as The Grand Ol\u2019 Opry, but definitely venerable. And there\u2019s quite a variety of news and news analysis, including state news, which is one of WPR\u2019s strong points.<\/p>\n A lot of musicians come through the University of Wisconsin in one campus or another, extremely capable players, and in the past few years, in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, we\u2019ve been putting them on the radio, performers who can explain the music as well as play it, from 13 or 14 years old up through graduate school, sharing their talents with everyone who tunes in listens later online. More about that later, too. We also have UW faculty from around the state come in to perform on the Midday as well as professional musicians who come up from Chicago. The state of Wisconsin has gotten bigger over the years, but the principle is still the same; Take what we find at the UW and share it with the state. If the rest of the world wants to listen in, too, so much the better.<\/p>\n What we find and share is not limited to musicians, of course. In my own realm of responsibility there\u2019s University of the Air, hour-long conversations, mostly with UW faculty on a limitless variety of topics. I\u2019ve talked to Deborah Blum about her Poisoner\u2019s Handbook, which is about the rise of forensic medicine in jazz age New York, I\u2019ve talked to Stephen Ambrose about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the building of the transcontinental railroad, to Lorrie Moore about the art of becoming a nationally-recognized short story writer. And most recently, an hour with Bela Sandor about how the Egyptians made chariots 3500 years ago and how they knew some secrets that wouldn\u2019t be rediscovered until centuries later. In the past 20 years or so, more than a thousand of those conversations, and, of course, we haven\u2019t talked to every expert by any means.<\/p>\n In the past ten years or so, we\u2019ve formed some very effective partnerships, too. In 2008 we started broadcasting some of the performances of the University Theater, which gives some wonderful experience for the drama students and gives our programming a nice shot of adrenalin. I could tell you an amusing story about a couple of glitches that came up in our most recent one, a broadcast of It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/em>. We\u2019ve worked with the Forward Theater and the Overture Center. Since 2002 we\u2019ve taken radio drama on the road, and this summer, on July 21 in Fish Creek and August 12 at the Big Top Chautauqua we\u2019ll be performing our adaptation of the classic Oscar Wilde story The Canterville Ghost.<\/em><\/p>\n Last December we partnered with the Wisconsin Veterans\u2019 Museum to broadcast a 1940s-style USO dance. Last year we produced a concert with UW pianist Christopher Taylor on the newly-restored 1879 Steinway at Villa Louis\u2014a joint radio-TV event, and another on the piano in the drawing room a Ten Chimneys. And we\u2019ve taken other programming and hosts on the road around Wisconsin. Zorba Pastor was recently a panelist on Says You in Eau Claire and yours truly did the same in La Crosse. And there are, no pun intended, a host of other shows that we\u2019ve taken all over the state.<\/p>\n Another thing you might\u2019ve heard in this centennial year of WPR is something called Wisconsin Life, radio and TV production, a series of very short\u2014two- or three-minute–pieces that add spice to the story of our state. You can find them online at wpr.org and wpt.org.<\/p>\n About the Internet. It\u2019s the best of places, it is the worst of places, but it\u2019s quite the frontier and WPR has gotten into it with a vengeance. We have an entire group of people dedicated just to web content and Facebook content. The best thing about it is its immediacy and reach. We now have 12:30 Quiz Question participants from all over the country and occasionally in foreign countries too. Old-Time Radio Drama has had listeners in Japan and China and southern Mexico, but of course we never forget our roots, so it\u2019s Wisconsin-based programming going out to all those places, just as the Swiss or the Swedish or Dutch programming I used to listen to on shortwave was based in those places. I developed a taste for polkas played on the accordion.<\/p>\n The bad thing about the Internet is the lack of vetting, whence cometh so much so-called fake news. But you can be sure that if the news comes from WPR, it been tested for accuracy and fairness and that applies to all of our call-in shows too. In our program notes for the Ideas Network shows there\u2019s quite a list of boxes to fill in having to do with the race, gender, politics and associations of the guests, not all of which pertain if the guest is talking about Egyptian chariots, but it\u2019s certainly there to fill out if it\u2019s relevant.<\/p>\n What does all this talk about my wayward broadcasting career and Wisconsin Public Radio\u2019s modus operandi have to do with you and the future of your profession?<\/p>\n Regardless of how opaque my remarks have been, you may have seen some parallels between what we broadcasters do and what you academicians do.