So, I’m trying to piece together our courtship and a few other things because they won’t have the opportunity to say, ‘hey dad, how’d you meet mom?’ This type of thing. So, I’m hoping to put it into a manuscript and copy it, make two copies, one for him, one for her, that they can eventually pass on. I’m trying to keep his memory alive.
While he was sick, he had a head-and-neck cancer. They had to operate on his tongue, so, after a while, the only way he could communicate was to write. We kept his journals and notebooks when he would write to us. They have those. And I want to put those—to have them laminated so they don’t fade with time. That’s his very own handwriting. It’s nice to have.
So, that’s the name of the course? Expressive Art Therapy?
Yeah. The content was expressive art therapy where the instructor introduced us into the world of art to get people to open up in counseling and other types of things. So, then when I wrote my paper, I chose a paper on school-based therapy, treatment and practice.
So, what was the assignment for this?
The assignment was to—after everything we learned, we were supposed to take it and write a paper on how we would apply it in the real world, on the job. Where I want to become a special ed teacher and then move into administration and/or counseling, and to become a counselor for special ed students as well as the regular student body, this is how I combined the two. Like, if I were to become that position, how would I use expressive art therapy, how would I integrate it into counseling on a school level and why would I integrate it?
So, you learned about what expressive art therapy is during the course of the class and then she wanted you to imagine how it could be used—you learned the theory in the class and she wanted you to spell out how it could be put into practice.
How, when, and where could you put it into practice, given your career field. We had others who were not teachers—one was a nurse, one was a counselor, one was an EMT by day and a part-time something-else by night. I can’t remember. All of us, even though we had different walks of life, were able to apply that.
And then this last piece was also a Writing Process piece. With this piece we were to choose something we wanted to know more about that we didn’t really have an expertise in.
When did you take this course?
I took this the same time as that other one, May 2003. The Maus book, this was required for the course and this was something that she asked us to do. So, as our term paper, one of our term papers—we had two—one, the personal paper I told you about and then this is the other one that we had to write about something that we didn’t know about that we wanted to know more about.
Did you have to do some research?
Yeah. I just realized that my mom was into button collecting and so I took a dive into button collecting as an educational adventure to see how—more about button collecting and how and if I could use it in the classroom. It’s pretty much—there are some quotes from my mom and some from the textbooks I read on buttons. It tells about how the classifications or design, the competition criteria for button-collection. And then the value of buttons. And then the educational impact—they can be used to relate history, to quote my mother, (reads from paper) “What captured my attention was the sheer joy and excitement when my mom said ‘from buttons we can learn and relate to geography, history, economics, art, style or fashion and sociologies. The possibilities are endless.’” Being that children learn in several different modalities, buttons can be learned in the classroom because they are a visual aide, for one, they are a tactile or touchable aide. To look at an everyday button vs. a button from way-back-when gives you a visual distinction and so, depending on the age of the classroom students, you could use buttons in many different ways. You could use them with small kids for counting out things—simple multiplication or addition or even division. So, it’s multi-modality.
So, did you want to add the part about—in terms of their usefulness or their application to the classroom—was that something that you added to the paper or was that something that she wanted you to add?
No, well yes. It was kind of two-fold. She said she wanted us not only to find something that you didn’t know about, but if you could apply that to what you do, do so. Show me how you would—As a teacher—where’s my quote? (Reads from paper): “I intend to make buttons and integral part of my teaching curriculum, hoping that I may inspire future colleagues to do the same and constantly think outside the box. I am charging myself and them to really use the world around them in teaching. Teachers should incorporate the man-made and the natural materials of society, such as buttons, into the classroom to enhance and enrich the learning experience for all students. Every student is the hope of the future, they are our leaders for tomorrow.’ And I close it with saying, “As a mother and a student, I’m learning new things everyday. If I ever need a button to mend a garment or help with homework, I’ll just ask my mother, the button-queen, as she was and still is my first teacher.” And that’s how I tied it all up. And I got an “A” for that one, so I went from just crazy, not knowing how to write a term paper, to getting to a point where I was getting “As” and the teachers were liking my work and I was being—I had flow and I had originality and I was able to pull it all together.
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Yes. And where I want to go as a teacher and where I want to go as a possible counselor. So, I went from looking back on my life and why things happened and how I handled them to looking at—taking in new information and saying, ‘Oh, well I can use it this way’—as a future reference point, a jumping off point, if you will, into the future, saying, okay, I’ve got this information with me and I’m going to take it with me and I’m going to apply it this way and if it works, great, if it doesn’t, then you rework it. It’s kind of self-therapeutic. Which, I told you, was my tool all along.
And I think I was drawn and I had to write the other personal piece in order to get some of the blockage out of the way and to put that behind me so that I could continue with school and I will say that I spent many a night crying as I wrote it because it was therapeutic for me.
But it’s not a news magazine, like Time?
Well, to some degree it is, yes. They had an interesting article on childhood obesity in the last issue that I found very interesting. And then went a little further on it and did some research and then did one of my human biology papers on childhood obesity, so I get certain ideas from things for home, for personal interest, or for school. It’s monthly. (4/5)
Can you describe some of the challenges you’ve faced as an adult student.
Doing term papers. Citations. Research. Writing. Making sure that I got all the parts that were necessarily—the introduction and the main article itself and the proper conclusion—just making it sound right.
That was a lot of different things. So, it was the research, getting on the internet, Ebsco—
That was all new. Feeling comfortable going there and doing that sort of thing.
And then it sounds like you were also describing the conventions of an academic paper, like learning a citation system.
Exactly. That was also a challenge. MLA and APA, and all of that, which I didn’t remember. So, I got some information here, which I found not all that useful because I found it too confusing. So, I basically said to my daughter, ‘what do I do?’
Your daughter the English teacher?
Yes.
Have you gone to her frequently?
I have. I have. I have said to her, ‘how do I go about writing a paper?’ I mean, I know it has to be written and you have to start—there’s the meat of the article and then there’s the conclusion. But how do you get from all of this research to there? And she said mom, write down what you have to say, make little notes, don’t try to put it together. What I was trying to do was get on the internet and start and write something. She said, don’t do that. Don’t go there, you’re making it too difficult for yourself. But she said, start writing it. You know it’s not going to be what your finished product is, but then you can go back and say, ‘wait a minute, this paragraph needs to be here.’ And she said, you need to have a dynamic introduction, but do the meat of the article first, and then do your introduction and your conclusion. We talked about citations and she gave me a couple of websites to look at which made it a little bit simpler and helped me see how to put things together and it helped a whole lot. It really do.
What about a couple of successes you’ve experienced so far, as a student.
Oh, that debate definitely was—on drilling in Anwar. We had to take the negative approach, that it wasn’t a good thing to do. We got assigned to a team—we were one side, they were the other. One person on our team said, ‘I want to take the negative approach because I don’t believe in it.’ The question wasn’t how you felt—it was, take an approach. Whether you were for it or against it. But, after all the research, I realized that that was the side I needed to be on, that I believed in—the negative side, that we shouldn’t be drilling in Anwar.
You didn’t have that opinion before?
No, not really. But doing the debate was—I’m not comfortable talking in front of a large group of people. But it really was amazing, that I got up there and gulped a couple of times and then got going and really got into it. And it was wonderful and I sat down and I was like, ‘wow, look what I just did.’ It was great. And I got an “A” in the course and I got an “A” in every course that I’ve taken and it was like, okay, yeah, I can do this.’
And it was wonderful and very rewarding to get this paper back and have her say, ‘fabulous job, you really did it well. It was a great term paper and great intro.’ It was like, ‘wow, this makes me feel good.’ You get that confidence and as it continues and you continue to do well and put your best effort into it, I think it’ll all go well. I really do. (4/5)
GENRE CONFUSION:
This is the website evaluation—he actually gave us the format. Which is the only thing that we got a format on. Everything else, there was no instruction. Just, in the syllabus, for example, interview, and that’s it.
Is that typical of the classwork you’ve done at GSC?
No. No, not at all. NOT IN THE LEAST. This was THE worst course. I gave this teacher a very poor evaluation based on the fact that there was very little instruction, very little guidelines as to what he was expecting. For example, I had never done an interview before. I had never done website evaluations—at least he had given a format for that.
So, this course is the exception?
Yes. Usually, my experience has been wonderful. I had a critical thinking course that was wonderful—the instructor was marvelous. Week by week she guided us through what we needed to do. She really guided us along the way as to what we needed to do and that turned out wonderfully. It really was a great experience. She was a marvelous teacher. And wonderful to have as a first instructor going back because she gave you an awful lot of confidence.
So, this assignment was to evaluate 16 websites—what kind of websites?