<\/p>\n Foremost is the mission. For you it starts with access and quality. You\u2019re Wisconsin\u2019s point of entry for an affordable liberal arts education. Well, WPR is also a point of entry, although a much more casual one to be sure. At UW Colleges, unless there\u2019s an option to audit, that point of entry requires a commitment of money and time\u2014tuition and two years typically, whereas for us the commitment is as casual as turning on a radio, payment is entirely on the honor system, and the time invested can last less than fifteen seconds if they come in at the wrong part of the opera or have no interest in nematodes.<\/p>\n We both strive to give our adherents\u2014our customers some might say\u2014a quality experience. You strive to be innovative in the delivery of that quality and support your students. I\u2019m guessing that such innovation rests not only on new technology\u2014which is literally fantastic as we enter a world that offers 3-D reality\u2014but also creative applications of good old F2F teaching. The Socratic method will never go out of style, even if it is delivered by a droid on another planet.<\/p>\n Lately I\u2019ve heard of some innovative teaching techniques that are also inherently practical. At the UW-Madison, agriculture students taking a fermentation course, produced a beer and teamed up with marketing students to sell it. And I\u2019m here to tell you, it\u2019s pretty good stuff!<\/p>\n At WPR we\u2019ve long prided ourselves on the quality of our content, but the methods of delivering it have become increasingly varied. We\u2019ve gotten into providing real-time video of some of the Midday musical performances, of which I said, hmmm\u2026I think we\u2019ve just invented something called television. And when we provide online text to go with our news and interviews, I said\u2026I think that\u2019s called a newspaper.<\/p>\n Well, all of these media are merging, and that will provide a frontier for broadcasters and college professors, an opportunity to enhance the learning experience, but a challenge, perhaps, to keep it focused. I\u2019ve heard convincing arguments that video games are effective learning tools, and I have to say, I\u2019m impressed at how quickly some players, elementary school players, master their complex rules, not to mention the hand-eye coordination they demand. Like any tool, an interactive video can be used well or badly. In the wrong hands, even a hammer is a bad thing.<\/p>\n Part of your mission is transfer\u2014<\/em>preparing students for their next steps in their education and lives. How do we compare there?<\/p>\n \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026..<\/p>\n In this age of ready access to information, undergraduate research seems to have great potential for enriching the student\u2019s life, expanding his or her intellectual curiosity and providing valuable knowledge and skills that will smooth the way into the job market. I reaffirm that in my opinion college, especially an undergraduate degree, should not primarily be for job training. It should be for teaching a student how to think, to stimulate his or her experience with the world outside the hometown, and to stimulate intellectual curiosity.<\/p>\n But if, at the same time, college can smooth the way for the student to become a professional, so much the better!<\/p>\n Some of these opportunities for developing a professional attitude and experience are available both at Wisconsin Public Radio and at the UW Colleges, but you have a far greater capacity than we do because we have a limited number of positions for researchers and collaborative assignments, and learning communities and nothing that compares with your seminars and learning communities. Nor, for students, do we provide something else that\u2019s become increasingly important on college applications and job applications\u2014experience in service learning, opportunities for students to give back to the community, in the way, say, that those students who developed the beer were giving something back to the community.<\/p>\n That brings us back to the good old-fashioned face-to-face schoolroom. Ours at WPR, though we may sometimes call it University of the Air, is not often face-to-face. It\u2019s voice to invisible individual listener. Those of us who are on the air may have the sense that we\u2019re talking to one person\u2014for me it\u2019s more like a kind of Gestalt where I\u2019m talking to thousands of people with a collective personality and experience, but never mind that\u2014we are talking to thousands of individuals who are free to come and go without our knowing it. They might be making faces, talking back, or doing who-knows-what while we\u2019re intoning about Brahms or Nero or raising the gasoline tax, and the only way we know the difference is if we get an email or a phone call from them later.<\/p>\n And we can\u2019t give our listeners the kind of life-bending advice that you can. Advising really is something that should be done carefully, with as much insight into the student\u2019s inclinations and aptitudes as possible. Not always an easy task! Not often one that can be accomplished in five or ten minutes.