No guidelines, no nothing. I guess we all made the assumption—does this need to be medical or biology-related and the answer was yes. Again, this was not spelled out in the syllabus or in the first 3-4 classes.
Was this something you had done in other classes?
No, never. And then, I did the fluoride debate—it was a bioethics report. We said, ‘what does that mean?’ Well, he said, ‘present both sides.’ We said, ‘how long does it have to be?’ Well, ‘whatever you feel is necessary.’ No guidelines whatsoever. So, you just sort of shoot from the hip and hope it’s right.
Were a lot of the assignments in this class just guesswork?
All of them were.
So, in this paper, what did you end up doing?
I presented both sides—the addition of fluoride. The debate over whether fluoride—The nice thing about it being in dental hygiene was, I knew a lot of this stuff. Part of my original question to him was, if you know something, for example, being in dental hygiene, I know about dental issues, so if I want to take, for example, the fluoride issue as a bioethic report—
What exactly does bioethics mean?
I don’t know. It’s a good question. One of the first things I did was go on the internet and look up the word bioethics. It gave different listings—it was talking about debates on issues in biology. And then it gave a list of them. You could go down that list and see what somebody might look at as a bioethic subject.
So, what I did was to take issues in dentistry—fluoride—go on a website that was associated with that and use that and also use it in my bioethics to make it so that it could be in different ways and cut down on the amount of work that I had to do.
Drawing on the knowledge that you already had?
Right. And also, drawing on the fact that I had done this research on this one aspect, so, how can I draw on this in different ways and cut down my workload?
You had done research on fluoride for your own purposes? For your life or as a dental hygenist?
As a hygenist I had learned about fluoride, had talked about fluoride, had talked in the practice about the benefits of fluoride. It was something that was very common and something I was very knowledgable about. Another thing I did was dental decay in children—as a website evaluation.
So, you weren’t reinventing the wheel?
No. Just trying to utilize my time as well as possible. It was an open course and really too open. Too loose.
I can understand. This is like an analysis or an evaluation (website project). And the bioethics—how many of these did you have to do?
Five.
Right.
I know it’s hard to talk about what he wanted, but can you tell me what you had to do in these bioethic reports? Did you just present both sides?
I did.
And did you have to take a position?
I did. I did. Whether it was necessary to do so or not, I don’t know. But I did.
And then, my grandson, the doctor’s son, who is out in Minnesota, Eli, had plagiocephaly—a malformation or misformation of the head, due to placing children on their back, as opposed to on their stomach or side to sleep. The incidence of plagiocephaly—and there are three different types of it… (explanation of plagiocephaly and Eli’s story)
So, what did you do with your paper?
I did a report and I called it “Eli’s First Helmet.” This was what I did for my term paper.
So, this is what prompted you to do a term paper on plagiocephaly?
Right. And people hadn’t heard about it so I thought it would be very informative. And I had to give an oral presentation on it as well.
What exactly did you do? Did you use a certain number of sources? Was the purpose to make an argument about something or to inform about something?
I think it was basically informative…but again. ‘Do a term paper.’ That’s all the information that was given. ‘How long does it have to be?’ ‘Four to eight pages.’ ‘Does it need to be cited?’ ‘Yes.’ It was very loose, very, very loose. And you also needed to give a 15-20 minute presentation on the subject, so I had overheads and I had his little helmet and I had some pictures of before and after. It was fun and informative. It was a good presentation.
So, it sounds like with all of these assignments, you were able to do what you wanted to do?
Yes. And that has made it interesting. The problem with the class is the expectation and the—you HAVE to do 16 website evaluations.
ANWR:
Critical thinking, yes. But I didn’t really draw on an interest. The major amount of work was on ANWAR and I didn’t have a clue about what was happening there, nor did I care about oil drilling. I didn’t. Until I got into it and determined, ‘hey, this is really kind of interesting.’ It wasn’t in a medical field, which tends to be my primary interest.
Did you all share your writing in this course at all?
Not at all.
In other courses?
Yes. In critical thinking, yes.
What did you do in that class?
We had eight people in class and four people took one subject and four took another. Out of the people in our group, two of us—there was a young kid in his 20s—both of us did against ANWAR and the other two did for ANWAR. So, we did collaborate frequently on the phone and got together before class, during class, after class. We did collaborate because we needed to know what to present and who was going to present what information.
And you tested out of or opted out of The Writing Process course?
I did.
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