<\/p>\n Like you, we at WPR stress and re-stress inclusiveness in what we do because in diversity there is strength. The face of WPR and the face of the UW Colleges has changed and will continue to change in the coming years, just as the face of America and the world is changing.<\/p>\n Given all of those high impact practices, how do we measure success?<\/p>\n Your methods and ours are noticeably different. At WPR, as I\u2019ve mentioned, we have audience ratings, Arbitrons they\u2019re called, which give a fairly accurate measure of who many people listen to us in the course of a year, how long they listen, and who else they listen to. Even more concrete is the response we get from on-air pledge drives, which is almost always stunning! If somebody calls in or webs in and gives you money, you can be sure that they\u2019re a loyal audience member. Or if they give you their farm or include you in their estate planning. Or even if they buy underwriting\u2014the public radio version of advertising. You know they\u2019re paying attention to you. And on the more anecdotal level, there are the people who buttonhole us at public radio events or on the bus and in restaurants and tell us what they think\u2014usually positive\u2014about our programming.<\/p>\n We have those measures. As for the rest of the time, we\u2019re casting a message in a bottle into broad ocean and hoping that someone will pick it up and benefit from it.<\/p>\n What about you? What about measuring your success? I can tell you nothing that you don\u2019t already know! You do have some concrete measures of your success. How many of your students transfer to four-year institutions? UW Colleges students who transfer within the UW System stay in school and graduate at higher rates than students who transfer from technical schools or private colleges, and you do it at about half the cost of the UW-Madison and more like a third the cost of a private college.<\/p>\n It\u2019s fair to say that that academic success is an indicator of successful teaching.<\/p>\n But in a sense, you, too, are casting a message in a bottle into the broad ocean because how can you know what impact you\u2019ve have on the lives of your young charges?\u00a0 It comes back to what college is for, and if you think back to what you learned in college, sometimes in courses that seemed to have little to do with the way you earn your living, little insights might shine through the fog like bright pennies. Excuse an excursion into pop culture. {Twilight Zone] <\/strong>I\u2019ll bet you weren\u2019t expecting that! In a story called \u201cThe Changing of the Guard\u201d that Rod Serling wrote for broadcast on June 1, 1962, Donald Pleasance played an English professor at a boy\u2019s school It\u2019s Christmas time and he\u2019s just been told that he\u2019s being forced into retirement. Concluding that he hasn\u2019t made a difference in the world, he\u2019s about to shoot himself when he hears a bell summoning the students to class, which is odd at that time of the night. He follows the sound into his classroom and the room is full of students that span his entire career, long deceased students who come forward one by one and tell him how he had taught them something to help them in moments of crisis\u2014about self-sacrifice, patriotism, courage, loyalty, ethics, honesty, and they thank him, saying that \u201ceach of us has in turn carried something with him that you gave him.\u201d<\/p>\n But you are on the frontier every day, not only because of the technology of teaching, but also because of the difficulties and the dangers. There\u2019s the danger of a spiral, that the loss of funding for what you do will diminish it and in turn lead to a diminished understanding of it and further loss of support and that the loss of tenure for those who deserve it will lead to further erosion of what you do, and require heavier teaching loads and allow less time for research and personal pursuits. And will precarious funding lead to a lessoning of academic freedom?<\/p>\n What little I have to offer in the way of a solution is wildly unrealistic and won\u2019t help you today or tomorrow because it starts in kindergarten.<\/p>\n Kindergarten is where we should start shaping students who will become citizens who value education, citizens who will develop into enlightened voters and enlightened legislators and regents and governors who know that our most valuable asset in Wisconsin is our minds, and that a sound educational system from K through college all the way to continuing education is the way to safeguard and grow that asset. My friends, you are on the frontier, you\u2019re holding off the wilderness, relying on too little support from outside, relying on your ingenuity, your stamina, and your belief in your work. You are <\/em>making a difference in the world, so hang in there and Godspeed!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Teaching Today: Frontiers or Frontlines? An Address to Faculty at the UW Colleges Colloquium I can\u2019t expect to tell you anything new about teaching because you experience it face-to-face routinely whereas the people I inform are mostly unseen, are free … Continue reading